US-Israeli start-up Nareos, a digital content commerce solutions provider, today launched what it is calling the world's first purely legal P2P file-sharing service over mobile.
Nareos launched its PeerBox service at MIDEM 2006, the international professional music market, taking place this week in Cannes.
PeerBox, designed for next generation mobiles, allows the users to search for music and download songs from the open peer-to-peer file sharing networks, such as eDonkey 2000, Gnutella and others.
PeerBox combines an audio fingerprinting component to offer copyrighted songs only as paid downloads, as well as on-air and speech recognition to identify music and speech-assisted search.
Users are required to either "speak" or "type" a music search query on their mobile to search for a title in p2p networks.
Users can also hold their handset to music, and after 15 seconds the song, album and artist information will appear on the PeerBox screen, together with a price for its download.
The service will be offered as a subscription and a pay-per-download service that will appear on the customer's cellular phone bill or credit card.
The application will also be available to download off the www.nareos.com website soon.
Nareos, a privately-held company headquartered in Beverly Hills, with R&D facilities in Israel, stated that it anticipates sales revenues from the second quarter of 2006 onwards.
Nareos CEO Alexander Lazovsky, who founded the company in 2004, today said, "The mobile is a fast growing medium for file-sharers and we aim to provide a convenient and exciting way to purchase music, anytime and anywhere, while supporting established and growing music artists around the world. We are proud to demonstrate PeerBox at MIDEM, and be the first company to put together all the pieces in the puzzle of legal mobile p2p file-sharing."
Published by Globes [online], Israel business news - www.globes.co.il - on Monday, January 23, 2006