Carlos Slim Helu, the world's second richest person, invested US$40 million in Shazam. Carlos Slim Helu is the owner of America Movil, the biggest wireless carrier network in Latin America. Conversely, Shazam is a mobile audio app company, concentrating on voice recognition.
The voice recognition app of Shazam helped its users to identify songs they have heard but do not recognize the names. The corporation extended its business to television. Analysts said that with the funding from Carlos Slim Helu, Shazam would be able to compete with Apple and Google.
Shazam was developed with a sharing capability while Apple's Siri and Google voice search were just search softwares. Shazam's social sharing aspect surpassed Apple's Siri and Google voice search since they were more like personal assistant programs.
For the last 12 months, Shazam generated US$300 million from music sales. It owned a database of 30 million music tracks including TV shows. The number of its users was around 350 million. However, only 20% of the said users use the app each month.
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