Why The Invisible Festival is a Fantastic Idea

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 This post is by Julius Solaris, your Editor in Chief. He is @tojulius on twitter . Meet the rest of the team!

Invisible Festival is a virtual festival right in your backyard. Powered by Spotify and with a noble cause.

I was immediately hooked while listening to my favourite music player by the Invisible Festival ad.

The idea is simply marvellous. Following the trend of user generated events, the Invisible Festival adopts extremely well Social Media to deliver a powerful message in a great way.

What is it?

It’s a virtual event that leverages on the power of Spotify, flickr and twitter, to raise awareness for Cancer Research UK.

As from Matt, Mark and Paul – the organizers – describe it:

The Invisible Festival is an online virtual music festival, hosted by you but soundtracked by us. It’s the world’s only 100% mud free, crowd-free, rain-free, tout-free, queue-free, free-free virtual festival.

It’s a terrific idea

This is one of those few initiatives that really grab my attention. We’ve extensively been talking about the power of user generated events and the changing role of event planners.

The Invisible Festival brings together all of the above with a great, balanced Social Media mix.

A Contaminated Concept

This is a great example of a contaminated concept. Ac concept that is born and develops around Social Media, Although there is no actual event, not even a virtual one, the aggregation component becomes the event in itself, leveraging on existing platforms. All of the above with a relatively small budget.

Congratulations to Matt Mark and Paul for the terrific job and a great lesson for all of us about creativity and delivering real value to the end user.

What I learned about Social Media

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On the 28th of May I was invited by great planner Liza Bergman to participate at Masterclass Social Media in Amsterdam, here are video and presentation.

I enjoyed the crowd and we also built a community for the event which I invite you to join.

Julius Solaris @ Masterclass Social Media from punkmedia on Vimeo.

If you can’t see the video click here

If you can’t see the presentation click here

[Event Technology] Pathable

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This post starts a new series about technology you should embed in your event.

Name: Pathable

Twitter: @pathable

Category: Networking

Description: Pathable allows organizers (which is you) to set up a community for their event. It enables networking with a powerful tagging system.

Your attendees are able to identify their interests and match them with others.

Networking begins before the event. To us this is one of the strongest contribution technology deliver to events. Networking is indeed one of the top reasons to attend events. Therefore you can do the math.

What I like: You can print out special badges carrying on your name as well as those of the people you should meet. The platform works out matching profiles, breaking ice in a powerful fashion.

What could be better: Stronger integration with LinkedIn and Facebook. We don’t want to fill in a new profile given the amount of time we spent to generate our official ones. Help us with a one click import.

Want to improve your event technology? We can help you

EventOrb unleashes Event Calendar

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EventOrb is a nifty event marketing service that allows promoters to do a number of things such as:

- Create unlimited events
- Add photos from the event before or after it has taken place
- Add videos of the event
- Search for events all around the world by proximity, date, time of day or category

They recently re-launched their event calendar, a great service that allows promoters to push event marketing even further, let me quote from their blog:

….So we decided to take our event calendar to the next level by allowing you to create a concise version of an event and even upload a flyer – all of this, without leaving the calendar page. When you’re done, “presto”, your event magically appears on the calendar.

Have a look and tell me what you think.

Link to Event Calendar – EventOrb

Thank you LeWeb

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Busy typing at LeWeb08 Photo by dsearls via Flickr

LeWeb08 was a crucial appointment for Internet startups, held in Paris few days ago. The conference was packed with obstacles, but I learned a great lesson: watching events online is a great thing.

I think online and offline are seriously connected. More than most of the Internet professionals suggest. I am of the opinion that every event should have a strong technological infrastructure, to allow people who cannot be there to consume the event. If you prefer, monetizing that as well.

LeWeb was packed misadventures. They spent more than €100K for wireless Internet connection,which was completely unreliable for the whole two days. They also had a serious problem with room heating leaving attendees in freezing cold.

Eureka

A lot of people commented on the above but forgot to celebrate the great success of LeWeb, mostly thanks to rezpondr a startup funded and helped by www.sleepydog.net which equals @philcampbell and @sleepydog

These guys, who represent the only real spark of creativity in this dull, credit crunch depressed, same old London, gave me the opportunity to connect to one page where I could find:

- a Ustream streaming of the event

- all the pictures from flickr tagged leweb

- all the seesmic videos tagged leweb

- all the qik videos tagged leweb

- all the twitter discussions tagged leweb

I had a chat with @philcampbell and he told me that:

…the idea is that a user/group/event can bring together livestreams and social content into one location to make the viewing experience more rounded for the user watching.   The content is displayed in a time based manner with content running from left to right. Newest content first.  Each piece of media has a lightbox on which the user can perform actions with that media.   If the domain is owned by the user that logs in you can also do various transcoding and distribution methods to convert media in a variety of formats.

If the above link no longer works, you can see a screenshot below (click to expand) or check eventca.st :

Few results that may interest you

- I listened to the talks in my nice and warm living room & with reliable internet connection.

- I had the chance to see pictures and videos in real time from all the other rooms as well.

- I read reactions of people listening and discussed with them during the panels over twitter.

- I networked with twitter users who were doing the same thing I was and established great relationships which are still going on.

- We peaked 3000 people watching and interacting through the live chat.

My suggestions

- Don’t bother yourself trying to understand whether leWeb was a success or not.

- Think about how the way we consume events is dramatically changing.

- Think about how perception of people attending your events is changing and expectations accordingly.

- Think about new audiences in New York when you are running an event in Japan and new ways of monetizing it.

- Think about twitter as the most revolutionary Internet tool within the events arena.

- Think about all of the above soon!