Singer & Arena Football team owner Jon Bon Jovi poses with Goofy Nov. 16, 2009 on the New York Street backlot set at Disney’s Hollywood Studios theme park. Bon Jovi and his band, who have sold more than 120 million records in a career that spans 26 years, have just released their newest album, “The Circle.” The group will begin a world concert tour in early 2010. (Photo courtesy Disney. Gene Duncan, photographer)

Today TouringPlans.com, the fine folks behind the Unofficial Guide to Walt Disney World, are launching a preview version of Lines, a mobile website for iPhone users that displays estimates of wait times for every attraction at Walt Disney World, in real time.

For the past 10 years they’ve been obsessively researching wait times at Walt Disney World, collecting and processing a massive amount of data along the way. Their products like Touring Plans and the Crowd Calendar help you efficiently tour the parks and avoid the crowds.

In Lines, it’s obvious they thought a lot about one’s experience while touring the parks: standing in Frontierland and want to know how long the line is at Space Mountain? Is Soarin’ really a ninety minute wait? Will there be FASTPASSes left at Toy Story Mania if we get there at noon?

Lines was built to solve these problems. There are many mobile applications doing wait times (Disney included), and accurate estimates are particularly challenging. TouringPlans has the unique dataset required to provide the most accurate estimates.

There is also a handy preview of what tomorrow will look like. I’d like to see this expanded in future editions.

To give it a test-drive, grab an iPhone our iPod Touch and navigate to http://m.touringplans.com (other mobile platforms are on the way). You’ll need a TouringPlans.com subscription (which is free) to use Lines during this preview.

The week is over. Time to circle the wagons and clear a few open tabs.

First, I was very happy to hear the Oh Amanda, who writes our LOST coverage here at The Disney Blog, has made it onto the Disney Mom’s panel. She totally deserves it. I know she’ll be great at answering everyone’s questions.

Disneyland Paris saw increased visits, but still lost money last year. Not a good sign for a company that is still carrying a lot of debt. Hopefully the improving economy will improve their fortunes and prevent the need for serious cutbacks in service and development.

Let’s get ready to rumble. The Winnie the Pooh lawsuit is back on! This is basically a continuation of the last lawsuit. The judge reject the Slesinger heirs the rights to the Pooh characters, but said they were due royalties. This lawsuit is about setting the royalty rate. This is never going to end, is it.

Artist Cardow has an interesting political cartoon related to the makeover Disney is supposedly giving Mickey Mouse.

With 20 animated films eligible for the Oscars this year Pixar’s UP will face some stiff competition from four other films this year.

If you didn’t hear, The Walt Disney Company made a little more money last 4th quarter that they did the year previously.

Lastly, I was at the Magic Kingdom on Wednesday night and rode the TTA through the upgraded Space Mountain. They were doing testing. Cars were running and the interior effects were on. Definitely a new sound for the cars, but no soundtrack I could hear. However, the new interior lighting effects were amazing. Much more realistic than the old version. Btw, I hear soft openings are possible beginning even today.

Walt Disney Company CEO Bob Iger takes the 1980s idea of synergy that was perfected by the early Eisner and Wells administration to the next level with his concept of the Franchise.

I’m not talking Kevin Garnett for you NBA fans. Nor is it like Subway where where you sell the concept to others to develop for you. It’s more about finding a tent pole that’s tall enough and strong enough you can hang a tent big enough to cover nearly every aspect of your company (I don’t think I’ve seen any Princess Tiana tie-ins for ESPN… yet) and increase their sales as well.

Based on what I’m seeing in terms of merchandise and in park tie-ins, I think Iger has identified The Princess and The Frog as the next franchise for Disney. A story in the Orlando Sentinel, (full disclosure, I was interviewed for the piece), discusses how much Disney is counting on the frog princess to make it a few bucks

Mitchelson, the Deutsche Bank analyst, said the ancillary potential of The Princess and the Frog is so large that the best measure of its success won’t be box office results — it will be consumer-product sales.

“To the extent that The Princess and the Frog is only considered modestly successful from a film point of view, that doesn’t  mean it won’t be quite successful from the perspective of broadening the princess franchise,” he said.

A good point. It’s been 12 years since the last Princess was introduced, and that’s only if you include Mulan among the princesses. I personally classify her as a hero, along with Pocahontas.

Disney’s most recent franchise consumer products producer was ‘Cars’. While not a critical box office hit, Cars made somewhere north of $4 billion in merchandise sales for the mouse house. I don’t think we’ll see quite that much with Princess Tiana merchandise alone, but when you add in increased sales of other princess merchandise, you might get close.

As evidence, at the Magic Kingdom last night I again saw little girls already wearing the Princess Tiana dress even before the movie has been released. Princesses of all colors too as is befitting a movie that really is an American story.

Do you make a habit of chatting with strangers? How about someone you’re sitting next to on an airplane for a few hours? Perhaps you should. You never know who you might meet. In this case, Noah met a man he’s calling Mr. Q.

Mr. Q had a large role in designing the ambient sound for Walt Disney World and solving one of the big problems encountered when moving from land to land… where does one soundtrack end and the other begin?

In the mid 1990’s, the park started researching the problem. It would eventually find no existing solution, so the engineers had to design and construct, on their own, one of the most complex and advanced audio systems ever built. The work paid off: today, as you walk through Disney World, the volume of the ambient music does not change. Ever. More than 15,000 speakers have been positioned using complex algorithms to ensure that the sound plays within a range of just a couple decibels throughout the entire park. It is quite a technical feat acoustically, electrically, and mathematically.

As we land, I ask Mr Q what he considers the highlight of his career. He describes how he wrote some software for “manufacturing emotion” with the thousands of new speakers in the park. The system he built can slowly change the style of the music across a distance without the visitor noticing. As a person walks from Tomorrowland to Fantasyland, for example, each of the hundreds of speakers slowly fades in different melodies at different frequencies so that at any point you can stop and enjoy a fully accurate piece of music, but by the time you walk 400 feet, the entire song has changed and no one has noticed.

More at How Mr. Q Manufactured Emotion.

(Via BoingBoing)

Hanging out in London? Then make plans for attending a November 24th Christie’s London film memorabilia auction where 25 rare Disney animation items including Mary Blair and Bill Peet artwork, a 1927 typed synopsis for “Alice the beach nut”, and the famous 191 page “Future Fantasias” folder compiled for Walt before Fantasia’s premiere by studio researcher Bob Carr are available.

Not in London? You can register to bid live online.

The last couple holiday seasons have brought a new Holiday commercial from Disney Parks. Here’s this year’s entry:

Anika Noni Rose, Princess Tiana, takes us on a very special journey through the music from The Princess and the Frog. The soundtrack hits stores November 24th or pre-order it now from Amazon. Save over 25% if you pre-order.

Also see here’s the music video for “Never Knew I Needed” by Ne-Yo (opens in new window as embedding is disabled)