Music fans are increasingly watching live concerts without gassing up cars, driving to venues, or paying for expensive tickets and convenience fees. Music webcasting has shown promise for over a decade, but the stage is being set now for an online live-music renaissance.

YouTube webcast its first-ever live full-length concert 1^st November 2009 : U2 at the Pasadena Rose Bowl. It brought in 10 million viewers worldwide in addition to the 100,000 who attended in person. A spokesman said that makes it the biggest event in the site’s history.

Billboard followed suit with the launch of Billboard Live. Sony has big plans to beam shows to its movie theaters over satellite, and interactive features are bringing online viewers closer to the mix, and sometimes into the mix.

Live music and digital music are opposite sides of the same coin. People listen to digital music alone, while concerts are about physical proximity to musicians and the crowd. Developers are finding a new middle or common ground, although it took a little longer than some of us thought.

Live Concert Webcasting

The audience for live online music has grown substantially since the Tibetan Freedom Concert drew 36,000 viewers in 1996. Live-music webcasting director Marc Scarpa, who helped stream the Tibetan Freedom Festival and co-created of the MySpace Live series, says the internet will soon realize its live music potential.

A Google spokesman said YouTube, which also streamed short live performances from the Outside Lands Music and Arts Festival in late August, plans to webcast more full-length shows like the live U2 concert on a case-by-case basis.

But Billboard launched an ongoing concert series, Billboard Live, with a live R. Kelly show from Dallas that let fans choose between four high-bandwidth Microsoft Silverlight streams using partner OWLive’s technology. IPhone users watched the show in near-real time through an app using iStreamPlanet’s first-ever bandwidth-adaptive HTTP stream of live music to a phone. Billboard plans to do the same for shows by David Archuleta, Daughtry, Alicia Keys, Usher and others.

Limatitions

Don’t expect to be able to watch any show you please. Licensing issues delay rollout on the scale of the music video. There’s no standard deal for getting the rights to stream a live show. Each one-off production requires extensive negotiation involving just about everyone attached to the songs and the venue

Live Concert Interaction

The next step is for fans viewing a concert remotely to interact with a show within the venue, putting messages on the stage or even sounds in the speakers.

Deep Rock Drive has been experimenting with letting bands play between massive monitors that show online fans’ reaction to the music in real time, and said it might let fans at home cheer between songs using their own microphones. The payoff for interacting with actual venues rather than that company’s cyberstage is potentially even bigger.

Current implementations let online viewers vote on set lists, appear in the webcast if chosen to be a host, and send in videos of themselves watching the show. “If Linkin Park is your favorite band in the world, you send in a video [of yourself talking about the show and] after the performance is over we can have a couple of these real-time video comments included in the show.”

In addition to the six to 10 cameras that shoot webcast concerts, Scarpa has been experimenting with pulling live video from showgoers’ cellphones and incorporating that into the webcast, and he plans to let the remote audience collaborate musically with bands, contributing riffs or mixes that play over the venue’s sound system.

‘Live’ Music in Movie Theaters, Living Rooms

Sony Club Dates strikes a happy medium between the solitary experience of watching a show on your computer screen and the experience of attending it in person, by piping live or prerecorded shows directly to movie-theater screens. Fans watch them together in a surround-sound environment that does the music a lot more justice than your desktop computer speakers do, and at a much higher bandwidth. Tickets cost $10 to $15.

At this point, Sony has experimented with one live and some taped concerts, but once this pilot program is complete, the company plans to beam live shows to theaters by satellite, selling tickets and sponsorships.

Sony’s first such event featured an Aug. 20 Third Eye Blind show viewers could watch in theaters Oct. 22. Up next is Creed, who will appear “live” in some of Sony’s 4,000 theaters nationwide TODAY.

Once the program is up and running, Fidler told us, Sony will deliver the shows in high-definition directly to its Bravia line connected televisions, the company’s Blu-Ray players and possibly the Sony PlayStation. He said the concerts are “exclusive to Sony from the theatrical release to this video-on-demand program on the Bravia network.”

Just-in-Time Live Recordings Sold at Shows and Online

Showgoers can buy professionally recorded concerts as they exit a venue on USB stick, CD, DVD or as a digital delivery. While by no means the first, EMI launched a major initiative in this area Wednesday: Abbey Road Live, which builds on the legacy of Live Here Now, which was launched by EMI’s Mute Records label in 2004, and forms the core of EMI’s nearly-real-time live music sales program.

Also, consumers may no longer have to go through the tedious task of sifting through millions of songs to find a band or songs which they may like. With sites like Last.fm, consumers can easily find out about a band, check out artists similar to their favourite singer, and know what are the top songs which are recommended by other users. This helps consumers to make an informed choice before purchasing a song or album. (Prevents consumers from buying an album or song, and end up not liking it, wasting their time and money)

Other then exposing me to tremendous amounts of violence as a young boy, it did do me at least one good. Acceptance of Augmented reality. Why you might ask? Simple these shows, although some in the late 80s were way ahead of there time. Transformers had robots even before the microsoft office( reminder for those who bought in school go go collect it), Centurian show that people could sync up with computers before the first mobile computer was build and pokemon and digimon brought it to a whole new level. Augmented reality

Remember the good o’ Pokedex,

Now this is where augmented reailty is headed. Point and the person with a device and TADA! All you need to know about the person is there. This will be a great addition in times like this where security its priority, all the cops or guards have to do is point the device at you and he will know all your legal records. Seems a fit far fetched? Not true! All they need is a device that works like the microchip planted in pets to be either in humans or simply placed in a card form like the IC. This also allows picture identification of criminals on the lose. Highly possible! It will be like crime watch on the go. And with face detection currently available in all new mac books world wide (get one at your nearest local dealer now) it will make it even easier to spot the person.

LCD TV market is getting huge now due to prices always dropping. This has allowed various technologies to be worked with such as virtual mirrors. These tend to be mirrors that hang on your wall, and also have a screen built in. When the screen it switched on the surface is no longer reflecting an image of you, but is showing a video.

Using this idea, a store in New York decided that clothes can be tried on by facing a mirror and displaying the clothes on screen. Where the clothes are not, you can see your reflection as though you are wearing the clothes. To add to this, a picture is then taken, emailed to friends and family and an opinion can be gained as to weather you buy the item of clothing or not.

Seems like an interesting idea and might help speed up things for those who get bored waiting for their wives to try on everything in a store.

Pardon the Dick Tracy style narration. But I mean come on ? 8am lecture, my archenemy, the joker to my batman, the vader to my luke, the tom to my jerry, you get the picture. But I know I had to… it was not my choice to make.

The least I could to was to head over to the serpent’s pit (lt17b), armed with a creative vado( incase I miss anything) and my trusty unibody mac, with a smile.

The fruitful 8am lect

But hey I got to give the devil its due( don’t worry ms kwa and Pat, its not you, ITS 8AM”) it was a fruitful one. Although I missed the occasional parts of the talk because I had to upload the vado to my computer as there was not enough memory, (CREATIVE if you reading this, EXPAND YOUR MEMORY!), I manage to take away what was worth more then an hours sleep and the treacherous, merciless journey I had to take every day, M….R….T!

What really impacted me was the fact that if some one really wanted, he or she could obtain anything they wanted about me, credit card number, mobile number, IC number,photos of me and my pet. Ok fine the last one I gladly give but hey u get my drift.

Are we progressing in to a Surveillance Society, where big brother can track or every step and our every move. Are the “little birds” on the streets lamps just admiring traffic or are they stalking me. Or could they be used to stalk me. For those of you who don’t know, nearly every inch of orchard road is covered with a camera, (I have seen it trust me), from the old youth park to the streets of ion orchard to the back alley of plaza Singapura. Just pop by the summerset police station and take a look.

The other thing that was bugging me was whether or not social media was the next bubble tea, longkang fish or coffee bread, a fad. The adoption rate is too fast, unnatural in fact. This led me to do a little research on Facebook.

Here are some stats

Statistics

General Growth

More than 300 million active users

50% of our active users log on to Facebook in any given day

The fastest growing demographic is those 35 years old and older

User Engagement

Average user has 130 friends on the site

More than 8 billion minutes are spent on Facebook each day (worldwide)

More than 45 million status updates each day

More than 10 million users become fans of Pages each day

Applications

More than 2 billion photos uploaded to the site each month

More than 14 million videos uploaded each month

More than 2 billion pieces of content (web links, news stories, blog posts, notes, photos, etc.) shared each week

More than 3 million events created each month

More than 45 million active user groups exist on the site

International Growth

More than 70 translations available on the site

About 70% of Facebook users are outside the United States

Platform

More than one million developers and entrepreneurs from more than 180 countries

Every month, more than 70% of Facebook users engage with Platform applications

More than 350,000 active applications currently on Facebook Platform

More than 250 applications have more than one million monthly active users

More than 15,000 websites, devices and applications have implemented Facebook Connect since its general availability in December 2008

Mobile

There are more than 65 million active users currently accessing Facebook through their mobile devices.

People that use Facebook on their mobile devices are almost 50% more active on Facebook than non-mobile users.

There are more than 180 mobile operators in 60 countries working to deploy and promote Facebook mobile products

Face book is expanding so quickly I actually forgive them for having a laggy server once in a while.

Lets face it, not only is facebook here to stay it has change the way we live.

Growing up, I have always be hearing this trait of a business man going around and many business man around me believe it to be the bible truth. The trait is that business men have to be at the edge of anything that’s changing. Only when they are able to do so will they be able to bring in the dough.

I never understand the concept especially in this day and age. See lets do the math. Business man =30 to 40, successful businessman= business man + 10 years. 30 to 40+ 10 not = TRENDY!

However I was greatly proven wrong. At a net working event that I went to, ever one was all *“Suit Up”, every one was busy chatting and exchanging business cards. I thought to my self hey I must be in the right place every one seems to be bring their A-game with the suits and cards.

*a Barney Stinson reference for all you “How I Met Your Mum” fans out there

What surprised me was not this because, well come on I bet this was what you were thinking when I mentioned networking event. But you would not expect this. Guess where I found the “Big Boys”? on a set of couches behind their blackberries and iPhones. When my friend introduced me to them is was the first question. And I swear this is the honest truth. “Do you have a facebook account? Feel free to add me .”were the actual words from one of them.

Probing into the that intriguing question I soon realized that this is what they have been doing. Instead of giving a business card which people will eventually lose or destroy, facebook is the best alternative as it is permanent, easily updatable, and easily accessible any where any time with the insergence of mobile browsers

What does this mean?

Don’t be surprised that in a matter of about a year, every company and business man will have a facebook account and it might very well be the best way to network