The Event

Virada Cultural is the 8th event in its class, taking place in Sao Paulo, Brazil, and bringing together over 4 million people in the old city center. It’s a mega-show with around 1200 stages and scenes, with artists performing during almost two days (5th and 6th of May).

The Opportunity

A few weeks before the event, the opportunity arose of developing a mobile application for the event, both for Android Devices and for iOS Devices. It seemed like there was a huge chance of showing the capabilities of GeneXus in a very hard time-frame.

GeneXus and Amazon

Thanks to GeneXus for Smart Devices, we were able to quickly develop and deploy native apps, both for Android and iOS, and have them running with one click in Amazon’s EC2 and RDS (to be able to handle the concurrent use of the applications by a potentially massive amount of users), without writing a single line of code in Java or Objective-C. Without GeneXus capabilities, we wouldn’t have been able to do it.

The Apps

Both in Android and iPhone, the App behaves the same way, thanks to GeneXus. The application has a list of events that will be part of the "Virada", and a list of the stages/locations, each one with its own atractions and map. Besides, there´s a map of all the stages that will have an event in the city. There are more than 150 locations where something is happening, usually at the same time. There´s also the atraction list itself, whether you want to see it in alphabetical order or by type (music, theather, Tourism) And inside every type, its genre (Rock, Punk, Action movies, art museum, etc)... There are 15 types and 178 subdivisions.and more than 1200 attractions, each one with one or more
presentations. Besides that, the apps also have a list of the latest news supplied by "Catraca Livre" and of Public Services, like how the public transportation is working throughout the day. By empowering Event Scheduling matched with Social sharing, the App grew very quickly the closer the Virada became in time.

Its development just required a couple of days in programming, a week of designing for iphone and another for android, to match them to the expected look and feel. One click to the cloud, and then to Google Play and Apple’s App Store. No way that would be possible without GeneXus. The App was chosen “Application of the Week” by the most important IT publication in Brazil and was ranked number 1 in Brazil in the Entertainment Category of the Apple Store. Until Sunday 6th there were 24.071 downloads of the app.