Samsung and Voquette Announce Partnership

Samsung Telecommunications America (STA) (www.samsungusa.com), and Voquette ( www.voquette.com), announced a joint development partnership to provide audio playback capabilities to Samsung's new UPROAR MP3 phone. Voquette, which provides streaming financial news to business professionals, has modified their Media Manager to allow Uproar owners to download the news streams onto their phone.

The announcement with Voquette may help the Uproar phone attract a broader, more mature, business-oriented audience. The Uproar's introduction to the United States market happened earlier this month in conjunction with Sprint PCS. The original positioning of the phone and its association with a new music "locker" service, powered by hithive.com, on the Sprint PCS site, seemed to indicate a target market of college age students.

The Uproar has 64 megabytes of flash memory, which is enough to store an hour of CD- quality music or up to eight hours of spoken word audio. The content, which Voquette will be offering, includes Wall Street Journal headlines, ON24 stock updates, RadioWallStreet CEO interviews, and CNET Radio headlines.

Still no word on when we can expect the Uproar to actually be able to stream songs or content, but then 3G cellular networks -- like Rome -- are not built in a day.

On a related note, James Lynch, vice president of business development at Voquette, said that Voquette is in the process of redesigning their Web site to highlight its new business focus, which will provide services to businesses in a B2B model. Voquette will still maintain their free business news service for consumers.

Voquette is the latest in a growing trend of previously consumer oriented streaming companies refocusing on the business sector. This week Listen.com and Eveo both announced similar restructuring plans.