Dan Kantor

It’s that time of the year again. As always, I stress all year trying to determine the ranked order of every new album I listen to. It’s truly a labor of love. I used to post the list here on Tumblr but last year I decided to move it to my main website. You can check it out here - http://dankantor.com/music.html (along with each list going back to 2008).

One observation I made this year (while listening to some music in Seattle with my friend Pete) was that when an album comes out by an artist with an older album previously on a top 10 list of mine, I subconsciously start the new album at the old album’s position. It’s theirs to lose. 

This year, Jamaican Queens came out with a new album. Their last album was my #1 in 2013. So this new album had the top spot this year assuming it was great and no other album was better. And that was indeed the case. It’s the first time an artist has had 2 #1 albums ever for me. 

Another stat is there were only 2 albums this year by artists that never made a previous top 10 list of mine - Unknown Mortal Orchestra and Tanlines. I’ve known Unknown Mortal Orchestra for a while (they played an Exfm show of ours in 2012) but they never made a top 10 list of mine. That changed this year with a strong #3 showing. 

As most of you know, I left Rhapsody over the summer and joined a startup called Clarifai. We specialize in visual recognition using artificial intelligence. It’s the sort of technology that you have to see to believe. It definitely feels like magic.

Up until today, our product offering was an API for developers and companies to who want to integrate our technology into their own systems. You can see this in action on our website using our demo: 

I’m very proud to announce that today we have a second product offering and our first for consumers. It’s a new iPhone app called Forevery. You can get it in the App Store here - http://apple.co/1HAysKW

Forevery automatically organizes all the photos on your phone. It recognizes people, places, emotions, times and more. It then allows you to browse or search and quickly find the photo you are looking for. 

Here’s that same photo. Check out how I searched for it and found it on my phone:

If I click into the photo I can see tags, locations and even people:

Summer Camp (11)

Unknown Mortal Orchestra (9)

Summer Fiction (9)

Active Child (3)

Malka (10)

Weed (2)

Unknown Mortal Orchestra (2)

Moonbabies (1)

Summer Camp (10)

Unknown Mortal Orchestra (6)

Tomorrow We Move To Hawaii (2)

Palma Violets (2)

Daft Punk (12)

Spoon (11)

The Helio Sequence (11)

The Killers (11)

My Morning Jacket (24)

Surfer Blood (23)

White Birches (7)

Mac DeMarco (6)

My Morning Jacket (24)

Angus & Julia Stone (14)

TV on the Radio (13)

Metronomy (13)

Reptar (17)

The Drums (14)

Mr. Gnome (14)

Caged Animals (14)

Reptar (23)

Bop English (15)

Death Cab for Cutie (11)

Boxed In (11)

Boxed In (27)

Lower Dens (13)

Bedroom (11)

Dave Matthews Band (10)

Boxed In (27)

Lower Dens (13)

Bedroom (11)

Dave Matthews Band (10)