[wonderous]

>> “Shazam, the 18-year-old company...”

Fact that Shazam is 18-years-old made me curious, and found the following on Wikipedia:

>> “Initially, in 2002, the service was launched only in the UK and was known as "2580", as the number was the shortcode that customers dialled from their mobile phone to get music recognised. The phone would automatically hang up after 30 seconds. A result was then sent to the user in the form of a text message containing the song title and artist name.”

SOURCE: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Shazam_(company)

[dsnuh]

I remember the first time I Shazamed a song. It was during the flip phone era and it was honestly the most magical thing to me at time. I had always wanted something like this, and here it was at my fingertips.

[sp332]

Around 2000, MIT had a number you could dial (toll-free) and ask a computer about the weather. It would keep track of where and when you were talking about during the conversation, so after asking "will it rain in Boston today" you could ask "how about Thursday" and then "how about Rochester, NY" and it would read you Thursday's forecast for Rochester. A very cool end-to-end demo of conversational tech.

[ams6110]

At that time, I wonder if there was any technology actually identifiying the song, or if it was a big mechanical turk sort of operation.

[dsnuh]

Lol I just recalled that I applied for a job there in 2014 when they had a position open in San Diego. Gmail turned the email I sent with my resume. It always bummed me out that they never contacted me back.

[madeofpalk]

I remember using Shazam back in... 2008 on my whatever Nokia phone I had back then. It was pretty good.

[psergeant]

2580 was also the middle digits of the keypad, making it even easier. I made heavy use of the service back in the day.

There was another service around the same time called Any Question Answered. This was before high quality internet on phones, and you could SMS them reasonably complicated questions and (at first) get good replies. Notable successes were their getting me ownership information for a pub, and telling me which local shops had an iPad in store. Service degraded significantly over time.

[wintercharm]

That's incredibly creative, getting around the limitations of flip phones.

[tmalsburg2]

That's how you see it today. But back in the day people probably thought, wow, look how creatively they are using the incredible capabilities of modern phones.

[ringaroundthetx]

TIL People born in 2002 are 18 years old now.

[hrydgard]

The company was probably founded some time before the service launched...

[nicky0]

The company was founded in 1999.

[ateesdalejr]

Um, that's partly wrong. I was born in the latter part of that year and I'm most definitely not 18.