connect nothing, f. cried piecing together a puzzling world of ______. by Loren Segal.

At midnight tonight, QTrax will be unveiling what can potentially be a radically new business model for downloading music online. To be fair though, the business model is in no way innovative. Offsetting costs of membership-free sites with banner ads is about the oldest trick in the book. The difference in this case is the fact that the major labels are actually on board with this idea, as Wired recently reported.

This actually looks pretty exciting. You can still hear the loud roar of those people against DRM claiming that this is not progress, but I think we should see how DRM would actually be able to limit the portability of music that has already been made freely available to anyone over that network. Considering that they plan on making iPod compatible in the near future, the music provided by this service should not only be able to move from machine to machine (by sharing it, at worst case), but from music player to music player. Without having seen the application in action, I can’t imagine how DRM in this context could do much harm.

Update 1 (01/28/08 1:00 AM): Seems like QTrax might be in some hot water with some final attempts to start the service, as reported by Silicon Valley Insider. At 9:57pm, QTrax was still in discussion with WMG trying to finalize the deal. This might explain why there is still no beta available to download. Will they be able to pull this off?

Update 2 (01/28/08 2:00 AM): The guys over at GameDrift seem just as anxious as me to get my hands on this stuff and play. They claim that the launch has been moved to midnight PST (instead of EST) and are going to be waiting to report on this live, so check it out.

Update 3 (01/28/08 12:00 PM):

“The future of Qtrax, a new file-sharing website which promised legal downloads of over 25m music tracks, is in doubt today after three of the four major record labels denied giving the site permission to use their music.” - source: Guardian Unlimited Music

Update 4 (01/28/08 6:13pm): The guys over at GameDrift did a little digging and found a link to the 0.2 beta version of QTrax. Keep in mind, downloading from the service is still disabled, but if you want to check it out, you can either install or check with GameDrift for their overview.

Update 5 (01/28/28 10:20pm): QTrax officially released the software from this download link (link from the download page). The site is currently acting up, but hopefully downloads will begin when it starts functioning again.

I’ve been a MacHeist buyer for the last few years now, ever since the wonderful TextMate was introduced to the bundle (for that year). It’s basically a limited time offer type deal on a shitload of great software for an insanely low price. If this stuff was advertised on T.V., you could easily picture a goofy looking middle aged man screaming off the roof of his store about how “everything must go”.

Well, there’s a new MacHeist, and there’s only 1 day and a couple of hours left to snag it up!

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So, for three years I’ve been attending a conference in Montreal called CUSEC, a ridiculously long acronym that I’ll spare everybody on. Let’s just pretend it’s a software conference mainly targeted at university students— and it’s organized by them too. It’s actually been a huge success story, having a conference organized by a bunch of engineers who you would think would otherwise rather just drink and play WoW, and getting great results out of it, inviting notable speakers, having more and more delegates turn out, etc.. It’s also been extremely awesome that these very notable speakers actually enjoyed their talks and experience at CUSEC— So much so that every single one with a blog wrote about it after the conference– and said something good.

This year we were lucky enough to have some great speakers, though someone who may stand out to people reading this would be Jeff Atwood of codinghorror.com fame. Not only did he give a really great talk, but he also was nice enough to give CUSEC a nice little plug on his website a few days ago, which will probably get the conference a little bit of recognition with his 75,000 RSS subscribers and 100,000+ a day readers (his words, not mine, check his presentation for more crazy facts).

It’s great to see that CUSEC is actually getting good press from the speakers and that they actually find the experience to be unique. If only we could invite these guys and gals back to speak every year…

Update 1 - Jan 20th 08: You can find photos from the event if you look up “cusec2008″ in Flickr.