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.
