Hackers to descend upon Outside Lands music fest
Hackers will infiltrate the Outside Lands music festival happening at Golden Gate Park in a few weeks. If you’re attending, keep an eye out for guys or gals typing furiously away on their laptops or holding their phones high above their heads in search of a strong WiFi connection. Don’t be surprised if you’re standing in line and someone taps your shoulder and asks you to test out their app. This is the official first year of “Outside Hacks,” where programmers will code inside festival grounds, working on websites or mobile apps that benefit Outside Lands attendees.If you tap me on the shoulder in the beer line and ask me to test out your app, "don't be surprised" if I punch you in the throat. Fucking great, I finally decide to go to Outside Lands after five years or whatever and it gets turned into Camp Annoying.
Outside Hacks is a followup event to Hackeroo — the hackathon that happened inside the Bonnaroo music festival earlier this year. Hackers will go head to head in a 24 hour competition happening August 3-4, the week before Outside Lands. The winning teams will get VIP tickets to the festival, where they’ll hack and hone their websites/apps from within the fest.Here I thought a music festival was about LISTENING TO LIVE MUSIC. No, it's about "hacking and honing websites/apps from within the fest." Hopefully one of the apps is Killyouallr. Or StabMe.
So what does a festival app look like? There’s a lot of possibilities. At Hackeroo, one of the winning teams developed an app called RooRunner, which acted like a TaskRabbit for festival-goers. Attendees could submit task requests into the app from their phones, like “I want a burger and water brought to me at a certain sound stage.” The other app was named RooWall, and it combined all the pictures, video, tweets, and other social interactions that festival goers were posting into one visual wall.Oh good. I was worried I would just have to watch the bands I paid $115 to see and I wouldn't have any way to post tweets and video onto a visual wall. And why should I get my own burger and water when I can pay someone to bring it to me? Woodstock, the dream is not dead!
Maybe I'm being too harsh. I guess I could support this if anyone worked on the following apps:
HeadPulverizr - If you lift your smartphone above shoulder level to take a picture, it blows up, sending shards of glass and metal into your skull.
BitchBeQuiet - Automatically releases a gas that causes vocal cord constriction if you speak louder than the music.
BlindMe - Blocks my vision any time someone wanders by wearing an animal-ears hat or sunglasses backward on the head.
DeChiliFier - Destroys the Red Hot Chili Peppers forever.
4 comments:
Is there some way to prevent cheating? I mean, I don't want my app to have been created before the bands started playing. It just wouldn't be the same.
Too bad Sunn((O)))) isn't playing. They'd probably create an EMP that would cease all computing.
"At Hackeroo, one of the winning teams developed an app called RooRunner, which acted like a TaskRabbit for festival-goers. Attendees could submit task requests into the app from their phones, like 'I want a burger and water brought to me at a certain sound stage.'"
OK, how did that work out? Because every time I have ever tried to meet up with someone at a big show (other than a pre-determined meeting point when everyone is still sober, usually at some obvious boring place by the entry, which also doubles as an earthquake emergency meet-up point), it goes like this:
A: Where r u?
B: Stage left, maybe 50 feet back.
A: OK I'm there. Where r u?
B: Wait, I forgot if stage left is when you're in the audience or on stage. Whatever, we're by the big tower thing.
A: OMG which big tower thing? Is it near the toilets?
B: Come now, there's a good spot in this rotation.
A: SRSLY WHERE R U?
B: We might be moving to by another tower thing so come fast! Wait, where r u? Are there hot guys there? Should we try to meet up??
So yeah, I don't know how somebody would bring me a burger.
I would pay $100 a show (on top of my ticket) for BitchBeQuiet. Maybe more after a couple $10 beers. It would literally make concerts worth going to again.
I would pay up to $19.99 for the DeChiliFier app. Developers, take note.
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