In the mid-ninties, around the time I had just become a teenager, I remember walking down the back corridor of a mall where my parents were leasing a space for their business and hearing a song playing overhead on the mall speakers that really caught my attention. I had no idea what the song was called or who made it, but I really liked it. I remember wishing I had some way to quickly find out, before the song ended, the name of the song and the artist. I remember thinking, "wouldn't it be great if this cell phone in my pocket could somehow tell me the name of this song?"A decade later I discovered Shazam, and even today, more than a decade after that, Shazam still has a place on my home screen, quickly within reach, helping me discover hundreds of great artists and songs overheard from as many different places. The magic of the experience, and the appreciation for the technology, stem from the memory of that moment in the mid-nineties when I stood under a speaker listening to a song that I might never hear again.
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