Hi Chris, it's Cornel Masson . I was at the London office from 2002-2006, then 4 more years working remotely from South Africa.
I worked on all the Java infrastructure around the recognition cluster (the latter being handcrafted C and assembly, optimised for specific Intel hardware).
The thing that Shazam got right was not just the core recognition tech, but the business processes and supporting systems around it. I remember how much work Chris had to do to convince the 4 major mobile networks in the UK to give Shazam the same 2580 dialing code (the middle 4 buttons, top to bottom, on an early 2000s feature phone).
A major part of the business is the constant sourcing and ingestion of the latest music, in all target markets (think Afrikaans pop in South Africa), deals with pluggers and record labels, etc. Initially, the back catalog was ripped from CD by a huge team of people in a warehouse, on custom workstations.
I worked on all the Java infrastructure around the recognition cluster (the latter being handcrafted C and assembly, optimised for specific Intel hardware).
The thing that Shazam got right was not just the core recognition tech, but the business processes and supporting systems around it. I remember how much work Chris had to do to convince the 4 major mobile networks in the UK to give Shazam the same 2580 dialing code (the middle 4 buttons, top to bottom, on an early 2000s feature phone).
A major part of the business is the constant sourcing and ingestion of the latest music, in all target markets (think Afrikaans pop in South Africa), deals with pluggers and record labels, etc. Initially, the back catalog was ripped from CD by a huge team of people in a warehouse, on custom workstations.