Let’s face it, music happens to be an integral part of almost all our lives. Music serves as a stress-reliever or a relaxation method, and in some cases, a way of life. Music inspires who we are and sometimes, what we dress like. As times change, so does music, often serving as a memento of a certain time or decade, and as music evolves, accordingly, so does the music industry. That being said, one thing has always remained constant; it has always been extremely and unnecessarily difficult to enter the industry and many times harder to be successful. Many of you may now be saying that this statement is not true, sites such as YouTube and Myspace have made it much easier to get a record deal. To you I say, please get Justin Bieber and Colbie Caillet out of your heads and look at the facts. You will be hard pressed to name more than 5 artists who were discovered through their profiles on these websites because not that many people were discovered in the first place.  Out of the millions of videos posted by hopeful singer-songwriters, less than 50 have even gotten a record deal. Out those only a handful have even reached stardom, and yes, Justin Bieber is obviously one of them. By no means am I trying to detract from their obvious musical talent, but I am stating the facts. Music producers simply do not trudge through the millions of videos and songs posted on the Internet looking for potential stars, and that is a shame because many of these online artists deserve a chance at stardom. Frankly, your chances of being discovered by Usher on YouTube are so low that you stand a better chance of being in another sex scandal with Tiger Woods.  Luckily, there is a new light in this dark, bleak world known as the music industry….

Enter Xeelium. From the name you are probably thinking one of two things, (1) this is some Chinese product being sold at Wal-Mart or (2) this is something amazing along the lines of Google or the iPad, and I am very happy to tell you that it is very much the latter and in no way, shape, or form related to the former. Xeelium is a project that has been in the works for a little less than a year by yours truly, Toufiq Media, LLC. Xeelium is an up-and-coming product that will revolutionize the music industry along with the social media platform. Xeelium will not only make the music industry more accessible to everyone but also allow producers to sift through the multitude of potential stars online with a simple click of the mouse.

Now this may sound too good to be true, but I along with artists, producers, and investors world-wide am very excited to inform you that Xeelium is very much a reality, with a beta due early 2011. That’s right, for many of you, the dream of a lifetime is just a matter of a few months. With a business model that is optimized for a product with such high possibilities, Xeelium is structured to be successful for all parties involved. In fact, Xeelium is the culmination of over a year of researching the music industry and tweaking the business model as necessary. As Xeelium enters its last phase of development, I hope that you will stop by the site from time to time to learn more about the next best thing after auto-tune. Have a wonderful New Year, and I hope you will make your New Year’s resolution stardom.

Sheehan Toufiq here!

What have I been up to? Toufiq Media is nearing the end of it’s research and beginning it’s application development phase. We’ve weighed the pros and cons of every programming language that would best suit our current project, Xeelium.

Xeelium? What is that? The fact is that we’ve thrown out very limited information out there on this current project, therefore right now I want to start sharing the dynamics, the features, and what exactly Xeelium is, besides the fact that it’s obviously some sort of web application with an extremely cool sounding name.

Xeelium is a new breed of music networking. Imagine a “widget” based application that allows musicians to create a social community with other bands, music producers, and industry executives. But there are tons of other social networking sites for musicians out there, what exactly makes Xeelium a “new breed”?

Widgets. Our plan to distribute API keys to third party developers to create lots and lots of widgets. There will be the standard ones branded by Toufiq Media itself as well as the ones by other developers doing what they do best. Music and video playing widgets, recording widgets, autotune widgets, video editing widgets, studio and beatmaking widgets, widgets for analytics, widgets to dress up your profile, the possibilities are endless. When it comes to branding yourself as a musician, Xeelium will be able to do everything. Of course Xeelium’s widgets will have to be accepted, so don’t expect any of them being advertisements promising a free ebook containing the top ten weight loss secrets if you complete a survey on your sex life.

The point of our story. Why Ruby? Three words:

It is sexy.

Ruby is a scripting object oriented programming language that highlights syntax. It was created to make the life of a programmer much, much easier. You don’t have to tell Ruby that the thing beside the lake that quacks like a duck, flies like a duck, and uses it’s bowel movement to prevent anyone to play effective tackle football anywhere in the park is indeed a duck. Ruby automatically assumes that. Now that’s sex appeal. What’s even more exciting is Ruby on Rails, an open source framework built on Ruby released around 2005 by David Heinemeier Hansson. Look him up, pretty cool guy. Also, since the framework is so new, it’s young, dynamic community is literally one of the friendliest, most supportive neighborhoods on the internet. Our plan is to build Xeelium on Rails while integrating a javascript library for the UI.

Scalability? There are loads of horror stories of Twitter’s scalability issues with Ruby on Rails. I for one could not keep track of how many times I saw those birds carrying that big ecstatic whale to give it ride of it’s life. Although Twitter did end up choosing a different programming solution (Scala), a lot of it’s code still remains on Rails. Also many people don’t know that Twitter’s scalability issues were mostly due to poor infrastructure and a lot of the biggest parts of our research is to ensure the prevention of something similar. We will cross the t’s and dot the i’s. All of them.

Now all we have to do is to roll up our sleeves and get to work on building the next big thing.

Success.

I feel like there shouldn’t be too much in common between the steel and wheat industries, but, when I think about it, they – and, really, all businesses – have at least one thing invariably in common: pursuit of success.

Sounds fine and dandy in theory, but the problem is that success is just so elusive. Just starting a business is problem enough; I mean, really – hitting on an idea and finding interested colleagues is already a fantastic hurdle.

Not to mention, even you’re lucky enough to get the ball rolling, most start-ups don’t exactly have the funds to rent an office, purchase furnishings, buy tons of “necessary” software, or . . . well. Do all too much of anything, really.

The solution?

Ditch it. All of it.

Forget the office, forget the fax machine, forget the expensive project managers and teleconferencing software – for start-up companies, it’s just too much.

And many new firms are beginning to take note of this – that bragging about your office sounds nice, but driving there every morning is more trouble (and gas money) than it’s worth – and that none of these expensive teleconferencing and project manager software offer anything to the average start-up that they can’t find in Skype or Google Wave, both of which are free, cross-platform options open to any entrepreneur.

It’s not that we’re settling by choosing the free option, or being miserly by not setting up a physical location. It’s just that renting out an office isn’t just a waste of money; it’s a huge blow to efficiency – and efficiency is absolutely essential the success of a start-up.

Just think about it for a second. If you do decide to rent an office, the only time you’ll ever be productive is when you’re in it. You’ll have to stop your work every time someone walks in with a stupid question – and, worse, you’ll actually have to answer it. You might end up with a landlord that varies your rent along with his mood. All that on top of the fact that the drive there is just one long waste of time and gas money and you have what works out to be, more or less, a recipe for failure.

Enter the home office. Every one of us at Toufiq Media works at home; not one of us has ever paid a cent for the software we use to collaborate; and all of us are exponentially more efficient therefore.

Whenever we need to hold a meeting or just talk with one another – we place a call on Skype. For free.

Whenever we need to organize assignments, share work we’ve completed, show everyone else what’s up on our end of a project – we post it all up on Google Wave. For free.

Whenever we’re in the middle of our work and receive a call from a friend or colleague on Skype – we have the option of just minimizing the program until we’re ready to call back. No obligation to receive visitors, no interruptions from secretaries, no more stupid questions from stupid people.

What we’ve managed is not only to work at home and cope, but to completely eliminate the office and thrive. By using Skype and Google Wave, we’ve saved ourselves thousands of dollars; developed an environment in which we can work on our own terms; and completely circumvented many of the obstacles to efficacy faced by traditional office-based businesses (i.e., restricted hours, higher costs for services like internet, forests of wasted paper, memos about memos, meetings about meetings about the meeting schedule, etc.).

It’s different, certainly – and it’s difficult, sometimes, to go against the grain. But, as young entrepreneurs, we have to realize that innovation is not just some abstract ideal that’s supposed to be necessary for success – if we treat it as no more than an idea, we’ll get nowhere.

But if we adopt it as our plan of action – then we see progress. The reason so few find success in their ventures is that everyone tries to take the same path to it. But if success is the end least often reached, it makes sense to take the path least often traveled. To innovate is to change something established; and what we’re doing here – throwing out the office and other costly factors in favor of Skype, Google Wave, and a home-based working environment – that, ladies and gentlemen, is innovation at its finest.