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In a first round of financing, PONTIS Venture Partners, a venture capital company headquartered in Vienna, Austria, as well as a group of business angels are participating with a EUR 2.3 million investment in Xendex, one of Europe’s leading developers for mobile games. The former founders of 3United mobile solutions PLC, an Austrian company that was bought for EUR 55 million in early 2006 by global market leader Verisign, are among the business angels. Xendex also has offices in London and Krakow and has generated sales growth of 80% in the last year and now has over 70 channel partners, including T-Mobile, Orange and O2.

Tags: 3United Mobile Solutions PLC, O2, Orange, PONTIS Venture Partners, T-Mobile, Verisign, Xendex

EMI has licensed Jamba to provide what the News Corp. and Verisign-owned mobile entertainment JV says is the label’s first DRM-free repertoire in Europe to cross both mobile and the PC, we’ve learned. Though tracks may not appear online for another couple of months, the deal was signed off late today. EMI is giving access to the copyright protection-free catalog it introduced almost a year ago now. Jamba Music will give customers MP3 files to the PC and the smaller, compressed AAC+ files to the mobile handset. Prices are not yet known.

Jamba Music is a music rental and purchase store, offered over both the desktop web and mobile, with synchronization of the music archive carried out over a data cable, Bluetooth or the net. It currently operates in Jamba’s native Germany though the outfit is keen to grow it through white-label deals with ISPs and in other countries this year. Previously, Jamba Music’s major-label repertoire had come in WMA format for PC but still AAC+ for mobile. Though Jamba claimed this deal is a European PC-and-mobile first for EMI, if you stretch it, you could say the iPhone/iTunes Store combination already offers DRM-free PC/mobile tunes.

Just as the labels have begun experimenting with DRM-free more generally, that notion is on some music industry lips in Barcelona. RealNetworks SVP Larry Moores told a session on the topic earlier today: “We’ve taken the dream and turned it in to a nightmare through DRM. Consumers expect their music to play everywhere. We’ll be offering DRM-free in some of our services this summer.” HP’s content, media and entertainment VP and CTO Brian Levy acknowledged DRM had posed serious problems but maintained artists had the right to earn money from protecting their wares.

Original Story

Tags: EMI, Jamba, News corp, Verisign