If you were one of the thousands of Seattleites who were part of the festivities at Qwest Field on Saturday to experience the transcendent U2 360 concert, including Commander Mark E. Kelly, husband of Gabrielle Giffords, who composed his special greeting during his 16-day mission with the Space Shuttle Endeavour crew, your attendance was duly noted. Among the many videos produced were HD quality, fully-immersive 360 panoramas that seemed to capture everyone in attendance in sharp high-resolution detail.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Mdx4fyMVKHY
http://www.youtube.com/watch?feature=player_embedded&v=35VAvTAFGzA
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rrTG7Fte9FY
Talk about mobile networking, 120 trucks brought the 3 gargantuan sets to Qwest Field. The mega-tour’s cylindrical video screen weighed in at 54 tons and is 14,000 square feet when opened — as big as two double tennis courts.What’s more, the video screen is made up of more than 1 million pieces. That translates into 500,000 pixels, 320,000 fasteners, 30,000 cables and 150,000 machined pieces. Compare that to your average Jumbo-tron, or toaster!
Many Seattle fans had waited up to two years to see U2 in Seattle. When the band played the old Kingdome in 1997, lead singer Bono expressed doubts that the band would ever be able to launch another stadium tour because of the expense and logistics. But U2 is now the top dog of touring bands, breaking records each year. The 360 Degree Tour is now the highest-grossing tour in history, blowing past the Rolling Stones’ Bigger Bang trek.
The hit song “Beautiful Day” had its introduction with Bono dedicating the song to both U.S. Representative Gabrielle Giffords and also to her husband Endeavor commander Mark Kelly who is “looking down on us from 200 miles up.”
Gabrielle Giffords is the Arizona Congresswoman who is still recovering from an assassination attempt in January. Giffords’ husband, the Endeavour commander, recorded himself in a video while he was in the International Space Station at that time with the message in cardboard letter cutouts floating in zero gravity “7 billion, one nation. Imagination. It’s a beautiful day.” He also said that he can’t wait to go home and tell his wife he loves her.
U2 star Bono also took the occasion to thank Bill and Melinda Gates in front of the crowd of 70,000.
“Bill & Melinda are a couple who have changed the world. And they have changed my life, and I just want to give it up to them. The Gates Foundation, Bill and Melinda,” said Bono to cheers from the crowd. “They are not just changing lives, they are transforming lives.”
Bono jokingly added: “Thanks for your passion, your brain power and your cash, actually.” [24×7]
Bing Creates a Social Search “Bang” at Seattle SMX Search Conference
It was but two short years ago that Microsoft turned the night sky around the Seattle Space Needle purple and first flew the BING search engine flag high above the Emerald City from the top of the Needle. Of course, at that time, no one knew the name of the upstart search engine that was replacing MSN and “Live Search” for Microsoft. So much has happened since! A search merger with Yahoo! and deals with Facebook among them.
Last week, BING announced a new set of tools, code named Honey Badger, for Bing’s Webmaster Center as well as support of the new, industry-wide Schema.org initiative which will standardize “structured database data” for the search engines. Schema.org offers a collection of tags marketers can use to improve the info search engines (plural!) have about their pages.
Bing search director Stefan Weitz said 5 exabytes of social data are uploaded to the web every couple of days and 4.8 billion results are available for any given search query. The impetus for this Social Search? Commenting on the engine’s relationship with Facebook, Weitz said: “Ninety percent of people consult friends and family while they’re making purchase decisions,” but this doesn’t change the fact that it’s hard to access this info on the web. Social sites aren’t research-oriented, and, traditionally, search engines haven’t offered social data, he said.
The Bing Business Portal also launched last week and was announced at the Bell Harbor symposium. With the Business Portal, small business owners, who may not have a Web presence at all otherwise, will be able to manage their presence on Bing, providing location and contact information, and even offering up bargain hunting deals to those who find them on Bing. [24×7]
