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U2 Uses IT To Change The Live Concert Experience--And Support the One Campaign

Anyone who's been to a rock concert lately knows that the old days of holding up lighters during ballads has been replaced by the more modern, high-tech glow of the cell phone. But the Irish band U2 has taken mobile communications to a whole other level--and for a great cause.

Anyone who has seen a show on the Vertigo tour knows what I’m talking about. When the band begins its popular song, "One," lead singer Bono asks everyone in the crowd who wants to help put an end to AIDS and extreme poverty to text message their name to a number listed on a large video screen--86483--which translates to the word “Unite.” The names are being collected in an electronic version of a clipboard for the One Campaign. The goal is to collect at least 1 million names of U.S. residents in an effort to convince the federal government to dedicate 1% of the U.S. budget toward “basic needs--education, health, clean water, food, and care for orphans.” Such a move “would transform the futures and hopes of an entire generation in the poorest countries,” according to the One Campaign Web site. By the end of the song, many of the names of fans in the audience are displayed on the screen. By the next business day, everyone who sends a text message gets a response from Bono inviting them to learn more about the One Campaign. Already, more than 650,000 fans have participated.

So what’s the technology behind the electronic clipboard? In mid-February, Dan Malks and a team at Sun Microsystems, the corporate sponsor, began work on a system that could handle the job--something that would be technically feasible, meet the creative wishes of Bono and his PR team, and, by the way, be completed in three weeks.

Needless to say, Malks didn’t get a lot of sleep, but the resulting system not only represents the power and flexibility of a service-oriented architecture, but it also, I believe, reveals an early look at how text messaging will be used to build communities and to facilitate collaboration. It is an example of how real-time, event-driven systems can be utilized for a business process.

The system runs on Solaris 10 using AMD Opteron chips. The software is written in Java. It required provisioning across all major mobile carriers (a process that can usually take many weeks for just a single carrier). Once fans send the text message from their phone through their carrier, it goes to an aggregation service in Singapore and then to a visualization server in California via a Web-service call using XML and Java APIs. The data goes through a series of automated filters and semantic validation and is ready to display in less than 10 seconds.

The same type of architectural approach--a loosely coupled system that utilizes Web-service calls and software patterns--could be used for any number of business applications as implementation strategies evolve, Malks says.

Now, I’m sure you don’t attend concerts and wonder what kind of technology is powering them, but increasingly, we’ll be able to not only enjoy our favorite bands but have new ways to communicate with them, support some phenomenal causes, and more. And you may find that similar kinds of systems and architectures can also help you build a community or distribute applications among your customers.

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