HP Buys Music Streaming Service that Syncs with iTunes

For those of you with webOS devices since the early days, you may remember a not so fun back-and-forth between Palm and Apple over allowing direct sync iTunes. We won’t make you guys re-live it, but suffices to say the stunt did not pay off as Palm had hoped, and users were left without any direct sync to their iTunes libraries.

But that was ages ago.

Fast forward to June 2010. The new sheriff in town, HP, has just thrown down the gauntlet by acquiring Melodeo to the tune (yes, that was on purpose) of $30 million.  Melodeo is a music streaming service that streams music to your device.  Think Pandora or Grooveshark, and you have a good idea of what it’s all about.

The key ingredient here is Melodeo’s top product, called “nuTsie” (an anagram of “iTunes…” cute, huh?). This app is found on multiple mobile platforms, and actually scans your entire iTunes library to stream to your device. For those who hate music streaming due to battery concerns, actual upload/download capabilities are reported to be incoming for offline listening. Now that’s cool.

Make no mistake about it, friends. HP has fired a shot across the bow of Apple with this move.  When Apple bought and shut down the iTunes streaming service Lala.com, many interpreted it to mean the company was about to launch their own web-based version of iTunes. It would seem HP is making yet another key investment in a cloud technology, which is good to see, considering webOS will provide a beautiful front end interface to tie it all together.

Oh, and for those of us worried that HP wasn’t into smartphones? … You don’t stream music to your printer very often… do you? (Come to think of it, it would be kinda cool to print out song lists, lyrics, etc.)

[Source: TechCrunch via Precentral]