Oregon Music News

Waterfront Blues Festival Mobile App

No festival is complete without a handheld schedule. There’s too much happening to keep it all in your head – keeping track of multiple stages, various artists and appearances, as well as where to find food, water and bathrooms.

Traditional paper maps are limited – you can only fit so much on two sides of a piece of paper. Who really wants to carry around a crumpled piece of paper all day? But a festival, especially the Safeway Waterfront Blues Festival, is better when you know more about what you’re seeing. Knowing that Curtis Salgado was the inspiration for “The Blues Brothers” is just one of those tidbits that makes his performance more enjoyable. That additional information has never been available – until the internet came along…and the new OMN mobile site.

Tom D’Antoni, Editor-In-Chief, said, “We’ve always been focused on making the main OMN site the best source for music information in Oregon, but now that more people are reading the internet with their phones, it’s really exciting to offer our readers a convenient way of finding out stories about their favorite musicians.”

For the 2011 Safeway Waterfront Blues Festival, Oregon Music News will provide a free mobile site with complete information about the festival, including artist biographies, performance schedules, Twitter updates, maps, vendors and contests plus live stories written by OMN. The mobile site can be found at wbf.oregonmusicnews.com.

Use this QR code to get there fast.

The artist page includes a customized listing with their picture, performance times and locations, as well as a biography. The site will also provide links to past and current Oregon Music News coverage, updated anytime an Oregon Music News writer posts a story about the festival…and we’ll be posting all day, every day. Event coverage doesn’t get any more real-time!

The complete schedule page provides a day-by-day list of when an artist will appear and on which stage. Any changes to the Blues Festival schedule will immediately update, providing the most current source of information. The information and maps page includes a visual guide to the location of various stages, as well as other locations such as restrooms, ATMs, first aid and lost kids.

Participating vendors are given a special page to provide you with heads-up on the food they offer, and in some cases, a Twitter feed letting you know about special offers. Finally, Oregon Music News will offer chances to win tickets and other merchandise. Fill out the survey once per contest to win.

Mark Niemann-Ross and Kevin Tomanka, both writers for Oregon Music News, coded the mechanics under the hood of the site. “The tools for creating something like this have really come a long way,” explained Niemann-Ross. “Don’t be fooled – it wasn’t easy – but we kept chipping away at the problem, and eventually wound up with this.”

“It’s built in a way that we can customize it for other festivals,” added Tomanka. “It’s possible that we could provide site for other festivals this summer, depending on how much time we have.”

Utilizing the mobile site at other Oregon festivals is already in the works as OMN is scheduled to roll out a special edition in late July for the 2011 PDX Pop Now! festival.

OMN is proud to be a media sponsor of the 2011 Safeway Waterfront Blues Festival . Visit our booth in the DME Louisiana Pavilion. Try out our new WFB mobile site on your smart phone. www. wbf.oregonmusicnews.com..