Our guys are here today opposite NHC so if you are on Southern bypass beware they are focusing on collecting money rather than enhancing any road safety.
Shazam could name any song back in 2002, on flip phones, with zero AI. You dialed the number 2580, held your phone up to the speaker, and hung up. 15 seconds later, a text came back with the song name. That same core trick still runs the app today.
The inventor was Avery Wang, a Stanford PhD in audio signal processing. His problem was brutal. Match a short clip recorded on a 2002 cell phone mic, in a noisy bar, against a database of a million songs, in seconds, over a phone call.
His solution treated music as geometry instead of sound.
The algorithm converts audio into a spectrogram, a picture of the song, then throws almost all of it away. It keeps only the peaks, the loudest frequency points at each moment in time. Bar chatter and blown-out speakers can wreck most of a recording. The peaks survive. Shazam only ever needed the peaks.
Those surviving points form what Wang called a constellation map, because it looks like a star field. Pairs of peaks get converted into hash numbers, and identifying a song becomes a dictionary lookup rather than an audio comparison. That made it fast enough to search a million tracks on 2002 hardware.
Wang published the full method openly in 2003 in a paper called "An Industrial-Strength Audio Search Algorithm." Anyone could read exactly how the magic worked. The moat was the database and the deals with carriers, never the secret.
Apple bought the company in 2018 for a reported $400 million. People have tagged over 100 billion songs since the very first one, Jeepster by T. Rex, during the beta in April 2002.
One deterministic signal-processing trick, written before most people had heard the phrase machine learning, and it's still so good that in 2026 everyone assumes it must be AI.
Proof of life ๐
Finally finished that 5 year masters program that had me on Survival mode didnโt even realise I was on survival mode till I wrote my last exam and basically crashed for weeks..
glad to say thatโs done and dusted as I wait for defense๐ค.
Locked in on marathon training glad to say the process is processing .
Currently full time early mornings at mjengo as I figure out the next phase of my life ๐.
Thank you for checking in ๐.
I hosted an event that raised a modest $3.5 BILLION in 90 minutes at the UN General Assembly in New York! ๐คฏ
It will fund education in 90 lower-income countries so that no child is left behind. My mom was a teacher in rural Kenya so this historic โharambeeโ is personal to me
I have just learnt that Senator Cyrus Jirongo passed away last December in a motor accident. I was not aware that he had died.
This is very sad. Jirongo was a good and patriotic leader who served his country with dedication. We shall miss him. My condolences go to his family, relatives, friends and the people of Kenya. May his soul rest in peace.
First trailer for Guy Ritchieโs โWIFE & DOGโ, starring Benedict Cumberbatch, Rosamund Pike and Anthony Hopkins.
The film follows the relentless betrayal & murder that occurs when a family battle for greed.
In theaters on February 19, 2027.