From Shazam to space, why I am excited about #Spark.me 2018
A few weeks ago I posted briefly some reasons on why I will attend (for the second time) the #SparkMe 2018 conference in Budva, Montenegro at the end of this month.
Now, the speakers lineup of this year it’s just mind blowing but I wanted to highlight two speakers in this post which I am very excited about, but also tells a lot about the format of this conference, i.e a unique :-)
It never occurred to me that Shazam was in fact founded in 2000 as the world’s first mobile phone-based music recognition service.
The first one is Dhiraj Mukherjee, Co-Founder of Shazam. I had heard before of Dhiraj and of Shazam of course, but in my mind Shazam was a recent startup formed in the smartphone area. It never occurred to me that Shazam was in fact founded in 2000 as the world’s first mobile phone-based music recognition service.
To me that is just astonishing. We associate such services that include magic-like capabilities like finding a song out of millions just by hearing a couple of seconds, with very recent developments in Artificial Intelligence or Machine Learning and amplified and made accessible with the iPhone. Before the smartphone area, the way Shazam worked was by calling a mobile number, which would then hear the song for 30 seconds and replied the answer with an SMS. Fast forward 10 years, the service became a worldwide sensation thanks to the smartphone revolution and the possibility to perform the same service in just a couple of seconds.
Having the chance to hear about this journey of the earliest years of Artificial Intelligence is rare and not to be missed.
I think learning the deep details of the start of the digital and mobile area can help us to really understand what digital is about and apply it to this day as well.
Mike was first person to tweet from space and a best selling author.
The second speaker is Former NASA astronaut Mike Massimino. If, from Dhiraj we can learn all about digital from someone who has seen things from a pioneers’ point of view, Mike can provide us a totally different point of view, that of outer space :-)
And believe me, he is far from being a shy astronaut. He is an amazing storyteller. In fact he was first person to tweet from space and a best selling author. I have always been fascinated from seeing airplanes and with flying overall. It’s one of those things that even though we have been doing it for decades and it is now something normal, it will never stop to be seen as an something hard to believe.
And for me people like pilots and astronauts that have been at the front seat, see things differently and in such a way that we, passengers (in planes at least), do not.
So there you go. If hearing about technology, digital and communication from a pioneer and someone who has been in space is not unique, I don’t know what is :-)
