One of my all-time favourite mobile apps is Shazam’s music ID service. You here some music in a public place and don’t know the song. No problem. Dial 2580, point the phone towards the music source and then wait. About 20 seconds later, they send a text message identifying the song and the artist. It almost always works. There’s something so satisfying about the service working as well as it does. To be honest, when I first heard about Shazam, I thought it would be like early voice-recognition on Windoze - giving me ‘fart long’ where I said ‘far along” and so on.

Incidentally - or not - one of the clever things that Shazam did was to get the short code 2580, which is the four numeric keys down the middle of the keypad. That’s how I remembered the number and consequently knew how to use the service, which also impressed my kids no end. As a family, we’ve used it numerous times whilst out and about and then downloaded the track from iTunes. I wish that Apple would team up with Shazam to make this more automatic. It means we can all enjoy their Starbuck’s music service no matter where we are.

Shazam works by finger-printing music, which means extracting a signature that can be easily and uniquely identified from a relatively short piece of the song. But, what if we turn this technology on its head and we use an already known sound clip to trigger a unique signature in the network? This is seemingly what TagAttitude has done, one of the winners of a GSMA Mobile Innovation Award at WMC 2008.

It is interesting that its inventors are pitching it as a contactless technology, competing directly with NFC. For example, you could walk up to a vending machine and make an order. The machine tells you to dial the number and then place the phone next to the speaker that squirts out the known sound clip. Of course, these aren’t extracts from the latest Linkin Park song. The sound clips isn’t music. It’s some kind of modulated tonal mixture to audibly encode the fingerprint. No doubt this encoding is where the IPR lies.

Why not use texting, you might ask. After all, this was the original method of mobile payment at vending machines throughout Scandinavia many years ago. Texting requires manual entry, which is prone to mistakes. But, more importantly, the information in a text can be falsified. Presumably, the sound clip can’t, although I’m not sure of the ramifications of replay attacks and number spoofing (which, admittedly, is a lot easier with a text messsage).

I’m sceptical that this will compete head on with NFC, except in certain niche cases. NFC is coming anyway and is a more robust solution to contactless payment etc.

I think that there are numerous other interesting apps for this sort of technology, but it remains to be seen how reliable the technology is, which will affect adoption. In terms of usability, then it doesn’t seem overly burdensome to ask a user to dial a number and point their phone. However, never underestimate the reluctance of a user to do something which they find odd or inexplicable, which might be a first initial reaction. Sure, users can become used to new ways of doing things, but then we have to consider that more convenient new ways of doing things will continue to enter the market. By the time users warm to call-and-point, NFC or other contactless technologies might be ready.

See also technologies like Cronto, which use the camera. This too could potentially work with existing 3G phones in a call-and-point fashion, if it were made to work over video.

Technorati Tags: Shazam, TagAttitude, Mobile Innovation, mobile payment, vending, NFC, contactless payment, Cronto