Find a friend, meet for dinner and hit the Fringe: technology can help

    The program guides for the upcoming Philly Fringe festival have been on the streets for a few weeks now. The thick book of 1000 performances in over a hundred venues across the city is both a goldmine and a logistical headache. But, don’t worry; now there’s an app for that.

    Festival director Nick Stuccio says last year he believed creating an iPhone application with searchable festival listings was too daunting.

    “I thought I’m going to have to get with a company, have a bunch of long planning meetings, they’re going to have to design a back end, and it’s going to cost $50,000 dollars,” he says.  “Where really, it took somebody smart, grabbed a bunch of data that existed, and bam-bam-bam it’s done.”

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    It didn’t cost $50,000, either.  The designer did it for free to pad out his web portfolio.

    The calculus of where to go, when, and how to get there becomes exponentially more complicated when you add friends. A new website called CommonSpace is being rolled out for the Fringe festival as well.  It determines a range of where you can conveniently walk, bike, or take public transportation. It asks the same of your friends, and creates a Venn diagram where your ranges intersect, so you can meet on the way to a show.

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