O'Reilly's Jenn Webb chats with Cait O’Riordan, VP of product, music and platforms at Shazam, about the current state of predictive analytics and how Shazam is able to predict the success of a song, and how the Internet of Things affects Shazam’s product life cycles as well as the behaviors of their users. Jenn also chats with Francine Bennett, CEO and cofounder of Mastodon C, about unintentional uses of data for evil and how data scientists can ensure their work stays on the data for good side of that line.

How Shazam Predicts Pop Hits

O'Reilly Media spreads the knowledge of innovators. At O’Reilly, a big part of our business is paying attention to what’s new and interesting in the world of technology. We have a pretty good record at having anticipated some of the big technology developments in recent history. For instance, we launched the first commercial Web site, GNN, in 1993; we organized the meeting at which the term “open source” was first adopted; we were early investors in Blogger, which helped launch the blogging revolution; and more recently, our Web 2.0 conference launched a world-wide meme. We call this predictive sense the “O’Reilly Radar.” And while we’re certainly not always right, we are, at least, good at making interesting guesses.

Our methodology is simple: we draw from the wisdom of the alpha geeks in our midst, paying attention to what’s interesting to them, amplifying these weak signals, and seeing where they fit into the innovation ecology. Add to that the original research conducted by our Research team, and you start to get a good picture of what the technology world is thinking about.

How Shazam Predicts Pop Hits

O'Reilly Radar