the onda

The barristas at my local coffee shop are jaded 20-somethings that think they have seen it all, which is why I was so pleased to delight them yesterday morning through my demo of Shazam, the wonderful music recognition application for the iPhone. Breaking for once from their affectations of ennui, they displayed a childlike sense of wonder that this joker with the jeejah (Stephenson speak for yuppie iPhone) could actually recognize their eclectic mix of tunes. As with others that I've shown Shazam to, after getting over the initial shock of the iPhone recognizing Yo La Tengo's "Mr. Tough," their next move was to let the line grow as one twiddled the stereo and the other tried mightily to confuse Shazam's algorithms.

Walking home I realized that Shazam, more than any of the other 10,000 applications in the iTunes App Store, points to the future for this next wave of always-connected, always-with-you, personal computers. Combining the power of a web service, local processing (including rich sensors), and the digitization of all manner of content, Shazam creates something that is truly unique: a computer assisted discovery, cataloguing, and commerce experience that feels like a real augmentation of our intellect.

And so, I figure it being the beginning of the year and all, my 2009 predictions are going to turn of the pattern that is beginning to emerge from use cases like what Shazam for music represents. In fact, let's call 2009 the year in which we implement Shazam for other things, and specifically, people, products, and places.

Shazam for people: I'm sure I'm not the only one who would love to be able to snap a photo of someone and have a Shazam-like listing of everything that is relevant to me about the person come right back. Though it may be socially awkward to point the business end of a cellphone camera at a relative stranger, the general idea goes something like this: between Twitter, Facebook, and all manner of other social tools, there is plenty of useful metadata to mediate richer in-person interactions, so why not take advantage of that? And I'm not just talking about the amoeba bumping behavior of tech conferences (entrepreneurs bumping together aggressively in the hopes of recombining into higher life forms), but regular life as well. I'd love to know more about the other parents at my kids's schools, and I'm sure that if I could obtain that knowledge in-situ and unobtrusively (which is where the Shazam-like magic comes in), idiotic topics of conversation like the weather and the Red Sox would soon be buried by more interesting exchanges.

This has got to be the next step in social network evolution. As pioneers in the space have wrenched control of the "social graph" away from individual vendors and attempted to standardize its portability, it becomes only natural for all sorts of personal publishing/communications tools to emit valuable social metadata that could feed a giant Shazam for people.

Shazam for products: When I am in that "buying kind of mood" (something we will all occasionally feel despite the collapse of modern capitalism as we know it), it'd be great not to have to squeeze every expression of intent into a teeny little search box. While getting a great lead on the latest HP C7180-xd is child's play for Google, buying most of the non model numbered goods in our lives through the search interface is sort of like sucking a watermelon though a straw— eventually you can do it, but it makes a mess and most of the time, it leaves you dissatisfied. Amazon has taken a great step with the "remember it" service on its iPhone app; by combing the output of the camera with its Mechanical Turk service (read: people in 3rd world countries trying to identify the product in your blurry image), they've got a start. Unfortunately most of the products the service can currently identify could also be identified by a quick Google search. So we need to improve it.

I'm particularly looking forward to the evolution of Shazam for products because of the implications that exist when you combine it with another trend I track closely: mass customization, or custom manufacturing. Just as savvy clothing folks tend to rip out pages from magazines as grist for their tailor's mill, I can imagine doing the same for a class of products that can be either customized or made from scratch directly for me.

Shazam for places: while Shazam is the coolest application on my iPhone, it is far from the most useful one. That title may belong to the combination of the GPS, the iPhone Maps application, and Google. With it, I can find almost anything, leave the house without much less of an idea about how I'm going to accomplish what I set out to do, and just generally be far more productive. Earlier this year I was even floored by how powerful this combination of local processing and web service can be in totally foreign environments: I managed to get myself around Cologne purely through public transport with zero German and not even a subway map to my name.

But of course, a Shazam for places needs much improvement over the current offering. I want tailored web searches from authoritative sources woven seamlessly into my map view. I want alerts when I walk by something that I might enjoy. And most of all, I want to be able to integrate the GPS and camera with an overlay of the world that makes directed activities more efficient, and true digital serendipity possible. Collaborative filters and other wisdom of the crowds algorithms have only taken babysteps thus far— with Shazam for places, we're likely to see incredible opportunities for augmentation of our intellect.

I'll close my predictions (or are these more like wishes?) for 2009 with the best year-end post from 2008: Om's admonition that we should stop tolerating mediocrity in business, products, and in life. As technology products and services continue to weave themselves into the fabric of our everyday existence, we are less likely to put up with the shitty user experiences and flakey services that tech companies have adopted as the standard for the consumer space. Om takes RIM to task on the Storm, but a year and a half into my present big company job, I can attest to the fact that they are not alone— most of us ship shit and expect that the razzle dazzle of the technology space will save us. It's why Apple is eating everyone's lunch in every product category they enter.

And no extension of the Shazam pattern in people, products, or places, is likely to make any serious headway without careful attention being paid to avoiding the creeping specter of mediocrity.