Apple has acquired Shazam
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Abhi Beckert
Ars Tribunus Angusticlavius
How long have you been using iTunes for? The product is 19 years old and it really was great in the early days.
It all went down hill when they tried to integrate a music store into it - and while that mistake happened with Steve Jobs at the company, it is widely sited as an example of Jobs strongly disagreeing with the direction other executives were taking with iTunes but reluctantly allowing them to have their way.
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Buying teams generally does not work in Silicon Valley. How did buying Siri team go?
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Chemical Tribe
Ars Legatus Legionis
Because Siri (killed the android app), the company they acquired to get facial recognition (killed MS's Kinect), the company behind touchid (didn't kill the market for alternatives, but android/moto used them first)
Course Google killed Waze on WP, all I can recall from them atm...
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Chemical Tribe
Ars Legatus Legionis
The only time it hasn't worked is when I've used it in a crowded restaurant and I'm not even near the speaker. Every other time it's fast.
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and threw roadblock after roadblock in the path of a MS YouTube app....
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Chemical Tribe
Ars Legatus Legionis
There was nothing there to take away in that case, unlike waze. Besides, the ui in WP still almost mirrors the android app anyhow.
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lol wat
The Kinect was killed by the market and it nearly took down the entire Xbox brand with it. Not to mention the Kinect 2 was largely done in-house without PrimeSense, and came out the same year that Apple bought them (that being 2013).
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This is a good point, I think buying technology works better (see Microsoft with internet explorer, large parts of DOS, Visual Basic, Vizio, Bungee, etc). Hopefully Apple get better at AI by learning from the Shazam team and improving the product, since they clearly didn't learn much from the Siri team, large parts of who as you point out have left the company.
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How about donating 400 million dollars to some sort of charity??
I mean if you're just going to throw money away, at least give it to starving children and not to devs of a novelty app that has no real value.
(What should I expect after the Beats purchase though, right?)
I mean if you're just going to throw money away, at least give it to starving children and not to devs of a novelty app that has no real value.
(What should I expect after the Beats purchase though, right?)
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Chemical Tribe
Ars Legatus Legionis
I don't exactly recall the source but IIRC it was here, in a Peter Bright article not that long ago.
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Abhi Beckert
Ars Tribunus Angusticlavius
ki
2009 - Microsoft anounces Project Natal (later renamed kinect) as a partnership with PrimeSense to track people in a room with cameras.
2010 - PrimeSense announces new technology that operates at short ranges (and is useless for the Kinect)
2010 - The Xbox 360 was released with Kinect using older PrimeSense technology. It was very expensive hardware and nobody ever made a game people wanted to play, so it flopped.
2012 (february) - PrimeSense announces revised technology that is again useless for Kinect (short range only) and is clearly targeted at hand held devices (like a smartphone).
2012 (august) - Prototype details leaked for a new Kinect with significantly more accurate room scale tracking.
2013 (november 22) - Microsoft announces Kinnect 2.0 that is vastly superior and doesn't use any PrimeSense technology. Despite being technically better, there were still no good games and it was still expensive. So again, a flop.
2013 (november 24) Apple confirms purchase of PrimeSense
It's pretty clear that PrimeSense realised sometime around 2011 that their technology is only viable for short range tracking which doesn't work for the Kinect, and so they switched focus and abandoned their partnership with Microsoft.
And then after a couple of years of releasing new/improved technology that nobody ever actually used, they sold to Apple. The announcement dates for this make it clear all parties involved had an agreement not to announce Apple's purchase until after the Kinect 2.0 was launched, in order to avoid negative publicity for Kinect.
Here's what happened:
2009 - Microsoft anounces Project Natal (later renamed kinect) as a partnership with PrimeSense to track people in a room with cameras.
2010 - PrimeSense announces new technology that operates at short ranges (and is useless for the Kinect)
2010 - The Xbox 360 was released with Kinect using older PrimeSense technology. It was very expensive hardware and nobody ever made a game people wanted to play, so it flopped.
2012 (february) - PrimeSense announces revised technology that is again useless for Kinect (short range only) and is clearly targeted at hand held devices (like a smartphone).
2012 (august) - Prototype details leaked for a new Kinect with significantly more accurate room scale tracking.
2013 (november 22) - Microsoft announces Kinnect 2.0 that is vastly superior and doesn't use any PrimeSense technology. Despite being technically better, there were still no good games and it was still expensive. So again, a flop.
2013 (november 24) Apple confirms purchase of PrimeSense
It's pretty clear that PrimeSense realised sometime around 2011 that their technology is only viable for short range tracking which doesn't work for the Kinect, and so they switched focus and abandoned their partnership with Microsoft.
And then after a couple of years of releasing new/improved technology that nobody ever actually used, they sold to Apple. The announcement dates for this make it clear all parties involved had an agreement not to announce Apple's purchase until after the Kinect 2.0 was launched, in order to avoid negative publicity for Kinect.
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Cool story, bro. You probably should have edited it for false information, but whatever. People aren't stupid, they know the truth.
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I built a Shazam song recognizer clone in 2-3 days by myself, just as a way to learn some new (to me) techniques. Now, absolutely Shazam is way better than my app (my app was accurate, but quite limited by comparison to Shazam in terms of what it could recognize), but I don't think it would be hard to get up to Shazam's level of competence.
Shazam was a good idea and it was probably cutting edge a decade or so ago, but of course Apple aren't buying Shazam just for this single feature.
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Kinect 1.0 was one the fastest selling pieces of technology ever at the time and remains one of the best selling console peripherals ever released. It did the opposite of "flop". Which isn't to say it was great, just that it sold *very* well.
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Apple Music on Android was (or maybe still is) a piece of crap. There was a huge functionality issue that even the sh****est copycat app on the Play Store does not have. Namely, if you listened to music using it and then wanted to go into the notification shade and tap to remove all notifications, the Apple Music "now playing" notification would also be removed and the music would stop playing. There was no way to make it a persistent notification or decouple it from the app so that the music could still be playing. That was not a day one bug, because i first installed it a month or so after they launched it on Android.
My podcatcher and Twitch (when set to audio only mode) take two different approaches to this and they both work fine.
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Starbucks plays some dreadfully awful music. I use Soundhound to find out who the artist is. I won't name names, but how the hell do some people get recording characters contracts.
But my use isn't all negative. Occasionally I use Soundhound to find out the name of the artist of a song I like.
You can talk to Sound hound. In fact, that was the original intent of the software.
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It's time to uninstall Shazam from my phone before it installs QuickTime, iTunes and Safari.
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Sure, go crazy, but before you do that, you may want to crawl out of that troll cave you've been living in and learn that Safari and QuickTime hasn't been bundled with iTunes for about five years now.
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I’d say that’s a bit too harsh. The original iTunes on the Mac - back when it was just an MP3 manager - had some powerful features the competition didn’t have. Especially the abstraction from the file system was a big deal back when most MP3 software would expect you to organize your files manually into folders.
Of course, that came with its own trade-offs: E.g., DB integrity made it necessary to use iTunes for syncing instead of simply copying stuff over via USB/FireWire, and the Windows version of the program always sucked, because Apple just can’t seem to get Windows software right.
Unfortunately, iTunes evolved from a DB-based music management software into a piece of bloatware that was supposed to take care of a whole grab bag of different tasks: app store, music store, sync, activation and backup management, podcast and internet radio client, audiobook library, etc. If it could have stayed focused on its initial purpose, it would probably be a better program today.
But yeah, all of that happened while Jobs was still calling the shots, so I can’t see any connection between his passing and the decline of that software.
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The whole Apple's Titan project (AV tech) is built on acquisition.
Siri was bought.
FaceID was bought.
The list is endless.
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How nice to be Apple customers. To be able to to say you are an Apple customer, you have to pay for everything to live inside a locked-up walled-garden, have personal data mined, and served with ads.
No wonder Apple is flushed with cash.
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But that’s not how Shazam works. They aren’t doingg random matching and figuring things out. They have an algorithm that generates a checksum for a snippet (which they have already precalculated in HQ) and then it simply has to match that. Siri is wide open in what it expects, and doesn’t have your complete verbal history to check against. There’s probably some overlap in terms of dealing with background noise and all, but Shazam is working with a very specific finite set.
One of the steps in music promo these days is to make sure Shazam has all your song ID infor before the song/album release so when something new starts playing you can easily purchase it Day 1.
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iTunes was bought.
NeXT was bought.
I would say Apple has shown a pretty good history of acquisitions that pay off. It is frequently a very good business decision vs inventing in-house. BTW, all these acquisitions were extensively further developed at Apple.
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Oh come on, the "testing" was "it worked better for me". There was zero actual testing going on.
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Pathetic how fanboys will come to the defense of a for-profit corporation. Hell, every single Apple "advance" has come from somewhere else - the iPod and iOS were developed by PortalPlayer and Pixo, OSX was developed by NeXT, Apple bought PA Semi to develop the AMP's, etc.
They are master integrators, and I love my iPad and iPhone...but good christ, it's just a company guys. Go rub one out or something. Love people, not corporations.
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By the engineers who originally came up with the idea. No one's saying that Apple doesn't do anything, it's the "Apple magic" that is stupid. Apple's desktops were irrelevant until they got Intel chips (and could run Windows (; ), their phones were astounding but basically functionless until they bought PA Semi, etc. Apple's "superpower" is having a devoted group of people who will pay 50% more for a product than they will to Apple's competitors (for the same product). That extra cash makes Apple able to buy more better engineers. It's why MS won't die, either. They have the capital. They can buy their way out of essentially any mistake.
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Don't worry Android users. There is always Sound Hound which is great for even cover band tunes.
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It sold very well because of bullshit reviewer hype PROJECT NATAL!!!! The hype for HoHoLoLens was similar, and it is nowhere to be found.
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Don’t know if Shazam will help with any of this but here’s a wish list:
* Option to show lyrics while song is playing. If can be done dynamically, in real-time, could boost karaoke
* Option to dynamically clean song lyrics in real-time. No need for artists to put out separate clean albums or song renditions and no need to buy and manage separate versions of the same song.
* Option to show lyrics while song is playing. If can be done dynamically, in real-time, could boost karaoke
* Option to dynamically clean song lyrics in real-time. No need for artists to put out separate clean albums or song renditions and no need to buy and manage separate versions of the same song.
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Don’t know if Shazam will help with any of this but here’s a wish list:
* Option to show lyrics while song is playing. If can be done dynamically, in real-time, could boost karaoke
* Option to dynamically clean song lyrics in real-time. No need for artists to put out separate clean albums or song renditions and no need to buy and manage separate versions of the same song.
I love that SoundHound shows lyrics in realtime.
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It's what big tech companies do.
YouTube, Google Docs (Writely), Nest, HTC's engineering, Motorola
Instagram, WhatsApp
Apple is very good at acquisitions, they haven't had any big huge boondoggles like Motorola or Nokia, and they have quite a few five star acquisitions like iTunes, NeXT, PA Semi, Authentec, Primesense, (and weirdly maybe Beats).
Yeah... lots of technologies come out of their acquisitions. It could be worse, they could have Microsoft's truly horrible history of buying technologies and turning them into turds.
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I don't recall mentioning "magic". Whether it was the original team staying just long enough or for a long time, irrelevant once the acquisition has been completed. They work for Apple. iPod, NeXT, PA Semi were critical purchases for Apple, absolutely. But what Apple's management did with them next was just as critical to the long-term success that these have been.
As for your other points:
1) You seem to be forgetting how "beleaguered" Apple used to be. Their cash pile is fairly recent in their history.
2) The flagship products from Samsung and Google are on par price wise with Apple's.
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Never mind identifying songs, I want to be able to pop the hood of my car, stick my phone over the engine and say "Siri, is that top end tapping sound normal?"
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AFAIK, Apple probably wanted info that Shazam had, such as their customer database.
Otherwise, they wanted the ability to toggle their form from a kid to a full grown, super hero by shouting out the "acquirees" namesake
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IMO the days of nerfing apps on $other_platform are over. It's all about harvesting data now, and Apple gets less of that if people aren't using their app acquisitions because they kneecapped it on Android.
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Except that is very slow. Right now you can configure Shazam to listen and identify on start up. Therefore I can pin it to the home screen and if an advert on TV plays a song I don't know I just tap Shazam and have my answer, not hold home button, say "what song is this" and then wait - just 1 tap.
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