The above video is one of the most beautiful pieces of classical music that I have ever heard.  It is also one of the most fascinating recent experiments with music and technology.  Eric Whitacre posted a video of himself on YouTube conducting the piece in silence, and then invited people to upload a video of themselves singing to the music. The answer was 185 voices, which he arranged into a “Virtual Choir”.  The results speaks for themselves and it is phenomenal.

New technologies allow for the better or more efficient process - essentially, doing something better.  That, at best, is lame.  The winners will be those who harness these new tools to change the rules of the game completely.

Who said that a choir has to meet in a bricks-and-mortar facility?  The new rules dictate that practising choir is no longer an issue of physical proximity but of clustering around passion.  This key of clustering around passion is the new reality for any organisation, in any field.

The video shown above is getting quite a lot of traction on the internet lately.  It shows a father-son project to send an iPhone into Space.  For real.  New technologies are making things possible that we only dreamed about a few years ago!  Yes you can have your own space program as a hobby. When we use technology to do things better we are only reforming existing possibilities - when we use technology to do new things, we are expanding horizons. 

Dear friend, dream it up, go do it and do not stop until it's done!  As someone once said,”It is OK to fail – It is not OK to quit!”

photo credit: Andrew* I have been seeing imaginative and creative ways of using technologies lately. Rather than being threatened by new technologies, Scott Hodge, Lead Pastor at The Orchard embraces technology both to galvanize his faith community, and also during their actual services. I was really impressed when they follow-through a teaching on rhythms of prayer with an experiment using Twitter where their church members were encouraged to sign-up on Twitter and then follow their church Tweets. Then as part of this exercise they would post tweets periodically that would prompt their church to stop what they were doing a few times a day and just pray. This was a throwback to monastic practices of fixed-hour prayer and according to Scott Hodge it seems to have gone down really well with their congregation. Another example of The Orchard being really creative with technology is in their use of SMS during church services. They held a Q&A session recently that encouraged people to txt their questions with the use of Jarbyco - they found that people would readily txt questions that they would never ask by raising a hand in public. That's awesome!!!! Also from Scott's bog comes this video about a really cool way to capitalize on Twitter by Kogi, a Korean BQ Taco truck in L.A. - check it out: