Chris Barton

CO FOUNDER & FORMER CEO AT SHAZAM ENTERTAINMENT LIMITED.

“BREAKING THE SOUND BARRIER – CHALLENGES WE FACED AND LESSONS WE LEARNED IN BUILDING SHAZAM”

Chris Barton speaker, shazam, keynote
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Chris Barton is Founder at Shazam Entertainment Limited and was its first CEO. Chris led the creation of Shazam along with three co-founders from concept, through inventing a new pattern recognition technology, to building and launching the world´s first music recognition service.

The service has had over 1 billion app downloads. Shazam was bought by Apple in September 2018. According to Wikipedia, it was the fifth largest acquisition by Apple in its history. Shazam had raised $140 million in venture capital.

He has also worked eight years at Google focused on mobile and at Dropbox as head of mobile operators development. Now, he follows his dream of advising passionate entrepreneurs who want to make the world a better place, by speaking on entrepreneurship and advising a handful of startups. In addition, he is embarking on his next startup venture.

Chris Barton co-founded Shazam in 1999 with the original idea to identify songs with a mobile phone. Before smartphones, people would call a number, put their phone up to the radio and receive a text identifying the song.

When the company launched in 2002, Shazam had 2 million songs in its database and took 15 seconds to process a user’s request. Today Shazam’s app has been downloaded by over 1 billion people globally. Now the app takes only a few seconds to identify songs from its database of over 30 million songs.

Chris Barton speaks at corporate and industry events, sales meetings, and conferences. His message of determination, persistence, and innovation inspires audiences ranging from sales executives and business leaders to technologists and entrepreneurs.

Breaking the Sound Barrier - Challenges We Faced and Lessons We Learned in Building Shazam.

Before smartphones, apps, and digital voice assistants, Chris Barton came up with the idea for people to identify songs by using their phone in 1999. But turning this idea into a commercial product was exceptionally difficult since PhDs in signal processing considered this problem “impossible” to solve due to the background noise. In addition, the startup faced numerous challenges in building the “fingerprint database” of millions of songs as well as launching to users in a world before mobile apps existed. In this exciting talk, Barton shows audiences what it takes to bring an original idea to market when everyone says you can’t do it.

Shazam’s Early Years: Surviving Difficult Times & The Keys to Startup Success.

What does it take for your startup to succeed? Chris Barton founded Shazam in 1999 with three of his friends but it took years to take a simple and original idea from a working algorithm to profits. In this enlightening and no-punches-pulled talk, Barton shares the story of the incredible challenges Shazam faced to “survive” through years of near-bankruptcy and explains his view of the ingredients necessary to make your startup successful.

Lessons for Entrepreneurs Collected from My Shazam Experience.

From picking the right idea to finding the right approach to building the business from the ground up, Barton explains his views on how to optimize the chances of your startup succeeding (and how to enjoy the experience along the way).

Picking the Right Obsession.

If you want to be successful in your career, you’ll need to pick the right obsession. Chris Barton had the chance to work with companies like Google and Dropbox, as well as co-founding Shazam. In this talk, Chris shares how these companies and others follow the right obsession to market dominance.

Story of Creating Shazam and "Touchy Feely" Lessons for Entrepreneurs.

When Chris co-founded Shazam, the music discovery company, his team had the crazy idea of using cell phones to help identify songs. This was before smartphones and apps. The journey was long and difficult but he and his friends learned important life lessons along the way. In this inspiring and motivating talk, Chris focuses on the very human side of being an entrepreneur and what you can learn when you challenge yourself to do something amazing.

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