HedOut to the Edinburgh Festivals
In 2007 we ran a mobile internet service called Fringe Knowledge, sponsored by The Times Online. You could access the full Fringe programme and reviews published by The Times. We had a street team demoing it and people’s brains exploded at the idea of accessing the internet from their phones.
What a difference two years makes. Today’s Festival goers are demanding access to the vastly rich programme of events that forms the world’s largest arts festival. For those not familiar with our annual bash, we have six festivals running at the same time with thousands of different shows and millions of tickets. The town is mobbed, the number of venues has, incredibly for us locals, grown to 200, and something needs to make sense of this.
HedOut have created a location-based event platform, for lack of a better description, and have managed to secure the official blessing of the festivals for their launch service. Called Edinburgh Festivals it is currently available for iPhone users.
Like the Edinburgh Festival Fringe the app is a bit rough and ready, but that’s part of the appeal. It’s not a glitzy, over priced production in the west end - it costs £1.79 and it’ll save you immense amounts of time and energy. People who don’t have not been here or been involved in ticketing will not appreciate just how amazingly good a job Gavin Dutch and his team has done. The ability to search by time and location is brilliant, out performing the edfringe.com site itself. Keyword search is very cool - I was looking for Burlesque events as in another universe I light and photograph such shows, and I was shown the complete list of related events for the next few days. Nice.
Best of all, though, is remote access to the offers running at the half-price tent. You can’t get that anywhere else, so you’ll save the price of the app many times over just on that.
