GLOBAL – This one almost slipped through the net, but luckily on our morning stroll through Nokia’s online corridors we stumbled over a guitar lead and followed the cord to discover Gig Finder – a new location-based live music and ticket-purchasing app over at Beta Labs. Tailored to play nice on S60 5th Edition touchscreen handsets, including the new Nokia X6, N97, N97 mini, 5800, 5530 and 5230, Gig Finder looks like a smart way to sniff out concerts and snag tickets in your area.
Gig Finder features smart recommendation talents, enabling you to easily find concerts, live events and venues based on where you are, with location-based content initially available for folk in the USA, Canada, UK and Ireland. Likewise, it suggests music events by taste, cleverly profiling the tunes stored on your device. Alongside the location-aware stuff, you can also manually search for artists and your favourite venues, cities and dates with a few quick taps of your touchscreen.
Once you’ve spied a gig you want to attend you can buy tickets and pick the best seats and prices via your handset, using any one of a variety of online ticket vendors. Plus, there’s a smart sharing option that lets you spread the buzz via Facebook, SMS or email. If you’re not sure how to get to a gig, it even offers directions with a link from Maps.
As is often the case with new slivers of software to first appear on Beta Labs, there are still some known issues with the app, yet it’s already gaining positive feedback with an average four-star rating from folk using it. Plus, suggestions for smart additional features have also begun to roll in. If you fancy taking it for a spin, visit Beta Labs to download the latest version of Gig Finder and offer your feedback on Beta Labs to help the developers tweak it into something even funkier.