Kent Baker: But one new Anglo-American enterprise has come up with an interesting hybrid. If you ever thought a piece of music sounded familiar but you just couldn't recall its title then Shazam is for you. Its founder is Chris Barton.
Chris Barton: You could think of it as a little bit like voice recognition and so whenever we capture 15 seconds of sound, we turn that into what we call a fingerprint of the sound, and then we run a search of this fingerprint against the database of all fingerprints of all the music on our computers.
KB: Let's do it, let's just have another listen. [Still Haven't Found What I'm Looking For playing in the background.] So you're gonna phone up on your mobile?
CB: Yeah, so as I said, basically we have a four-digit number. Shazam identifies the song.
mobile: Please wait 20 seconds while Shazam identifies your song. Shazam has tagged your song. You will get a text message soon, bye for now.
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CB: Now Shazam has successfully identified the song and it is now sending me a text message as we speak. Here it is, it says, "I Still Haven't Found What I'm Looking For by U2 was tagged by Shazam and you can visit your list of songs on Shazam at myshazam.com".
KB: So this is gonna be useful for the consumer, but now to how exactly this is going to help the mobile phone industry, which at the moment is in the doldrums...
CB: Well, we found the mobile phone industry is shifting its focus from acquiring new customers as they found they have come close to saturating the markets, certainly within the UK, to looking for premium revenue streams, non-voice revenue streams. Shazam has just that kind of service, it's a service that provides information to the consumer. It's fun, it's interactive and it helps bring in new revenue streams for the mobile operators •
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