" Forget the fad of accosting random strangers to jack your headphones into their iPods. That's so two weeks ago. The future of on-the-go peer-to-peer music sharing is already starting to groove in Ireland.

Media Lab Europe, research partner to MIT Media Lab, is testing tunA, a software application that employs Wi-Fi to locate nearby users, peek at their music playlist and wirelessly jack into their audio stream. Pronounced like the fish and signifying music "tunes" and "ad hoc" file sharing, tunA is being designed for wireless PDAs, cell phones and even its own hardware device. "

Neat.

] "The main issue behind it was a way to connect people
] subtly, without being intrusive," said Bassoli. "And
] music is the way teenagers want to open themselves to
] people around them."

i don't even want to begin to get into the legal smackdown these people are going to get...

it's too bad... this is a truly awesome idea. if allowed to propagate, this could really be a windfall for lots of subtle social interactions.

[edit]
] Technology pundit Andrew Orlowski, on the other hand, is more
] concerned that tunA does not have downloading capabilities.
]
] "I'm not sure that a device that would allow streaming but
] wouldn't allow you to copy would be very popular," he said.

well, since it's conceptually not about trading music as much as sharing (in the proper sense of the word), i'm not sure that's a major issue... but perhaps a solution is to allow the exchange of metadata (the title, artist, etc, or something more sophisticated like the RIAA-proposed metafile for sharing that was memed a few days back)... enough, at least, to allow you to purchase the track you'd been streaming earlier. That sounds like an acceptible compromise to me.