The Digital Campfire at Outside Lands

At Microsoft, there is a lady by the name of Laura User and she has the job title “Digital innovation manager” and she gets to do some pretty cool stuff. The most recent being something called CrowdFire. The idea is basically this: integrate social networking and technology into a music concert, add the fans and stick the whole thing in a tent. What you get is a central place where concert goers can share photos and videos via social networks, see highlights of the concert, get to the front of the stage without actually being there thanks to live streaming. If that wasn’t enough, Rock God wannabes can try their hand at Rock Band!

Connecting the dots for you, the name CrowdFire comes from the concept of having a “digital campfire” built by the crowd in the middle of the concert. The results of this first effort at San Francisco’s Outside Lands music festival showed that around 100,000 concert goers decided to get involved with the resulting content streamed to TV screens around the concert an online

MyTake – What a great job to have, I think I have to add the word innovation to my job title. This kind of activity just goes to show that social networking is integrated into most of our lives, even areas that we wouldn’t have thought it would be. What was that quote from that movie…"If you build it they will come”…. Well, that’s pretty much what happened, people wanted the facilities and Microsoft gave it to them. I think we are going to be seeing more initiatives like this, but where next – live sport?