Sony Ericsson talks up TrackID

A very interesting event in London's Soho saw Google, Sony Ericsson, and 3 UK sitting around the same round table. Revealing comments were made by Sony Ericsson's Anders Runevad about content services.

He claimed that the company's TrackID service – which identifies music - is getting the equivalent of two hits every second from users around the world identifying their music.

So the handset vendor is actually sitting on top of a highly successful discovery tool. Moreover, the information gathered can be broken down locally as well as globally.

This means TrackID could help identify which is the most popular track in the Indian market at a given point in time.

Obviously Sony Ericsson is keen to integrate this with services that it offers to mobile operators – specifically Play Now. TrackID will be built into version 5.0 of Play Now which will become known as Play Now Arena.

Sony Ericsson says Play Now is experiencing millions of downloads but it doesn't specify how many are paid-for downloads. Nor does it say what proportion are music tracks as opposed to ringtones or games.

The most interesting point is that Runevad hinted that TrackID could be integrated into whatever music store a particular mobile operator has in place. The company is also prepared to ener into an Applesque revenue share agreement.

The curious thing is that while Runevad admitted that his TrackID technology offered "a lot of good potential," he didn't see services forming a major part of the company's revenues. So no Ovi for Sony Ericsson, then.

Finally, an excellent gem of wisdom from Google's Robert Hamilton. He claimed that building its search directly into handsets had cut the time from desire to a live search by 40 per cent had driven up usage by 20 per cent.

He admitted that Google has always known that any decrease in search speed times drives up usage of the service.