Virgin Mobile's 'mobile lighter' festival survival kit

Link: Tech.co.uk | News | Mobile lighter for music festival moments

Gig goers can now create those lighter-in-the-air moments with their mobile phones, thanks to a new virtual lighter that’s part of the Mobile Festival Survival Kit from Virgin Mobile.

Phil at tech.co.uk reports that the survival kit, a brilliant idea, includes a virtual lighter that you can wave at folk as well as a torch (that’ll be priceless when you’re stuck in a muddy tent hunting for your spare mobile battery).

Phil’s story includes instructions to download the survival kit — texting VFEST to 82330. I did the very same from my T-Mobile handset and got a reply back straight away. Unfortunately when I loaded the link, I got the above message. Not very useful. In fact it was bordering on helpful, but not quite. Perhaps it’s for Virgin Mobile customers only. You’d think that, if this is the case (assuming it’s not actually broken), that they’d be marketing the hell out of this fact with some cheeky Virgin-esque text (“If you had a decent mobile service, you’d be able to see this page” or “You’re not cool enough to see this page”).

So hunting for more information for you, dear reader, I hit the Virgin Mobile UK press office site. I was looking for more details — you know, a screenshot or something, ANYTHING… but all that I found was their ‘we are not as cheap as Tesco Mobile’ story about their roaming costs (38p a min vs TESCO… yes, TESCO at 35p a min). Nothing about the survival kit. Sometimes I forget that most companies aren’t yet in the era of joint-up marketing and public relations.

Anyway it sounds a great idea — and I’m sure it’ll be a wicked implementation, especially since it’s Mobstar who’re behind it.