1. Smell flowers in Holland
2. Cover yourself in green leaves and go morris dancing
3. Throw yourself off a tower
4. Watch turtles
5. Pretend to be a pirate

Best Major European Festival: Heineken Open’er – Poland
Best Medium-Sized European Festival: Electric Picnic Music & Arts Festival – Ireland
Best Small European Festival: 5 Tauron Nowa Muzyka Festival – Poland
Best New European Festival: Temple House Festival – Ireland
Best Indoor Festival: Rolling Stone Weekender – Germany
Best European Festival Line-Up : Oxegen – Ireland
Best Newcomer: Florence and the Machine
Best Headliner: Muse
Festival Anthem of the Year: Muse – Uprising
YOUROPE Green ‘N’ Clean Festival Of The Year: Boom Festival – Portugal
Artist’s Favourite European Festival: Melt! – Germany

Heineken Open’er Festival

Oxegen Festival

Hurricane Festival

Pukkelpop

Roskilde Festival

EXIT Festival

Sonisphere Festival

Wacken Open Air

Sziget Festival

Rock Werchter
Plenty to think about for summer 2011!

Spoiler Alert:

So what exactly is the ultimate festival app you ask? I think you start by pulling bits and pieces of existing festival apps that are really well done. The ultimate festival app needs to have the right mix of Information, Simplicity, Interaction, and Fun.

Information: At its most basic level, the festival app must replace the paper program booklet we all hate carrying around. In addition to performer and venue listings it should take advantage of the digital medium and include plenty of photos and videos. The Cannes Film Festival App is a good example of rich information packed into a festival app.

Simplicity: The danger with all this information in the palm of your hand is that it becomes overwhelming and confusing if the user interface is not intuitive. Believe me, simplifying all this information into a festival app is no easy challenge.

Interaction: This is where festival apps have a real opportunity to dramatically enhance your experience. The Glastonbury App by Orange offers a nice augmented reality experience. Joobili’s new Sziget Festival App increases interactivity by helping festival goers connect with friends within the festival and those beyond the festival gates via twitter, facebook, etc.

Fun: We go to festivals to let loose and have fun and this element is sometimes lost in our search for the perfect digital program guide. I’ve seen fun features like tent-finders, strobe lights and alcohol tests. My personal favorite is the encore flame included in the French Quarter Festival App.

In addition to the criteria above, the ultimate festival app must do one more thing. It must have a business benefit to offset the cost of developing it. This could be revenue from sponsorships, paid apps or in the case of free apps it could be user registrations and brand awareness. The point is that festival apps are not just fun toys, they are an increasingly important part of the festival experience (especially with mobile ticketing on the horizon).

Judging by the flood of festival apps that launched in 2010 it won’t be long before we are closer to the ultimate festival app. Until then, we’ll keep improving on what we’ve got.

We are excited to officially announce our partnership with Athens Tourism. As you can see from the video, we feel pretty lucky to be working with such a dynamic destination. The team from Athens is really eager to jump headfirst into marketing their destination online and through social media. Joobili will be promoting Athens’ top events and festivals, as well as boosting Athens’ activities on Facebook and Twitter. Government back tourism agencies have a bad reputation for being the last to adopt new technologies, but Athens and a few others stand out to us as few examples where this reputation just doesn’t fit. Just another reason why Joobili loves Athens.

Joobili was recently invited to present our company at ITB Berlin, more specifically during the PhoCusWright summit on March 10 . For the uninitiated, this is the leading global trade show for the travel industry. Our slot is titled “5 Minutes of Fame” and is designed to highlight up and coming travel startups. The title made me laugh thinking about  Andy Warhol’s famous quote, “In the future, everyone will be world-famous for 15 minutes.” Well, I guess we’ll settle for 5 minutes for fame…for now

Seriously though, it is a big honor for us to be invited to present our ideas to such a distinguished crowd (we are sandwiched between keynote presentations from the Global Director of Bing Travel and the CEO of FareCompare). I will be sticking around for a few days to catch the rest of the Expo so if you will be at ITB Berlin as well and would like to meet up just drop me an email or leave a comment.

I recently returned from spending a week in San Francisco and Silicon Valley alongside my fellow European Seedcamp Finalists (check out the write-ups by Don Dodge and VentureBeat ). The guys over at Shout’em gave a nice day by day summary of events, so I’ll just jump to my conclusions.

Seedcamp put Joobili in front of some incredibly smart entrepreneurs and VCs, 95% of whom are altruistically focused on helping startups reach their potential (the other 5% come to meet fellow VCs or look for a job). Mentoring is cool, but mentoring alone would not be worth the transatlantic flight. Remember, Seedcamp is a platform. It is validation that some smart people from Seedcamp thought Joobili was interesting, and therefore other smart people should take a closer look at us. That’s it! But that’s also enough.

With the Seedcamp endorsement in hand, Joobili was able to get meetings with Founders and CEOs of 9 travel websites including some really dynamic entrepreneurs like Gregg Brockway from TripIt, Mike Cassidy from Ruba, Josh from NileGuide…the list goes on. The result was a lot of good advice specific to online travel, a few partnerships and some potential deals. The willingness to share sensitive information and open up personal networks is why The Valley will continue to have an innovation edge on the rest of the world.

Some of the meetings were facilitated by mentors we met in London, others were through our own network. The point is that, like most things in life, Seedcamp is what you make of it. It is a foot in the door, a good excuse to send an intro email, but ultimately it’s up to you to make it happen.

Speaking of making it happen…applications for Mini Seedcamp Prague have just opened. I encourage startups needing validation (read everyone), especially those from CEE to apply.

I still don’t know if Twitter is an effective use of my time, but I do know we have Twitter to thank for Joobili being featured on the BBC this weekend. BBC presenter Carmen Roberts was doing some research for her upcoming segment on the best travel websites. She posted a tweet and Darren Cronin from Travel Rants responded by recommending Joobili. I happened to meet Daren at a travel conference and we’ve exchanged tweets a few times over the past year. He has no financial motivation for promoting Joobili, it’s was just a case of Daren being a helpful guy. To make a long story short, the conversation was picked up on my Twitter search and before I knew it I was talking with Carmen directly and Joobili was featured on the BBC. The point is that on the one hand it would have never happened without social media and on the other hand I could never replicate this “success” or measure its exact cause. Herein lies the contradiction of social media that people find so frustrating. For me, I just accept it for what it is and enjoy the “ROI”…whatever that means!

Click on the link below to view our BBC debut. Joobili appears near the 2:15 mark on this video.

By the way, if you haven’t already checked out the holiday-inspired site decorations you should do it now before they go away forever (or at least until next year).