These particular COWs and COLTs are being positioned around Detroit and Kansas City to flood their baseball stadiums with LTE capacity just as the Major League Baseball season peaks. It’s a sign Verizon’s new LTE network isn’t quite so new anymore. Verizon has now sold enough 4G smartphones, and those smartphones have begun consuming enough bandwidth that the carriers’ original high-capacity 4G network doesn’t have the juice to hold its own at crowded events.

I’m not saying Verizon’s LTE network is overcrowded. It’s using 20 MHz of spectrum to support 8 million LTE connections across the country. Its network has plenty of capacity to spare. But stadiums are special cases, packing tens of thousands of people into cramped spaces, many of whom are uploading videos and photos.

Concerts and sporting events will always push the limits of the mobile network, but what’s telling here is that Verizon is already deploying 4G COWs and COLTs at these events. It means its 4G network is already being tested: Current users are consuming more bandwidth than the handful of towers around these stadiums can pump out.

It’s at these stadiums where we’ll first witness the evolution of Verizon’s and other carriers’ networks. The COWs and COLTs will remain, but they will eventually be augmented with Wi-Fi and new network architectures designed to pack tremendous amounts of data capacity into confined spaces. Verizon has already started down that path by building distributed antennas systems (DAS) into stadiums. New LTE DAS systems just went live in Chicago’s Wrigley Field and in Miami’s Marlins Park.

DAS setups take the capacity of a single cell and distribute it among numerous antennas, allowing a carrier to shape cellular coverage within or around buildings rather than just blast bandwidth out from up on high. Those DAS systems, however, will eventually give way to Verizon’s first small cells. Instead of distributing a single base station’s capacity among numerous antennae, a picocell or a microcell will deliver the entire base station’s bandwidth at a single location.

Then those small cells will move outside to the stadium’s outdoor seating areas and its environs, transmitting directly underneath the macro network umbrella. At that stage, all of those disparate technologies will coagulate into the amorphous mass of the heterogeneous network. At any given location our devices will have multiple options in connecting to the network, and hopefully bandwidth won’t be such a limited — or expensive — commodity.

Mobile networks are evolving, and if you want to see that evolution firsthand, you should start going to more baseball games.

Verizon cow image courtesy of Flickr user turtlemom4bacon

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The London-based site’s latest addition is a dashboard that allows bands and artists to promote their live dates across the internet with a single process, through a series of partnerships with other services like YouTube, Spotify and SoundCloud. Through a string of integrations with other music sites (Bandcamp, Foursquare and VEVO are also on the list), the site can push viewers, listeners, or readers towards their gigs and try to sell more tickets.

The service is already being used by a series of notable groups, after a beta period with prominent U.S. booking service The Windish Agency, which looks after dates for the likes of Universal Music and Domino records and artists including M83 and Soundgarden.

CEO Ian Hogarth, who recently raised $10 million in funding from Sequoia Capital, previously told me that he wants Songkick to be the “public company for live music fans”. Looks like this is one of the steps along the way.

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But the move also meant something else: it suddenly brought a great pressure to bear on the company. The business has so far made most of its money through affiliate deals, partnering with ticket sales companies and taking a small slice of the price. But with a total of $17 million raised, the question of how Songkick lives up to that price tag quickly became a talking point.

Over at Digital Music News, Paul Resnikoff made some strong points about what the money could mean to Songkick. The chances are that it’s now probably too big to buy, he argued — at least at a price that will make investors happy.

Songkick could easily join the class of overvalued, hard-to-sell startups in music right now.  Startups like Next Big Sound and Topspin, for example, both of whom are sizzling on the sexiness scale, but difficult to properly monetize, scale, and sell at the kinds of multiples that investors demand.

In addition, he made the point that Songkick’s bigger concern may be that the company’s most important partner and its most obvious acquirer, ticketing giant Live Nation, has been experimenting with its own Labs team. Their experimental work appears to be aimed, in part, at providing some direct competition to Songkick — something that could be extremely dangerous.

Speaking to CEO Ian Hogarth today, he told me that the pressure to find an exit was something the team thought about very, very carefully before taking the money.

“You don’t sign your name at the bottom of the funding documents without thinking that through,” he says. “We weren’t raising money… we weren’t close to running out of money or needing to raise more.”

Instead, he says, there was a meeting of minds when he had a casual meeting with Sequoia’s Greg McAdoo and Mike Moritz. If Songkick would eventually want to raise more money (which it did) it made sense to do it with a partner that felt enthusiastic about the opportunity. And, says Hogarth, they saw huge potential in the company because its concert-finding products are just the first part of a long-term strategy to become one of the biggest music services on the web.

So what does that strategy entail? Will it be focused on growth before revenue, like Twitter or Instagram? Or will it need to find a major revenue strategy to make the business highly profitable?

“They’re one and the same thing,” he tells me. “It’s really important to focus on the bottom line, because that’s a great test of how you’re really doing in the market — but you have to do it right, and that involves growth. We’ve had the chance to plaster the site with ads… but that doesn’t put any money in the pockets of artists and venues.”

He alludes to Live Nation’s recent work and admits that the vested interests inside the music business can make it hard, but that the company is betting that there’s more to be done than simply taking a cut of ticket sales.

“The sales affiliate model is a good scoreboard,” he says. “But the challenge is finding out how the relationship with transaction providers evolves. Some ticketing services have launched things that look a lot like Songkick, but our intention is to be a great neutral platform for everyone — whether you’re a small artist hitting the road for the first time, or a giant ticketing company.”

Although he skirts around precisely what that “neutral platform” will entail, it sounds like he sees Songkick as something far broader than just a database of gigs.

In fact, it could be something much more like a communication service for musicians — something that connects artists and fans, lets them interact, buy and sell music and merchandise, and helps them share not only the experience of going to gigs but also the memories of having been. That may sound a little familiar — MySpace, of course, built its public image on the relationship between musicians and their fans — but Hogarth says there is much more to be done.

So is the target to make Songkick big enough and healthy enough that it can’t easily be ignored, or circumvented?

“Yeah, but I don’t really think about it like that,” he says.

His gamble is that the reward for becoming the major online player in concerts could be significant. After all, the live music industry was worth around $23.5 billion last year — up from $16 billion in 2006.

“The way I think about it, there’s a public company in live music, Ticketmaster, and their primary partners are venues,” he says. “There should be a public company that represents fans. We want to build that company, and really that’s the end goal that we’re driving towards.”

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Aggregating user-submitted videos

For bands and show promoters who want to leverage those videos to engage with their audiences and show fans what it’s like to be at one of their concerts, Veokami offers tools for finding, adding and automatically sorting through and formatting different moments of an event. The platform crawls YouTube looking for videos of a specific event, or users can submit videos that they’ve found. Veokami then arranges the clips based on when they took place during the event, as well as a number of factors, such as audio and video quality.

The end result is an event video page that includes clips from many different videos and camera angles, allowing viewers to skip around and see a show from multiple perspectives. The platform syncs up audio tracks, which lets the viewer watch a continuous stream of user-contributed content by automatically switching between videos whenever one of them ends. Viewers can also flip through various videos in a timeline view.

For an example of how it works, check out this page for Morgan Page’s show at the Avalon in Hollywood, which was part of his “In the Air” tour.

Getting fans pumped before the show

While artists could just go back and create video pages for past events, Veokami can also be used as a promotional tool for events that are upcoming. To make maximum use of the technology, Veokami founder and CEO Brett Welch said artists and show producers should let fans know that not only can they record video at the show, but that it’s encouraged.

“When you tell people before the gig, they record more and they upload more,” Welch said.

As a result of that messaging, Welch said the Veokami team found bout five times as many videos for the Hollywood show as it normally sees for events from similar artists. That volume of content enabled Veokami to surface some pretty high-quality video, and to ensure a continuous stream of the entire show. The goal is to have more breadth — that is, more overall coverage of the show — than depth, or number of videos to choose from for any given moment.

The result is a deeper engagement with fans, who no longer have to search for moments from a show and therefore end up watching longer. Welch said that in the startup’s early tests, viewers tend to stick around for 25 minutes or more per event page, and typically click through about 3.5 different camera angles per sitting. Fans can also share particular moments from an event with their friends, through connections with Facebook and Twitter.

Expanding tools for and artists and super-fans

While today Veokami is now doing much of the curation for videos itself, the goal is to extend its platform so that artists, promoters and — most importantly — fans will be able to build these pages themselves. That could end up being a very powerful promotional tool for artists as they look to show listeners what it’s like to be at one of their shows. Next up, Veokami will be used for a concert by rock band Switchfoot in Phoenix this Friday. That band has more than 165,000 followers on Twitter and 1.5 million Facebook fans.

Veokami has three full-time employees (and one intern) and is currently based in Mountain View, Calif. and is part of the third batch of 500 Startups Accelerator program. In addition to some seed money from 500 Startups, it has also received a small bit of funding from Tenacity Worx.

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