

Shazam Has 50 Million Users and Secures Investment From KPCB - physcab
http://www.billboard.biz/bbbiz/content_display/industry/e3ibadf593c28401ee842612eb017b4bf6a

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allenbrunson
i used to work for the company that now owns the music recognition algorithm
that shazam is using. it's staggering how much hardware it takes to make this
stuff work. they have a database of millions of songs, all of which must be
kept in ram at all times, to make recognitions fast. it requires hundreds of
linux servers.

despite my preference for stuff i've actually worked on, i think the midomi
app works just as well or better. but they were late to the party, so they're
having trouble getting the eyeballs.

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martingordon
Shazam is _the_ song identification app on the iPhone. The real question is
whether they're actually making money off of their iTunes referrals; KPCB
seems to think/know so.

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jonknee
I wonder how they are calculating users... The iPhone app has 10m downloads,
hard to believe that the other platforms (BlackBerry, Android, etc) account
for more than 80% of their users.

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physcab
Goes to show that: urgent need + simple solution = home run.

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zaidf
You seriously ought to reconsider your definition of a home run.

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physcab
I think if you build a product that 50 million people love, or that 10 million
people have downloaded, that would be considered to be a home run. If that
isn't, what is?

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zaidf
50 million downloads is a great thing and a big deal. But it is not a homerun.
Home run almost exclusively refers to a liquidity event: either selling for
hundreds of millions or billions or going public.

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physcab
I guess everyone has different definitions. 50 million users is a pretty tough
benchmark to get to, especially in a little over a year. Hell, I'd be happy if
there were 1000 happy customers for my apps. But damn if your bar is set on
IPO, more power to you.

