Motorola: Building a cloud-based music and photo sharing service

Motorola ultimately wants to improve its Droid smartphone line up, as well as the potential to integrate those devices with cable TV boxes, so today’s announcement by Motorola Mobility (comprising Motorola’s Mobile Devices and Home businesses) might be a step in that direction. Motorola has acquired Zecter, a start-up developer of cloud storage and streaming applications (ZumoDrive, a cloud-based content sync, access and sharing service; and ZumoCast, a service that streams personal media to any device). With the acquisition, Motorola may be able to allow mobile device users to share digital content, such as calendars, chat rooms, photo albums and music. And the presence of the company's devices in the cable industry may open the door to more integration between its smartphones and its cable boxes for new and innovative ways to share media.

This deal seems to be in line with the work Motorola has done (e.g., filing a patent a few months ago for a cloud-based file sharing tool named “Family Room”) to integrate wireless syncing, desktop integration, video transcoding and thin-file retrieval technologies across its device and MotoBLUR user interface offerings. All this is in hopes of offering consumers real-time, integrated access to content.

By buying an on-demand digital media synchronization and streaming technologies provider like Zecter, Motorola may be able to give users on-the-go access to music, video, photos and documents.

Though fairly new, Zecter has gained momentum in a short period of time. With more consumers migrating to the cloud, the startup’s ZumoDrive offering purportedly serves about 1 million users and has raised about $1.5 million in funding, not to mention a deal with HP to provide its cloud storage app on netbook devices. What’s interesting about the ZumoDrive service is that it not only syncs to the cloud, but it presents cloud-stored files as though they are locally stored on the device. And the ZumoCast service is interesting in that it provides a way to avoid cloud storage costs on multiple devices through an app that turns a computer into a personal cloud server that streams media libraries to mobile devices upon demand.
This isn’t the only deal Motorola has put into the works recently, as over the past few months, it also acquired connected home software developer 4Home and location-based mobile software company Aloqa.