Midomi Nails It on the First Try
Few people know that Bill Gates uses one of my inventions.
A long time ago, I told my wife that I had a killer idea spawned from a lifetime of shoveling snow in the Midwest. When pouring a driveway, you should immerse low-current heating coils into the concrete or asphalt to melt snow as it fell. Did I act on it? Of course not.
A few years later, as Bill and Melinda Gates built their estate on Lake Washington in Seattle, I read that he was employing just such a technology.
I didn't learn my lesson then, and only a couple years ago, I had another "thought invention" that I never put into practice. This one was a search engine that used your PC's microphone and allowed you to hum a song whose name you couldn't remember. Scanning patterns and frequency ratios, it would match your humming and tell you (assuming you're not tone-deaf) what song you were thinking of.
Well, a few days ago, Dr. Watlington via Search Engine Watch informed me I'd been scooped again. Midomi is the exact engine I had envisioned.
Currently on a crusade to put a name to the tune of several easy-listening hits I remember from my childhood, I decided to give it a try. All you need to do is give Midomi's Flash interface "permission" to use your computer's microphone (and camera, if you want to give them a visual record of your making a fool of yourself).
In ten seconds, I'd hummed a few bars, and ZING -- out popped "Love is Blue" -- including a link to purchase Al Martino's version, as well as links to other users' versions of this song.
Midomi's methodology is intriguing. The engine doesn't compare my humming with the actual professionally recorded songs. It compares my humming with the humming or singing of other users who actually knew what song they were humming or singing. So this way, the engine doesn't have to compete with professional background music or vocals of the studio tracks when it looks for a match.
I plan to follow up this post with some thoughts about how Apple is missing out on some significant search traffic. But for now, I'll ask Apple: Why haven't you bought this engine yet and integrated it into iTunes?