Streaming, Texting and the Obama Inauguration

There you have it. The 44th and first African American President of the United States of America has been sworn in. So, without starting a political debate, lets talk about the technology that helped millions of people around the world watch history in the making.

Yesterday we discussed how the cellphone networks were doing everything they could to make sure everyone (especially those in Washington) could still make calls, send pictures, video and text messages, as well as update their Twitter, upload photos to the web and email like there’s no tomorrow while the ceremony was going on.

So how did it go? We want to hear all about your cell phone experiences over the last hour or so. Also, don’t forget to let us know who your carrier is. AT&T spent $4 million on making sure its 3G and 2G services were up to scratch and Sprint and Verizon made a lot of extra effort too with trucks on the ground to provide extra coverage, so if it wasn’t up to scratch, name ‘em and shame ‘em, boys.

Also how did you guys find the streaming? We assumed it would be fine but it seems the lads in our Culver City office had a bit of trouble; they missed the swearing in all together. Our Director of News Operations, Tuan Nguyen, sent a message just afterward and said that Hulu, CNN, Fox and Ustream were all impossibly slow and that he missed about 99 percent of the inauguration. Ouch. Gotta love working remotely, halfway around the world.

If you uploaded pics, tweeted, texted, emailed, called, watched or listened, we want to hear it. Leave your thoughts below. Again, we'd like to reiterate the political debate thing: there's a time and a place, and we're interested in tech at this time, in this place.