Mario Mansour Blog

It’s been hyped for the last 15 hours all over the internet about Justin Bieber song U Smile getting slowed down 800% resulting in a 35 min epic music. What’s the big deal?
Even Shamantis, the author of this music work, is not fascinated by what he did, not claiming “to be any sort of MY OWN talent resonating. All I did was put the song through Paulstretch. Anyone can do that” as he posted on soundcloud

and here’s the original version

The slowed down version went viral with over 500,000 plays in less than one day, but there are actually 2 other players in this story that got hyped even more.
Of course, Justin Beiber himself because it’s obvious that one would want to listen to the original song and since most people haven’t heard about it earlier so you can image the number of hits and searches.
The other player happens to be PaulStretch, the open source software which was used to create the slowed down version.
Here you can see the trend

Every year I wait April 1st to see what the team at Google have come up with ideas. PigeonRank, Google writer, Gmail paper, … were interesting and innovative and shows that Google puts efforts into creating April fools themes. This year, it was more like a disappointment.

Missing vowels from Gmail’s login page

Another prank was Google changing their name on the search engine to TOPEKA !

Now this one is more of political aspect than humor. Perhaps a Google response to “Think Big Topeka” and the huge campaign that the community of Topeka has started to attract Google’s attention to bring the 1 Gbit Fiber experiment.