Rants And Ramblings About Mobile Technology

I added a few photos to Flickr, just to show I was there. They have no other qualities.

Dream Theater

Finally I’ve seen Dream Theater live, and it was very good (read: f****ng great!!!!!). I’ve seen them on DVDs before, and this was in my opinion en par with the best recorded shows. James’ voice didn’t crack up either, so it was all fun and games. They played a gamut of songs from most of their albums. Even songs from theme albums worked well on their own.

They are all very talented musicians, so nothing went wrong in the performance department. They also kept reasonable contact with the audience. They don’t need any gimmicks to pull off a good show (I was afraid the gargoyles beside the scene were theirs, but they were actually for Heaven & Hell).

Parts of the audience chanted each and every song. They played one song from their upcoming album (out end of June) Dark Clouds and Silver Linings: A Rite of Passage. The audience even sang the lyrics to that one. That’s impressive, until I found it’s already out and about on the Web.

The 1.5 hours were over in no time. I wish there had been more of it.

They will play at Hovet in Stockholm during September. See here for the full tour schedule.

Europe

Europe, the Swedish band from the 80’s, has been playing together again for a couple of years, and did quite well at SRF. Seeing them after Dream Theater was probably a bit unfair, but I enjoyed it all the same. I saw them live in 1986, and their confidence was at least 100 times better now.

Continuing mobile distress

Another day of some to no coverage. This is actually unusual for Sweden, as there’s supposed to be coverage even in the mountains of northern Sweden, so it was probably mainly due to overload. I’m sure most took the chance to call between the shows. Calling during shows was impossible, even when standing far away.

I sent an SMS to get the festival programme, but the response SMS never came back.

Some advice to future mobile service providers participating in shows like this:

• Make it much more apparent that there are such services. I’m pretty sure no one used the festival programme service, as it was only shown for a few seconds on a very long info rotator on a big screen.
• Provide services that are more disruptive and interesting, like getting backstage passes, voting for the best band or whatnot, not just information that could easier and better be obtained on paper. An information site with links to more information about the artists might be fine, but clearly people are not there to surf the Internet.
• Make it very clear how much the services cost, so there’s no question about that.
• Partner with operators to get better mobile “power” during the festival days. Operators can do that, provided they know beforehand. The SRF organizers should have secured this of course, not individual service providers.

Posted by Anders Borg 10:48 | Permalink