Archives 2010

Music Recognition Redefined – Introducing SoundHound! #ShazamFail #SoundHoundFTW

Yea… I cannot start off telling you all about recognition redefined without.. first giving you a story about how I came to learn of this amazing tool to battle all tools!

“Ooh! What’s that playing on the radio! Wow, let me see… (Pulls out iPhone4, loads up search and types in shaz – Select Shazam and select “Tag”) [listening… listening… listening…]

You are limited to 5 tags per month!

?!?!?WTF?!?!? I’m limited to 5 per tags per month?!? Okay fine.. sure that was a complete surprise, but I’ll download the pay version and finish tagging my song there. 

Just say no!

HI IM SHAZAM AND EVEN IF YOU PAY YOU STILL GET ADS – JUST LIKE CLASSMATES.COM  Seriously?!   Yea, #fail multiplied by #fail equals me going to look for another solution.   And it was then (that I complained about this on Twitter) that @jeffcoffee suggested I check out SoundHound!  

 SoundHound on the go!SoundHound Mobile

Okay, let me first off set the disclaimer:

There is a ‘5 per month’ limit on the Free version of SoundHound as well, but I was already in the market for a new product which clearly was NOT Shazam.

So, I load up the app and I get splashed with this screen

SoundHound Splash Screen SoundHound and bad singing of Yellow Submarine SoundHound finding Yellow Submarine SoundHound Share Song SoundHound Twitter Integration 

First of all, let me just say.   Whoa!  I decide to click “Tap Here” and I proceed to sing the Beatles “The Yellow Submarine” (I did consider filming me doing that… for your sake, I didn’t ;))

Lo and behold shortly into the song, BAM! It recognized it from my very own (at this point out of tune voice)  Wow! I should share this feat with someone shouldn’t I!? Ooh! Twitter and FB integration!  Yea, that’s the cost of doing business though.    But what if I don’t know the name of the song… all I can really remember is an artist…

Speak the name of your artist

With the ease of knowing ‘words’ I simply say a song name or an artist name by clicking on the “Title or Artist” section and bam! I’m presented with Michael Jackson!

SoundHound Settings

And while it is very nice that they have the settings easy enough to configure inside of the Settings section… the following is something I tested (both from my iPhone and my iPad) Something I had wished Shazam could do.. but never did, and frankly I don’t care if they ever support it at this point!

Suppose the following situation exists:   You’re listening to a song out of iTunes/iPod on your device, or even listening to something on Pandora! And you’re saying “Man, I wish I had the lyrics to that song, or knew what album it was off of, or other details” etc etc..  So you go and launch Shazam and immediately all sound CEASES to operate.  WTF?!? That’s kind of dismissing!

SoundHound Now Playing!

I welcome you to this feature in SoundHound called “Now Playing!”   Yes, this screen shot is from my iPad because it looks soooooo much cooler in that sense ;) But it works JUST as well on the iPhone (I guarantee :))

What's Hot with SoundHound (iPad edition) What's Hot with SoundHound (iPhone Edition)

And the last thing I’d like to share from my playing with this, is the “What’s Hot” “UnderPlayed” and “Just found by Users” options.  As you can see the iPad version looks a lot sweeter than the iPhone version… :)

And last but not least, I’d like to share some of the ‘highlights’ mentioned from their actual website which incase I missed any of this, you have it here! :)

Soundhound on Android Free Version of SoundHound
Now Available for iOS and Android

Highlights

Blazing fast music identification
Sing & Hum recognition
Voice-directed music search
In-app lyrics

Special on iPad:

Big, beautiful lyrics and music videos
The SoundHound Ticker


Version 3.3.1 for iPhone, iPod touch and iPad
Version 2.0.1 for Android

– SoundHound (free): 5 IDs per month
Available on the App Store

– SoundHound ?: unlimited
Available on the App Store

Soundhound on iOS

Oh, and let’s not ignore the one feature (which seemed to be overlooked in too many ways in the features…)

Instantly Launch a Pandora Station (SoundHound)

Instantly launch a Pandora Station!!!

Okay..  I think that is enough… I’ll let you tell me your favorite functions, features and otherwise.   If you found this useful at all, and if you kick the ‘”Shazam” habit, let me know.  If you’re from Shazam I’d love to hear your feedback as well. :) 

What is the difference between orange and blue fiber cable

Hey guys! I bet you’re wondering the very same thing a lot of people wonder.  And chances are you did a search (as I had in the past) with the very same query as this title.   And chances are.. you’d end up with a page filled with OMFG irrelevant data, when all you want to know is; WILL ORANGE CABLE DO 10G, WHY ARE ALL MY CABLES BLUE NOW?!’  Etc.. :)

So, in the effort of full disclosure and thanks to my good friend Stuart Miniman, I’m publishing this post here, containing everything you actually care about!

Published in this lovely slide share; Converged Networks: FCoE, iSCSI and the Future of Storage Networking is a beautiful slide like this, but the real core and important bit is.

image

Orange Fiber Cable DOES 10g, but only up to 82m

Blue (Aqua) Fiber Cable is ALSO 10g, at lengths of up to 300m

By the looks of things though, when it comes to the days of 40g or 100g, Orange cable will not exactly be your best friend in those scenarios; a good problem to have at that point.

So, when you’re going through your datacenter and doing short-haul in a cabinet and saying “doh! we need to rip out all of this orange so we can to 10g”.. Don’t.   If you’re running long haul or to a cabinet pretty far away, sure make sure it’s blue all day long but you will be fine in the short term if you’re doing short runs.

Hopefully you found this useful (let me know if so) because I’m sick and tired of trying to remember what this is and end up at a million pages telling me EVERY detail but this! :)

EMC Unified Storage Guarantees my speedometer will always be 20% faster!

Hi, my name is Erik Estrada, you may remember me from such YouTube Video’s as Speeding Ticket w/Erik Estrada – EMC 20% Guarantee

This is actually a particularly funny video – Any time a celebrity shows up in a video, it’s pretty funny. :)

First thing I did in this video was deeply analyze it with loads of commentary! (You may notice I didn’t do that in my previous post, EMC Unified Storage Guarantee improves your Golf Game by 20% – Which is accurate because… Golf isn’t my thang so much, so improving my game by 20% isn’t saying much ;) that and it’s good to take a break from discussions)

But this video in particular… it drew up a few questions to the top of my mind:

  • Is that really someone’s car with a CIO license plate in california?! (I considered calling it in to determine who owns that plate… but I didn’t.. ;))
  • Is Sarah Phillips intended to represent someone internally/externally? (Not sure, I couldn’t find anything which jumped out…)
  • Why is it she only handed pieces of paper?! Is that the new greener California License?! made of paper?! :)
  • Why isn’t Sarah wearing a seatbelt? (Yes, I realize this is staged… :))
  • If I got pulled over for 78 in a 65… well, let’s just say, I’m glad I work for EMC… ;)

All in all though, it’s a fairly funny video which quite frankly… if I could get a 20% guarantee on my speed limit, I’d be ALL over that – Though with that being the case, I’d hope that everyone else on the road equally had a similar 20% guarantee or at least introduce some vehicles for us to get to FAST (Oh my god that was a terrible tie-in/joke! :))

EMC Levels the playing field with Cloud based storage offering (ATMOS Online)

I’ve been meaning to weigh in on this, but with the holiday weekend… well, you get the post-weekend weigh-in after everyone has had the chance to say everything good and bad on this (You’d be amazed at how little bad has been said on the subject.  I say how little because it’s ALL been re-iterations of the same register article)

….What happened?!?? I was just using ATMOS Yesterday and all of a sudden every competitor of EMC is telling me that ATMOS is DEAD and it’s time to close up shop?!? Whoa, hold on there pardner, that’s not what we’re saying at all! (Yes, that is exactly how *I* read it from the NUMEROUS competitive coverage of this event occurring and happening :))

As far as you and I should be concerned, ATMOS hasn’t changed at all; except perhaps getting a little simpler in your choices of where to store ATMOS.

Stolen from Chad Sakac's blog! :)

Prior to this June 29th event, you would have the choice of ATMOS Hosted internally as part of your Private Cloud.   ATMOS Hosted externally at EMC’s ATMOS Online, or ATMOS Hosted externally at one of the three Service Providers listed below.

Cloud Service Provider Service Description
AT&T Synaptic Storage as a Service
Hosted Solutions Stratus Cloud Storage
PEER 1 Hosting CloudOne Storage

Now… as far as Production Grade ATMOS Online goes; You can choose between Internally, and Externally with the Cloud Service Providers where you can act and operate against their existing SLA structure you may likely be familiar with.

Looks pretty straight-forward if you ask me!   I sat down, read all of the data which was available to me, and I saw a strategic decision being taken in order to remove the competitive pressures between EMC’s own sales force, and that of the partners and service providers offering up the ATMOS Cloud Service to the general purpose community.   Or in the words of Dave Simpson who so eloquently said:

The winners, of course, are EMC’s Atmos cloud storage partners, which no longer have to compete with EMC. Likewise, EMC no longer has to compete with those partners. It’s a win-win on that front. In fact, on its Atmos web site, EMC is “strongly encouraging” its existing Atmos customers to migrate to one of its partners.

…..

The shuttering of Atmos Online should be seen not as a failure on the part of EMC but, rather, as another prescient and tactical move by the company.

And quite frankly Dave said it well; which I feel takes the whole debate about “where” should I host my Cloud Storage off the table; Discussion point over.   But what now?

With the service providers discussion off the table, I think it is important to take the time to focus on customers and the community

The EMC ATMOS Online Community is still strong and hearty.     Your vehicle for open discussion on this matter is still available and at your disposal.

The ATMOS Online service can continued to be used for Development Purposes.

Keeping your Cloud Private and doing your own internal testing has never been stronger with the release of the ATMOS Online Virtual Server Appliance (VSA)

And last but not least – Customers DO continue to use this, and STILL will continue to use this.   This is best of breed Cloud Storage in a growing world which needs more versatile solutions at your disposal.    There will continue to be businesses like eBay who selected ATMOS to create a reliable, scalable cloud infrastructure.

So in the end here; the real winners are YOU! EMC Customers, EMC Partners, EMC Service Providers.

There’s never been a better time to play with ATMOS, and with the public release of the VSA, I’ve been seeing internal and external adoption grow at exponential rates; which means you’ll likely see a lot more perspectives and use-cases of EMC ATMOS which will far trump that of what has been seen up until this point.   More fun, more play, more winners! :)

References also discussing this:

Where to get your Cloud On: