O2 Wireless Festival gets interactive
This weekend sees the opening of London’s massive Wireless Festival in Hyde Park. Now bigger than ever before and sporting some of the most popular bands around, this promises to be an unmissable event to anyone with £35 to blow on a single day ticket or £100 for a four day ticket. The sponsor O2 is keen to see that as much of its latest mobile technology is showboated around and that subscribing festival-goers are not distracted from firing off text and multimedia messages for longer than the time it takes to say “Oh look, NEW order” during the whole event. The list of headline acts, including Basement Jaxx, Keane, and Kasabian, is only rivalled in scale by the volume of ‘interactive’ experiences O2 is encouraging the crowd to enjoy. Funny, there was me thinking that festivals were about watching bands, drinking warm cans of cheap lager and getting covered in mud, but apparently you’re actually meant to follow your mobile phone around entering numerous competitions, picking up more lame ring-tones and using your electronic barcode to explore the “O2 Bubble”.
But wait, that’s not all, you can also have your witless expression transmitted before the crowd’s mirth using O2 MMS and the huge screens, though fortunately control of these will be left to O2’s ‘Angels’ ensuring that the screens aren’t subjected to four long days of photos of people’s backsides. There’s also a dedicated WAP site (but if you’re already at the festival… oh I give up), a series of reverse auctions, SMS backstage gossip, Hypertagging, and loads of other compos. So brace your thumbs, for this weekend they belong to O2.
