Patrick's Day festivities in the palm of your hand

VISITORS ATTENDING the St Patrick’s Day festival this year can keep a guide to events in the palm of their hand with a new mobile application to track the festivities.

Developed by MobaNode in conjunction with the St Patrick’s Day Festival, it can be downloaded directly to a mobile phone or through a PC from

www.stpatricksfestival.ie.

“What we built was a mobile festival guide that can be downloaded to your mobile phone,” said MobaNode founder Shane McAllister.

“Everybody has a mobile phone – there’s 120 per cent penetration in Ireland alone. It’s the ideal medium on which to provide content related to your event.”

The application includes an interactive map with details of where and when each event takes place, and supplies information such as ticket prices and times.

McAllister said the company approached the festival with the idea, after searching the list of events for the year to see what would be the major attractions. “The St Patrick’s Festival popped out at us,” he said.

The company put together a demo for the festival committee, and got approval to develop the application.

“We fast tracked the development of this. When we got the okay to do it, we threw all the manpower we could at it,” said McAllister.

“An application like this would usually take six to eight weeks to develop. We halved the timescale on that, given that we had a pretty strict deadline to get it ready for March 12th, the first day of the festival.”

The application can be used with any java-enabled mobile phone, except the iPhone, as it would have taken too long to get the application into Apple’s AppStore, missing the festival.

Other routes to get the mobile guide to people were considered, including an SMS download. However, with up to 700,000 people expected to attend the festival, it was feared that the cost to the festival committee would become prohibitive, as the number of people downloading the application could not be capped. It was not disclosed how much the application cost to develop.

The company is hoping the application will take on a life of its own. “Once a user has the application on their phone, they can share the download links by SMS with friends,” said McAllister

Mobanode plans to expand the application for use with other events, both in Ireland and overseas. “The festival and entertainment space in Ireland is dwarfed in comparison to the UK. They might have 10 times the amount of events going on that we have,” said McAllister. “There’s great opportunity for it.”