Issue 12.With all the excitement of the summer festival season in Sydney, it came as an interesting surprise that with the upcoming Good Vibrations Festival, Nokia have released a handy Mobile Festival Guide.
I received a notification of this through one of the many emails Good Vibes send to subscribers to keep them updated with competitions, Good Vibrations Mambo clothing (what the?), new band line-ups and other festival information.
At the bottom of the email was this message.
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NOKIA GOOD VIBRATIONS MOBILE FESTIVAL GUIDE!
Nokia have created the Good Vibrations mobile festival guide, which not only provides loads of opportunities to win free music, get Good Vibrations VIP treats, and win Comes With Music phones; it also provides the essential festival map, timings, info on the line up and allows you to plan your entire day so you don’t miss a thing. Just text ‘Nokia’ to 19930300 and we’ll send you an SMS to download it to your handset.
Nokia are also providing free WiFi across the festival site, so don’t forget to turn on your WiFi on your mobile and take a look at the mobile festival portal where you can find out everything you need to know about Good Vibrations Festival and rate your favourite acts of the day.
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You can view the email here if you're interested.
So, as curious as I am I decided to send the text message and download the Festival Guide application. It's awesome! It has a very simple user interface, making the application very intuitive. I'm sure it will be very helpful during the festival.
There were no charges indicated on the email, however according to a forum about the Nokia Music Festival Guide in the UK being available for the Reading and Leeds Festivals (over a year ago), the download and message alerts are free, but standard network rates may apply.
After receiving this email, I decided to send a social email at work because I knew many people from the office were attending the festival. I was then asked a couple of times how much the app was to download. To me, this was interesting because it made me believe that people are still skeptical about download charges, despite Telcos reducing data fees and encouraging customers to use mobile content. This is certainly one obstacle Australian Telcos face this year.
This type of mobile app was the first I'd seen utilised for Music Festivals in Australia, however Nokia has been using this technology for a long time now. This makes me question why has Australia fallen behind? Is it because our market wasn't ready to accept downloading content to their mobiles? Whatever the answer is, I'm glad Australian Telcos are beginning to push this content and make customers more comfortable with the concept.
Overall, the opportunity here for Telcos is that they become more active in the Australian Music Festival scene as they become more popular than ever before. Take an example from what other international carriers such as O2 and Orange are doing in this space and start to implement similar ideas. I believe there is huge potential in this area, and if done right, can have massive rewards. Telcos leverage sales from their own music stores, promote exclusive content from popular artists, and x-sell new handsets with specific artist content packs (???). Its a target market that has not yet been taken advantage of by Australian Telcos and owned (aside from Virgin's V-Fest), but it is only a matter of time before they do.
Cheers!
Greg
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