20th Century Fox teamed up with Color for the premiere of Water for Elephants in New York earlier this month, and it was also recently used at one of MySpace's Secret Shows.
Now the app is hitting the festival circuit. Marketing company iStrategyLabs began working with the Sweetlife Festival, a music fest presented by Washington, D.C.-based restaurant group Sweetgreen, on innovative solutions for a more engaged festival experience.
McKee Floyd, from iStrategyLabs, says the app will be used as an experiment with social media.
"We took a look at the way Color was being used to engage people in one location," says Floyd. "It was made for this kind of festival event. It creates a way for everyone to gather their individual experiences into one."
If you're not familiar with Color, available for iPhone [iTunes link], it allows anybody to share their photos or videos with friends and strangers. The app detects who is nearby and automatically creates groups for sharing visual content. There is no “friending” or “following” in Color, though. All the photos are public, and your circle of friends is determined by algorithm — based on how often you hang out with a person. It’s a concept the company calls the “elastic network.”
So, basically, you can surf around and look at snaps that people in your vicinity take, which is great at a festival.
"This is right in line with what we're looking to do -- to have people establish relationships, to build a community right in the moment," says Color's John Kuch of the fest. "We like to compare it to disposable cameras at a wedding," he says, referring to how wedding guests take pictures with disposable cameras provided by the bride and groom, and then the couple has tons of multi-angled shots.
The folks at Sweetlife decided to take the idea of Color a step further in conjunction with the festival -- adding game play in the form of a digital iSpy game.
Fest attendees will be asked to capture images and answer questions to win prizes like VIP upgrades, concert tickets and an iPad 2. The first prompt will be “iSpy something delicious" and is open to interpretation. Winners will be notified via comments on the Color app.
Although you have to be at the fest in order to participate, the game -- and use of the app at the festival -- will serve to bring more people into the experience of the event, Kuch hopes.
"There's so many people who won't have access to the show, so it will let other people interact," he says. Photos will all be aggregated on a dedicated website after the festival ends.