Shazam is Making its Way to Retailers with Augmented Reality. Most people will know Shazam as that app you use when you hear a song and don’t know who it’s by.
In 2014, the company focused on making its app more purposeful by adding a social recommendation aspect and Rdio and Spotify integration, in which users can scroll through a feed of artists related to what they’ve Shazam-ed to discover new content. For 2015, Shazam is extending its feature to a world outside of music. Shazam CEO Rich Riley sat down with us and gave us his idea of what’s ahead for the company in this coming year.
You may have already noticed Shazam prompts in your television commercials or movie theaters that act like QR codes – “Shazam this commercial to learn more!” This year, Riley says the team will continue to work a “visual Shazam” feature to connect the app to the physical retail experience. It makes sense. Riley also showed us how the company will integrate more augmented reality into Shazam results. Top image via USA Today. Vicomi Wants to Replace the Like with an Emotion Scale. The ‘like’ and ‘upvote’ have become an integral part of navigating the internet; what would Facebook or Reddit be without them?
Still, as far as expressing how you actually feel about that infuriating article, sad photo or funny cat video, they’re pretty basic tools. Vicomi, a Web platform that provides publishers tools to measure user ‘sentiment’ is looking to change that with the official launch of its response system dubbed “Feelbacks.” Instead of simple binary response, its system lets users react on a spectrum of emotions. Vicomi believes Feelbacks allows users to more succinctly share their reactions while also fostering a more engaging community.
Magic Leap Secures $542M Led By Google For “Lightweight Wearable” Tech That Merges Physical And Digital Worlds. It’s rare that a company can stay relatively secretive while raising a huge amount of funding, but Florida’s Magic Leap has managed that.
The startup, led by CEO Rony Abovitz, announced today the close of its $542 million Series B, featuring investors led by Google, Inc., and including KPCB, Andreessen Horowitz, Obvious Ventures, Qualcomm and Legendary Entertainment. The list of investors reads like a who’s who of influential companies and individuals across various industries, and Abovitz explained to TechCrunch that the reason for that is that the tech’s potential isn’t limited to any one field, which he says puts its potential market size in the trillions of dollars annually range.
That could explain the valuation of Magic Leap, which is north of $1 billion, given that this round is still a minority investment, per Abovitz. Google Launches Street View Imagery For All 12 World Cup Stadiums In Brazil. The first game of the 2014 soccer football World Cup in Brazil is scheduled to kick off a week from now and — in what’s slowly becoming a tradition around major sports events — Google today released Street View imagery of all 12 World Cup stadiums.
In addition to the stadiums themselves, Google also took its cameras to the areas around the venues, as well as numerous other sites in the country. These include the likes of the Iguaçu National Park and St. Michael of the Missions. Google says that with this update, Street View in Brazil now also features images from “hundreds of interesting sites across Brazil.” In addition, the team today released new imagery from other South and Central American countries, including Peru, Chile, Colombia and Mexico.
Google Maps Easter Egg Offers Dragons as a Mode of Transport. If you love Game of Thrones as much as we do, you’ve probably pondered what it would be like to have one of Khaleesi’s dragons at your disposal.
Google appears to be on the same wavelength, after it added the mythical creature as a travel option in Google Maps. From what we can tell, it’s only available for a single journey – Snowdon to the Brecon Beacons – and is a fitting trip, given the red dragon that adorns the Welsh flag. Google Stars Extension for Chrome Leaks: Hands On.
We’ve known for a while now that Google is testing a new favoriting service called Google Stars, aimed at helping users save, share, and organize Web content.
This is largely due to multiple leaks, detailing features as well as showing off the interface in a video and screenshots. Today, Google+ user Florian Kiersch, who has done the majority of the digging behind the service, has leaked the Google Stars extension for Google Chrome. Kiersch spotted the extension on the Chrome Web Store before Google pulled it, and apparently downloaded it to share with the German site Caschys. That blog in turn uploaded the 369KB file to CloudUp, and by now it can probably be grabbed from all over the Web. Since it’s not yet available on the Chrome Web Store for most users (Google employees have been dogfooding the Google Stars service for months), it has to be installed manually.
Basic functionality remains the same as the current favoriting system in Chrome. Beyond Analytics: Understanding Humans While Scaling Your Business. Jonatan Littke is the CEO and co-founder of Lookback.
When WhatsApp was acquired by Facebook, there were eight million WhatsApp users for every employee. Eight million. Traditionally in business, when you scale up your company, you grow your number of employees along with your number of customers.