Finding your way at a festival

edanto

So - late night posting, so unsure about the chances of success, but I'm at a (great) lil festival in Kilkenny, and one thing that's a little annoying is that the lineup times are changing a bit on the fly and it's a little tricky to navigate.

would anyone want to work on an app for the fest that allows the stage team to update it on the fly and punters to see it instantly and find the tent (there are about 6 tent/stages and there's a decent bit of space between them.

I reckon we could sell the app for a yoyo in the app store, so happy to share with others that make it? I know the problem and the solution, but not the technical details in between. Anyone interested to know more?

edanto

Goes without saying that the festival is on NOW, so this would need to be live in about 8 hours. Any app nightowls?

Creamy Goodness

edanto wrote: »

Goes without saying that the festival is on NOW, so this would need to be live in about 8 hours. Any app nightowls?

It takes about 7-10 days for an app to get through the App Store review before it hits the App Store. If you're thinking android no one will buy the app.

Also where do you think the app will get the data for the changing schedule? who is the owner of the data? Where does the data live?

This is not to say that your idea isn't a bad one it's just it would probably need to be more generic as in work for more than one festival, works on both android and iOS and possibly windows (these days, definitely in the next 12 months) and would need to be worked on 2-3 months before the festival starts.

edanto

Great advice. The idea I'm toying with now is simplified, so that instead of an app, the Line-up is just on a simple website. As soon as someone joins the WiFi, the first page that loads is this little website which gives the line-ups on each stage (initially, it would give a 'now and next' for each stage, and then you click into each stage and see the full details if you want).

At this particular festival, there's no budget to develop that site (and certainly not to do it today), but the confusion still reigns supreme as regards line up here. Tis a great 'lil festival but they had quite a few obstacles to overcome in the last 10 days and didn't have time to do some of the finishing touches you might find at bigger ones like line-up lanyards or time signs by each stage.

For the website, I think it would need to be based on an easy to deploy/use (so that the production team could update the details from their phone/laptop) CMS like wordpress, and very responsive to mobile sizes.

That might be a good starting point, since it's simpler to develop, and also creates an online repository of structured data that a future app could pull.

b.gud

I've always liked the idea of a well done app that let's you know what's going on a now and where for a festival. I had thought about doing one for a festival in Galway a few years ago but didn't have the time.

edanto wrote: »

Goes without saying that the festival is on NOW, so this would need to be live in about 8 hours. Any app nightowls?

Based on your subsequent posts you do seem to have a pretty good idea of what is necessary to make an app like this happen, but the quoted statement above represents a big problem for mobile developers. There is a general perception that it's pretty easy to throw together an mobile app which is part of the reason why a lot of people of very reluctant to pay for them.

Completely ignoring development, if an app that I was going to release to the public had 8 hours of testing I would be seriously worried that it wasn't enough!

MyPeopleDrankTheSoup

http://www.mobanode.com/ do a lot of festival apps like this.

The Corinthian

georgiecasey wrote: »

http://www.mobanode.com/ do a lot of festival apps like this.

There's a lot of companies that specialize in niche apps like this (sporting tournaments is another type that springs to mind) because they can churn them out relatively quickly once the basic app framework is written; just change the data and graphical assets.

Not sure if they're terribly viable commercially unless the festival in question is paying you to make them though, as installs are going to be low (at best a few thousand) and that's not enough to make any kind of return in ad revenue, even for just changing a few strings and drawables.

edanto

And CrowdTorch would be another big player in this area, who do exactly what TC outlined above, they have a skeleton framework and the client can activate different services as their event requires (and budget allows).

It's not a space I'm looking to compete in anytime soon, but at the time of the OP I was looking for the simple tech solution to solve the problem at that particular festival regarding line-up time confusion.

This might be something I work on if I get spare time in the coming months, if anyone's interested in collaborating, either post here or PM me.

The Corinthian

edanto wrote: »

It's not a space I'm looking to compete in anytime soon

As I suggested, it's not a space many would be interested in competing in any time soon.