How Skyline Created the Mile of Music Festival App

Posted on Posted in Sessions
October 12, 2016 | Meeting Schedule

Radisson Paper Valley Hotel & Conference Center, Lawrence Room
(333 W College Ave, Appleton)

5:00 pm Check-in & Networking
5:30 pm AITP Announcements
5:45 pm Dinner
6:30 pm NEW AITP Speaker Series – John Ptacek, Skyline Technologies

Session Synopsis

The Mile of Music is an annual music festival in Appleton Wisconsin featuring over 800 live performances, 70 artists on a, mostly, one-mile stretch of Appleton’s downtown every August. The Mile of Music recently completed its fourth annual festival that saw over 70,000 people attend the festival over its four-day run.

Every year of the festival, Skyline Technologies has partnered with the team that makes the event happen. Over the last three years, this includes creating the mobile application that festival attendees can download.

The application is an example of many of the trends prevalent in today’s IT world, including cloud based architecture, a mobile application for users and data analytics for insights.

In terms of cloud, with a large amount of attendees over a short time period, the platform is a great example of burst mode architecture. Computing resources are lightly utilized for 51 weeks of the year, but for one week, the resources need to be quickly ramped up to handle the influx of users.

The mobile application enables festival attendees to quickly navigate the 800 shows that are going on over the weekend. It also provides access to the artists and provides samples of their music so people know who they will be seeing.

In terms of data analytics, Appleton’s downtown was seeded with low energy Bluetooth beacons. The application utilized the beacons to provide a real time heat map of where crowds were during the day. After the festival, the data was processed to provide information to organizers about popular locations and bands.

The application and the platform that Skyline created was recently featured at one of the keynote presentations during Microsoft’s Worldwide Partner Conference (WPC) in Toronto. The conference is attended by over 15,000 people and allows Microsoft to show case partners doing innovative things around the world.

During his talk, John will provide an overview of how Skyline developed the application and experiences representing Wisconsin at a global conference.

Biography2016OctSpeaker

John Ptacek is a Skyline Technologies Principal Consultant where his primary focus is the design, development and envisioning of solutions for customers around the globe.

During his career he has developed solutions to solve problems for a wide variety of industries. Examples include virtually melting down nuclear reactors, developing a system for pricing over 10 billion dollars in consumer goods orders, corporate extranets for professional sport teams as well as mobile applications for music festivals.

His current focus is on solving problems using cloud technologies to reach users on their phone, their PC or while they are talking in their living room.

He lives in Appleton, WI with his wife and a gaggle of children who are usually playing music, running or shining shoes. Follow him on twitter @jptacek or on his blog at http://www.jptacek.com.

October 12, 2016


Registration

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