When a festival timetable clash means two of your favourite acts are set to play at the same time, the only thing worse than having to decide which you check out is the chance you’ll pick the one who’s having an off day. Then you’ve gotta trudge all the way to the other stage, wasting valuable time along the way getting another beer and waiting for your girlfriend to use the toilet, meaning you miss most of the other act. It’s a lose-lose situation! If a new Dutch mobile application has its way, however, you’ll never have to wonder which stage is the hottest ever again…

The concept is pretty simple; users of the application simply rate the band they’re watching as ‘Hot or Not’, the information is then compiled and relayed back to users so they can see how popular various stages across the festival site are. It’s displayed visually on screen – red means the stage is a winner, blue means it’s a dud! Although not included in the launch application, there are also plans for users to be able to check the ‘Heatmap’ against those who share similar music tastes, meaning you only need to observe the opinion of people who like the same stuff as you and not all the bogans at the other stage. The Lowlands festival in the Netherlands will be used as a test case, with Dutch telco VPRO’s music platform 3VOOR12 debuting the technology.

It’s a cool idea, but we don’t expect to see it appearing at Australian festivals any time soon. Considering a measly text message takes usually takes several hours to be delivered when mobile networks get so congested, we don’t think the opportunity to casually browse wi-fi on your phone is likely to happen!