VIRAL

Viral retrieves large and disperse streams of cultural data, displaying it in an organized and intuitive way, thus gathering both culture consumers and promoters in one web platform specialized in events. Combining data retrieval with human curatorship, we’ve built the most complete, up-to-date and organized events guide in Portugal. Departing from a Cultural Cartography approach, we now wish to take our work further by mapping the interactions between cultural agents and audiences in Europe and globally.

For the past 3 years, the Viral platform has been contributing to smarten up Portuguese cities by helping visitors and citizens to easily acknowledge what is happening in their cities concerning culture and entertainment, and by helping promoters communicate their upcoming events more effectively.

Besides detailed information about events and event promoting organizations, which are searchable through filters (district, type of event, date…) and by its own search engine, Viral also hosts a collaborative publishing area, a featured events area, metadata and multimedia integration, interactive maps, a tag-based navigation system and a widget that allows event promoters to embed any event list in any website or blog as easily they would with a YouTube video. We are currently developing a mobile app based on the web platform, a premium advertising system and new digital tools aimed at event promotion.

Viral was built taking scalability into deep account, and is thus infinitely replicable: implemented in Lisbon and Porto in a first stage, the outbreak spread to all the cities of Portugal and is now ready to help smarten up Europe’s main destinations. The integration of Fiware technologies is allowing us to take this virtual organism to the next level, through the integration of capital upgrades such as context aware interaction, event experience enhancement and recommendations based on user profile and location.

By providing detailed, organized and real time information about cultural activities in European cities, Viral can represent a great asset to both citizens and visitors. The targeting capabilities will also empower event promoters with innovative tools to communicate with target audiences. Finally, the development of data analysis and visualization instruments could provide the cities’ institutions with invaluable insights about the complex network of interactions amongst cultural agents and between these and their audiences.

The Team

Carlos Quitério  Co-Founder, Product manager Internationally requested illustrator and designer, loves to draw and paint
Hugo Branco  PR, Communication Philosophy Degree, MA Digital Arts; Invited speaker Art & Tech conferences.
Monica Planche  Marketing, Account Experienced accountant, account manager. Digital Marketing post-graduate
Tiago Abelha  Head of web development, Co-founder Web developer/designer,creative thinker with a passion for new technologies