Identify Music Through Your Phone
Shazam - just hit 2580 on your mobile phone and identify music
I must say. This is one hell of a mobile service.
You dial the service, aim your phone at the loudspeakers, and in 30 seconds you’ll receive information about artist and trackname via sms.
The service is able to match 1.6 million tracks.
Here’s a read on the technological aspects - what kind of hashing algorithms you could use for music matching. This, as you might imagine, is no trivial matter, and the algorithm uses minimal distinct spectrograms as fingerprints for each piece of music.
And according to this story in Guardian Unlimited, the company are in the expansive state of mind. Starting with Suomi/Finland (One of the most mobile’ized european countries), Italia/Italy and Österreich/Austria. Shazam will team up with recordstores allowing you to buy a record you hear in a café or club within minutes.
So with a little luck Danmark/Denmark will be targeted soon.
Statement: I think it’s cool. Techwise of course, but it’s also a new way of utilizing the mobile phone as shopping device without doing wap or location-based services.