Metracks.com offers 1gb space to stream audio to your desktop and handset

I sat down with Tee Banwait, CEO of Metracks, on a chilly cold bench, outsite St Paul’s Cathedral at about 7pm in late December last year.

I think we both felt like we were playing spies but it was actually one of the best places in London to meet at that point because the whole city was alive with folk screaming about Christmas. That’s all very well, but when you’re a geek with a mission, you want peace and quiet to hear the other chap talk.

So a park bench in the grounds of St Paul’s worked.

It was there that Tee outlined his strategy for his company, Metracks. Essentially we’re talking audio file storage and the ability to stream your music from anywhere. Not a new concept in the history of the web — there have been and are quite a few services that you can point to that apparently do this already.

Not the way Tee spoke though. Ultra simple interface. The girl-at-the-office wanting to listen to her music. Click, click and you’re done. Last.fm, but with your own music collection. Upload it and walk away, your music follows you in the clouds.

In December, this was speculation. Tee was just setting up the company and getting things started. I was particularly interested with how he was planning to offer services to mobile users.

“Flash Mobile,” he said.

“Ahhh,” I thought, “Interesting..”

He’s only gone and done it.

It’s live. In beta. The service is flying right now. It’s only been live a day and a bit — and already hundreds of folk have found it out of the ether and registered already. Not surprising. It’s really, really simple to use. No arsing around.

Get a free membership. Upload a few tracks. Drag’em around in to make your preferred lists and then click play. The audio plays. Next. Job done. Want it on your mobile? No problem. It works perfectly on Windows Mobile — although I need to talk to him to see if will work on my E61.

You get 1gb of storage with the beta and 10gb of traffic per month. Although I understand Tee is aiming to move the service to unrestricted when they can. I haven’t managed to get time to talk to him about revenue models as yet.

With data tariffs coming down to the 5/10 pound a month mark, this kind of service is nicely positioned. I really like the concept of being able to stream my music from a central location and not having to store it on my device. I want to be device independent.

I’ve just begun uploading my music.

Want to check it out? You can still get yourself a beta account over at www.metracks.com but be quick as, based on uptake at the moment, I reckon they’ll soon have to close the beta. Check it out. You can email Tee and his team via the site.