>> “Shazam, the 18-year-old company...” Fact that Shazam is 18-years-old made me curious, and found the following on Wikipedia: >> “Initially, in 2002, the service was launched only in the UK and was known as "2580", as the number was the shortcode that customers dialled from their mobile phone to get music recognised. The phone would automatically hang up after 30 seconds. A result was then sent to the user in the f…
TIL People born in 2002 are 18 years old now.
Um, that's partly wrong. I was born in the latter part of that year and I'm most definitely not 18.
>> “Shazam, the 18-year-old company...” Fact that Shazam is 18-years-old made me curious, and found the following on Wikipedia: >> “Initially, in 2002, the service was launched only in the UK and was known as "2580", as the number was the shortcode that customers dialled from their mobile phone to get music recognised. The phone would automatically hang up after 30 seconds. A result was then sent to the user in the f…
I remember the first time I Shazamed a song. It was during the flip phone era and it was honestly the most magical thing to me at time. I had always wanted something like this, and here it was at my fingertips.
Lol I just recalled that I applied for a job there in 2014 when they had a position open in San Diego. Gmail turned the email I sent with my resume. It always bummed me out that they never contacted me back.
I love Shazam but honestly, if they remove integrations like "Open in Spotify" which seems likely, I would probably switch to using SoundHound.
Huh. I thought Apple completely killed Spotify. I personally had to switch because Artists started doing exclusives with Apple only and I really couldn't justify Spotify over Apple Music, even though I much preferred Spotify's experience. I've also noticed Apple's catalogue is much larger than Spotify's. Is Spotify getting better? I'd love to switch back.
Personally, the only person I know that uses Apple music instead of Spotify or GPM works at Apple.
Amazon's Mechanical Turk service launched in 2005.
The concept of the "Mechanical Turk" has been around for over 200 years: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Turk
It's pretty obvious what GP meant. The concept of crowd-sourcing small chunks of work as a service is not the same thing as a hoax which involved a single person masquerading as an automaton. Amazon chose a clever name for its service that is memorable and references humans fronted by machines.
The concept of the "Mechanical Turk" has been around for over 200 years: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Turk
It's pretty obvious what GP meant. The concept of crowd-sourcing small chunks of work as a service is not the same thing as a hoax which involved a single person masquerading as an automaton. Amazon chose a clever name for its service that is memorable and references humans fronted by machines. Asserting otherwise is an example of the etymological fallacy: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Etymological_fallacy .
Ehh, I have seen references to using a person instead of an algorithm before Amazon released their service. Basically, if your automating human dexterity it's robotics, if your automating the brain it's AI. Sorting vegetables being a useful early example where humans could be thought of as a replaceable black box if you can break down what they are specifically doing. Thus Machine vision and classification where two common tasks because you need to play any game not simply replay a specific one.
The concept of the "Mechanical Turk" has been around for over 200 years: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Turk
It's pretty obvious what GP meant. The concept of crowd-sourcing small chunks of work as a service is not the same thing as a hoax which involved a single person masquerading as an automaton. Amazon chose a clever name for its service that is memorable and references humans fronted by machines. Asserting otherwise is an example of the etymological fallacy: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Etymological_fallacy .
The term "mechanical turk" has been used to describe "fake AI" since before Amazon Mechanical Turk was released.
I'm a bit shocked that they're paying $600M. Is Shazam even profitable? It feels like a clever tech demo from 10 years ago that's already been replicated in search engines like Google.
Yes, they became profitable in 2016 via mostly brand advertising [1][2]. The company has nearly 400 employees according to LinkedIn. With a very conservative personnel estimate of $125k/employee/year, that's $50M alone. Let's throw on another $25M for everything else and they need to be doing at least $75M+ in annual revenue. [1] https://www.macrumors.com/2016/04/20/shazam-for-brands-user-... [2] https://www.billboar…
Perhaps I have limited understanding of running a £40m a year business, but why does an app like Shazam need 400 employees?
Even if selling data and/or advertising, do they need (say) a 200 people sales team.. ?