Myself and my brother built a prototype of a very similar wristband last year, completely independent of these and without knowing about them (we built ours in

Myself and my brother built a prototype of a very similar wristband last year, completely independent of these and without knowing about them (we built ours in the summer, we first saw Coldplay's in autumn). At first we were pretty dismayed and annoyed to see that somebody had patented the concept (we never looked into exactly what the patent covers), though one of the guys we were working with has connections in the Coldplay management team and assured us its fine for us to continue. But then we thought about it some more and realised that we didn't need to, that the coldplay wristbands have some flaws (for what we wanted to do with them) that we can better tackle in other ways. Our goals are very different from Coldplays anyway - they seem to be using their wristbands more to make the DVD look awesome than to please the crowd present (though theres obviously some of that too). Our goal was always interactivity and engaging the crowd in more direct ways. So we cooked up a similar concept which is not only more suited to interacting with the crowd, but also less expensive to produce. So win-win. The wristbands are cool and maybe we'll still do something with that (depending on the patents of course - the Xylobands don't really do exactly what we want, so we'd probably want to build our own anyway) but we did the startup thing and pivoted and came up with something better (for our purposes). The laptop would be connected by cable to a transmitter box and antenna. These are supplied by us on a free rental basis with a £500 refundable deposit. Our own transmitter cost us about US$20 to build. Sure, it could only be controlled by USB-MIDI (while afaik theirs supports stuff like DMX), but meh, it wouldn't require a £500 deposit. In any case, I'm now repositioning myself as more of a backseat tech consultant for this project rather than hands on engineer as I'm working on an unrelated startup and don't have time to stay involved in the day to day building of audio/visual gadgets, so over the next few weeks I hope to finish off a few more prototype devices and then leave the production up to someone who has a better idea what their doing.