What is a fringe festival?

Fringe Festivals (Wikipedia link here) exist throughout the world as havens for underground and emerging arts scenes and have been around for more than 60 years. The Fringe concept was born in Edinburgh, Scotland. In 1947, eight performance groups appeared uninvited on the “fringes” of the exclusive Edinburgh International Festival. The Edinburgh Festival Fringe has since grown into the largest arts festival in the world, and one of the most popular.

So if that can work in the art’s sector, why not apply it to the mobile technology sector? We ran successfully in 2012 in Barcelona with 7,000 or so people attending 45 events across the city. We’re running the festival this year from Sunday 24 February to Friday 1st March 2013. Most of the events will be in Barcelona in a wide variety of venues and a wide variety of styles of events to attend. Some events will be happening outside of Barcelona too for those who can’t make it to Spain at that time.

We work on a mixed model where there are some events already happening that week that you can piggy back on as a sponsor or you can create your own event, or host someone else’s event in your office (if it’s local to Barcelona). This means everyone has the opportunity to participate and it means that we can support work and businesses in the wider mobile community no matter what your size or budget. No event too big or too small to qualify and the more variety in event formats, the better. Whether it’s an event for five people or for five hundred, we’re happy to welcome you. Breakfast seminars, geek meet-ups, parties, podcasts, dinners and parties – we don’t mind! And the more topics we can cover, the better. We’re already talking to people about events looking at education, loyalty, mobile advertising and mobile payments. It’s a big industry, there’s room for a lot more.

There are lots of ways to get involved from attending events to hosting and running them. We’ll also have some fringe reporting too so if you can’t be there in person, you can see some of what’s on from the comfort of your laptop or mobile device.

We have a mailing list so you can keep in touch with the events happening and coverage of the festival itself once it’s in action. You can add your email address in the box on this site.

Find out more about how to get involved here. Already have an event planned? You can add it by filling in this form.

Find out more about our team and our festival supporters here. We couldn’t have done this without their professional and moral support.