With several thousand users streaming out their own personal radio broadcasts, Foster City-based Live365 is the largest online radio service provider to date. Now, thanks to a recent development showcased at the National Association of Broadcasters (NAB) conference in San Francisco this week, they may also become the most portable.

Live365's free tools for developing and showcasing an Internet radio program have swelled its audio offering to over 18,000 simultaneous broadcasts, but until today, users were stuck listening to the streams from their desktops. The company is now promising owners of any mobile devices running on the Windows CE operating system access to the first streaming MP3 player for the platform, conceptually turning a PDA or a Web-enabled phone into the largest radio station on the planet.

"Through wireless delivery of streaming content, Live365 enables the Internet radio broadcaster to reach beyond the stationary computer, located in the den or office, and into the ubiquitous realm of Internet-enabled mobile wireless devices such as mobile phones, PDAs, and automobile stereos," says Paul Cattrone, Director of Wireless Technology at Live365. "The future is global Internet radio broadcasting."

No word on when the player will be available for download to the public.

In similar mobility news, Palm's OS won out over Windows when San Francisco-based MuBu.com announced at NAB that its sound-based music recommendation service is now available to Palm users. MuBu (short for Music Buddha) lets users listen and rate sample clips from various styles of music and then automatically recommends new artists with "similar" styles (see Rub The Buddha For Better Beats).

"MuBu has always been a service about the unique needs and tastes of the individual," says John Adams, founder and CEO of MuBu. "We've created the MuBu application for the Palm in order to extend the MuBu experience to users in a way that is both practical and useful. Developing a wireless platform was a natural extension of our service, so that consumers will have immediate access to their musical recommendations anywhere."

Surprisingly, streaming video to portable CE devices has been readily available since early this year, most notably from big mobile media play PacketVideo, a company Mobile Insights analyst David Hayden calls "the RealNetworks of wireless." Packet has already inked major deals with Columbia/Tri-Star Interactive (to stream movie previews), Lucent, and QUALCOMM to adapt video and audio-streaming technology to the existing 14.4Kbps speeds of wireless networks, not just on CE devices but a host of mobile platforms.

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