Times Square Goes a Tweeting

This is the year when high tech hits the Times Square New Year’s Eve celebrations.

For the first time, viewers around the world will be able to access a 6 1/2-hour Web cast of the event and post comments about it on Twitter and Facebook.

The Web cast is being organized by The Times Square Alliance and Countdown Entertainment, co-organizers of the Times Square New Year’s Eve events. During the Web cast, five separate story lines will be streamed throughout the night, discussing the international participants, the history of Times Square as told through photos, the story behind the bloggers and other information. Viewers will be asked to post pictures from their own New Year’s Eve parties from around the world that will be included in the Web cast.

To see it all, viewers can go to TimesSquareNYC.org; Livestream.com/2010

Facebook users can easily add the widget to their profile’s by using our special Facebook APP here - http://apps.facebook.com/timessquare/

Viewers will also be able to access the webcast on their iPhones atiphone.livestream.com/2010.

And any site can embed the Times Square video player onto their own page.

LIVE WEBCAST/BLOGCAST

The Times Square 2010 Live Webcast/Blogcast will begin at 5:50pm on December 31st and end at 12:20am on January 1st. US

In addition, those watching the events will see a change to the famous New Year’s ball. It’s going all LED, all the time.

While the ball itself has been lit with LEDs since 2007, the lamps that light the four digits for the new year have used old technology, incandescent and halogen bulbs. This year, Royal Philips Electronics, Dutch electronics and lighting company, completed the transformation, weatherizing 545 of its AmbientLED long-neck LED reflector lamps and placing them inside the four numerals for 2010.

And now, the public can try the home version. Consumer-designed AmbientLED lamps are available at Home Depot for about $50.

The new LEDs use 9 watts of power each, compared to the 40 watts used by the regular lamps. The home version uses 11 watts to equal the light output of a standard 50 watt bulb. Both versions will last 25,000 hours, saving workmen (and homeowners) afraid of heights the task of having to make multiple trips to change bulbs.

Each of the ball’s 32,000 LED lamps can be individually controlled giving lighting designers the ability to create thousands of different effects and patterns. As with the Empire State Building, the ball is now used year round to commemorate different occasions, such as Valentine’s Day.

The red, green, and blue LEDs in the ball can also be programmed to create up to 16 million different colors. Given the state of many of the people that gather below the ball on New Year’s Eve, the number of those colors that can actually be discerned by the crowd may be up for grabs.

thanks to The New York Times: Gadgetwise:  Times Square Goes a Tweeting By ERIC A. TAUB

and Time Square Alliance: Times Square New Years Eve – 2010