Shazam Vice President EMEA, LATAM and Canada Josh Partridge: “IT specialists lack understanding of business processes”
A representative of the company that developed the popular music recognition service visited Innopolis University and spoke about the role of young IT professionals in Shazam development, the music and the company's plans.
Since my studies at the university, I have been frustrated by the narrow specialization and limitations of a particular field of study in universities. I believe that the university should expand consciousness, test your views for strength and inspire the creation of new ideas. Therefore, my advice is to do what opens up new horizons for you, even if you don’t immediately understand what the practical value of what you are doing. This is especially important for undergraduate students.
As for the subject areas, I believe that modeling business processes is one of the most important aspects that nobody thought about five years ago, and now it comes to the fore. To launch a startup, it is important to understand which business model your idea is based on. In IT universities, they mostly study subjects related to programming, and this is an important part of the future product. But you need to know how to monetize the product.
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Even during my studies at the university it was difficult for me to understand what exactly my work would be. At Innopolis University, I was attracted by the fact that studying here is directly related to practice, students learn what they encounter while working.
We are looking for people who are passionate about high technology, and those who want to try something new, experiment, change and go forward. Changes are constantly taking place in the IT field, and I believe that they are very important and need to be prepared for changes. Our company has changed a lot in ten years. And this is a normal process - to evolve, move forward and change. Therefore, the ability to search for something new is so important.
Over the past three years, in terms of the number of users of the Shazam service, Russia ranks among the top three with 20 places. Therefore, we are developing a product taking into account the interests of a new group of users, and in this context we need to expand contacts. The company employs employees from 40 countries, we often conduct hackathons in the USA and the UK, we need specialists in design and development.
Wide geography is very important, especially for the launch of the product: if you open Shazam and see that Russian music is available in the application, you will want to use the application again. We get a lot of feedback from users, and all this helps us grow.
We are working to make Shazam the first application available on any new platform. This is very important for our development. Initially, Shazam was an SMS service, an application available on simple mobile devices, and now it integrates with Siri, Snapchat, Samsung TV, and is the first application on the Apple iWatch.
The application recognizes 90% of the tracks, and only in 10% of cases the recognition fails. In 5% of cases, the reason is in the absence of a signal, in the rest - due to live performance. In some countries, the recognition rate is lower - 70%. For example, we do not have a very large catalog of Arabic music.
10% of the inaccuracy is due to a bad signal, an attempt to recognize a live performance, or a not very famous track of the 70s. We have specialists who daily track cases of inaccurate track recognition in each country. As soon as such an incident arises, we find out its cause - perhaps it was a live concert on TV that is not recognized.
We add new features to provide the best user experience: recognition by geolocation - during the concert, the recognition result will be the playlist of this artist, deferred recognition - the user recognizes something while not accessing the Internet, and the application shows the result when the gadget is connected network. We have other ideas on how to further improve the service, and we hope to implement them in the future.
We have expanded our mission from a music recognition service to a service for interacting with the surrounding space. A year and a half ago, we launched the image recognition function. We want users to search Shazam for not only music, TV shows, radio programs, but also images. Recently, we launched Shazam codes (when recognizing the code, the application provides additional information about the object, visualization of goods, mini-games, video, animation in augmented reality mode). In Russia, using the Shazam for brands technology, the largest campaign in Europe with the Pepsi brand was implemented, 400 thousand people were overseen by the products and 250 thousand photos were taken in augmented reality with the animation offered by the brand. We are currently working with Danone products. Buyers can interact with the packaging and be in the content with elements of augmented reality.
In our database of half a billion tracks. But the secret is that we do not store tracks. The algorithm works like this: we create an imprint of the decibel track and save it. When Shazam reads a track, the application does not write it, but compares it with a thumbprint in the database. This is an important point, because as the database grows, the data transfer rate needs to be increased. As soon as a new track comes out, its imprint immediately appears in our database.
Shazam is convenient because it can be used as needed. Yesterday I was at a club where Russian music sounded, and I went to Shazam about ten times in the evening. I have two children, and I don’t often go out somewhere, so next time I’ll probably go to Shazam in about a month. The application can be used when necessary: at least 20 times a day, but you can not go there for several days. This and its difference from other daily applications, such as instagram.
I think that information technology has already had a huge impact on music. I remember my first iPod with four buttons, which contained only 2,000 songs, and I had to take CDs with me on the road. And now you can listen to 40 million tracks on Spotify. I find it incredible. So the impact of IT is already obvious. Being able to access a huge amount of music is phenomenal!
About education
Since my studies at the university, I have been frustrated by the narrow specialization and limitations of a particular field of study in universities. I believe that the university should expand consciousness, test your views for strength and inspire the creation of new ideas. Therefore, my advice is to do what opens up new horizons for you, even if you don’t immediately understand what the practical value of what you are doing. This is especially important for undergraduate students.
As for the subject areas, I believe that modeling business processes is one of the most important aspects that nobody thought about five years ago, and now it comes to the fore. To launch a startup, it is important to understand which business model your idea is based on. In IT universities, they mostly study subjects related to programming, and this is an important part of the future product. But you need to know how to monetize the product.
')
Even during my studies at the university it was difficult for me to understand what exactly my work would be. At Innopolis University, I was attracted by the fact that studying here is directly related to practice, students learn what they encounter while working.
On the role of young IT professionals in the development of Shazam
We are looking for people who are passionate about high technology, and those who want to try something new, experiment, change and go forward. Changes are constantly taking place in the IT field, and I believe that they are very important and need to be prepared for changes. Our company has changed a lot in ten years. And this is a normal process - to evolve, move forward and change. Therefore, the ability to search for something new is so important.
Over the past three years, in terms of the number of users of the Shazam service, Russia ranks among the top three with 20 places. Therefore, we are developing a product taking into account the interests of a new group of users, and in this context we need to expand contacts. The company employs employees from 40 countries, we often conduct hackathons in the USA and the UK, we need specialists in design and development.
Wide geography is very important, especially for the launch of the product: if you open Shazam and see that Russian music is available in the application, you will want to use the application again. We get a lot of feedback from users, and all this helps us grow.
About the development plans of the service
We are working to make Shazam the first application available on any new platform. This is very important for our development. Initially, Shazam was an SMS service, an application available on simple mobile devices, and now it integrates with Siri, Snapchat, Samsung TV, and is the first application on the Apple iWatch.
The application recognizes 90% of the tracks, and only in 10% of cases the recognition fails. In 5% of cases, the reason is in the absence of a signal, in the rest - due to live performance. In some countries, the recognition rate is lower - 70%. For example, we do not have a very large catalog of Arabic music.
10% of the inaccuracy is due to a bad signal, an attempt to recognize a live performance, or a not very famous track of the 70s. We have specialists who daily track cases of inaccurate track recognition in each country. As soon as such an incident arises, we find out its cause - perhaps it was a live concert on TV that is not recognized.
We add new features to provide the best user experience: recognition by geolocation - during the concert, the recognition result will be the playlist of this artist, deferred recognition - the user recognizes something while not accessing the Internet, and the application shows the result when the gadget is connected network. We have other ideas on how to further improve the service, and we hope to implement them in the future.
About the possibilities and the secret of Shazam
We have expanded our mission from a music recognition service to a service for interacting with the surrounding space. A year and a half ago, we launched the image recognition function. We want users to search Shazam for not only music, TV shows, radio programs, but also images. Recently, we launched Shazam codes (when recognizing the code, the application provides additional information about the object, visualization of goods, mini-games, video, animation in augmented reality mode). In Russia, using the Shazam for brands technology, the largest campaign in Europe with the Pepsi brand was implemented, 400 thousand people were overseen by the products and 250 thousand photos were taken in augmented reality with the animation offered by the brand. We are currently working with Danone products. Buyers can interact with the packaging and be in the content with elements of augmented reality.
In our database of half a billion tracks. But the secret is that we do not store tracks. The algorithm works like this: we create an imprint of the decibel track and save it. When Shazam reads a track, the application does not write it, but compares it with a thumbprint in the database. This is an important point, because as the database grows, the data transfer rate needs to be increased. As soon as a new track comes out, its imprint immediately appears in our database.
About personal experience with the application
Shazam is convenient because it can be used as needed. Yesterday I was at a club where Russian music sounded, and I went to Shazam about ten times in the evening. I have two children, and I don’t often go out somewhere, so next time I’ll probably go to Shazam in about a month. The application can be used when necessary: at least 20 times a day, but you can not go there for several days. This and its difference from other daily applications, such as instagram.
On the interaction of IT and music
I think that information technology has already had a huge impact on music. I remember my first iPod with four buttons, which contained only 2,000 songs, and I had to take CDs with me on the road. And now you can listen to 40 million tracks on Spotify. I find it incredible. So the impact of IT is already obvious. Being able to access a huge amount of music is phenomenal!
Source: https://habr.com/ru/post/342450/
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