Linked List: November 22, 2024

Friday, 22 November 2024

Shazam Hits 100 Billion Song Recognitions 

Apple Newsroom:

Shazam has now officially surpassed over 100 billion song recognitions since it launched. To help put that into perspective:

  • That’s equivalent to 12 songs identified for every person on Earth.
  • A person would need to use Shazam to identify a song every second for 3,168 years to reach 100 billion.

Shazam launched in 2002 as an SMS service in the UK, and back then, music fans would dial 2580, hold up their phones to identify music, and receive the song name and artist via text message. Shazam’s following and influence continued to grow in the years that followed, but it was the 2008 debut of the App Store and introduction of Shazam’s iOS app that brought its music recognition technology to millions of users. By the summer of 2011, Shazam had already recognized over 1 billion songs.

I had no idea Shazam started in the pre-iPhone era of mobile phones, getting audio via a phone call, and sending results via SMS. Clever! That takes me back to Moviefone — the service we’d dial in the 1990s to get theater listings and showtimes. You’d call your city’s local Moviefone number — almost certainly using your landline — navigate a menu (“Press 1 if you know the name of the movie you’d like to see...”), and Moviefone would tell you which theaters were showing it, at what times. It sounds archaic but it was great, and they did a great job with the phone menu user interface so you could navigate it quickly.

It also reminds me of the very early days of IMDB, which preceded the web. You could send an email to IMDB with the name of a movie in the subject, and IMDB would email you back with all the information it had about that movie.

Android Authority Reports Google Has Cancelled the Pixel Tablet 2 

Mishaal Rahman, reporting yesterday for Android Authority:

Android Authority has learned that Google has canceled the Pixel Tablet 2, the presumed name of Google’s second-generation Pixel Tablet. This is disappointing for Pixel fans who were waiting for Google to refresh its first-generation Pixel Tablet with a newer chipset, a better camera, and, more importantly, an official keyboard accessory. [...]

Last week, I shared what I learned about the Pixel Tablet 2 from a source within Google. I deemed this source to be very credible given my past history with them as well as the fact that they were able to share unreleased images of the device with me (which I obviously did not publish to protect their identity). After the publication of this article, however, I learned from my source that Google had decided to cancel its plans to release the device, citing concerns that the company would lose money on it.

“Concerns that the company would lose money on it” and 9to5Google’s framing of the same news as “profitability concerns” are fun euphemisms for “no one wants an Android tablet”.

This comes on the heels of news just this week that Google is supposedly “fully migrating ChromeOS over to Android” — but somehow not “merging” them — with the specific goal of better competing against the iPad. So a generous read might be that Google is scrapping the Pixel Tablet 2 because that device was planned to run Android (as the existing Pixel Tablet does) but now Google is rejiggering their tablet and laptop hardware roadmaps with the upcoming ChomeOS-migrated-to-not-merged-with-Android OS in mind.

A less generous read is that Google is afflicted with institutional ADHD and generally acts with no apparent strategy. They’ve kept their focus on annual updates to the well-regarded Pixel phones for 8 years now, but haven’t managed to make them hit products. With the rest of their hardware, their strategy has been about as coherent as their comically chaotic efforts in messaging apps.