APPLE GENIUS WORTH 8.4 BILLION: Guardian.co.uk’s charles ARTHUR

The author puts a keen focus on how we gave Apple enough information to make 8.4 billion seem fair.
Extremely sharp and incisive. I learned a lot.
I think Mr. Arthur is a bit too quick to be interpreting Steve’s algorithm at this point. I find that the program is genius in large part because while Steve Jobs and Apple™ know the tempo of every song to a frightening accuracy. Five seconds of silent thought will tell you the reasons Mr. Jobs will not fill in a BPM (beats per minute) column. To truly understand the tempo manipulation: you;d need to see the algorithm itself! So said, knowing the speeds of the songs I play on drums (it’s the drums or the treadmill – I’m doing the exercise thing), I find the program to be almost wildly genius. What’s wildly evil os that
1) Apple knows but will not divulge BPM;
2) Apple uses the tempo element of you collection on playlists made for you that are so good that when I play I do not even look at what is coming next as all has been satisfying in the extreme!
clipped from www.guardian.co.uk
Steve Jobs launches Apple Genius

Genius. It’s a word that Guinness seems to have abandoned in its advertising. So Apple, which can spot a vacuum as well as the next big company intent on world domination, has been quick to pick it up.

The “Genius” feature in the latest version of iTunes is getting a lot of attention: you pick a track in your iTunes library, and after a bit of munching away – and talking to Apple’s online servers at the iTunes Store – it will come up with a list of 25 or more tracks that it thinks “go with” the track you selected.

This feature is probably the most valuable piece of coding that any group of people has ever written. By my calculations it’s worth about $8.4 billion.

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