Before the countdown to Happy New Year in Times Square, there's a year of preparation by hundreds of people, including IT professionals who prep the star of the show: the Times Square Ball. Crunch time for the tech team starts in December as they lay HD fiber-optic cables from 42nd Street to 59th. The ball is a sphere of more than 32,000 LED light bulbs that can create more than 16 million colors and billions of patterns. Behind each LED node is a data cable that carries commands to switch colors or patterns from a computer controlled by Countdown Entertainment, which helps produce the event. Enthusiasts can follow news about the ball on a mobile app that displays the ball's Twitter feed and videos of Times Square events, including the live webcast of the celebration on New Year's Eve. "It's something we all grew up with, and there's nothing else like it at any other time of the year," says Jeff Straus, president of Countdown Entertainment. "Now, technology has made the event accessible to the entire world."
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