Prepping for ACL with technology
This is shaping up to be an event-filled weekend indeed. The TechCrunch/Austin Ventures Meet-up is this Thursday, preceding the famed Austin City Limits Music Festival.
While the TechCrunch roundtable and party at Pangaea are completely sold out, you can still get your hands on Friday and Sunday single-day tickets at the ACL Fest official website (or there’s always craigslist if you still want your three-day fix—prices tend to be pretty reasonable this close to the event). If you were lucky enough to get a ticket to the TechCrunch party and haven’t purchased an ACL ticket and want to, hold out until Friday morning since they’ll be giving some away Thursday night.
EDIT: Once the TechCrunch event is over, make sure to check out the Moximity Launch Party at The Belmont, one of my favorite Austin bars, just two blocks down from Pangaea at W. 6th and Lavaca. Bring your iPhone along as they’ll be signing people up for the launch of their awesome iPhone app. I’ve got my early copy and I can’t wait for other Austinites (and eventually friends around the country) to be on it. Want a beta code? Let me know in the comments and I’ll get you hooked up in no time! These guys are doing some awesome stuff, make sure to follow their progress on Twitter @moximity.
And how, pray tell, am I preparing for the music festival? With as much tech as I can muster Monday through Thursday, of course! For one, Pandora has a kickass section of their site dedicated exclusively to 18 music festivals, including ACL. Check out the Festivals section of their site for the link to the ACL Channel at the very bottom. The only downside of this is you can’t seem to thumb-up or thumb-down anything for future reference.
Also, for scheduling purposes, I’m using sched.org (remember those guys from SXSWi 2008?); Taylor and Chirag have created a section specifically for ACL08. Their site seems to be running really slowly these past few days so I’m hoping they’re just going through maintenance in preparation for the weekend. Once it’s up and running properly, check out my schedule to see what bands I’ll be making it to. I’ll be twittering my whereabouts if you’re at Zilker. Also, I’m following @360acl to check out any news or insights that The Statesman/Austin360 might have. Plus, they’re aggregating people’s tweets on a live Twitter page on their site which seems cool.
Any tools that I’m missing out on? I’m charging up my iPhone, making sure Shazam [iTunes link] is on my home screen for music tagging (and hoping it works with live music), readying my bike (despite recent spills) and getting ready for an awesome weekend. See you in the sun!
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My friend and I are actually working on a website dedicated to music festivals at http://www.mashfest.com. We provide some sched.org-like functionality – you can create a custom schedule on the site, but we haven’t finished coding all of the sharing options for seeing others’ schedules yet. The page for ACL 2008 is at http://www.mashfest.com/austin-city-limits-2008, but there’s actually going to be a page for every show at every music festival ever held. You can see the schedule grid by clicking the schcedule tab on that page, and you can add shows to your schedule if you create an account.
We’re not quite finished getting the data in for all of the world festivals, as the site is still in development and has a ways to go. It’s going to have all the usual stuff, like photo/video submissions that are tied directly to shows, bands, and festivals, so you can feel all nostalgic or figure out who you are going to see at the next festival. We have all of the schedules for ACL in since inception, and have lineups in for probably 50% of the festivals so far. Last.fm integration will provide the band descriptions very soon, so we won’t have to rip Wikipedia entries for everything.
I’m joining Conjunctured very soon, so this is one of the things I’ll be working on there when I’m not doing paid work. It was cool stopping by there the other day and I look forward to being a member :).
Very interesting. I’d love to see more of this type of thing.