Teenager coder app-y to help visitors to festival

One of the youngest app developers in Europe has turned his attention to his native city and designed a new app for visitors to the Winterval festival.

Waterford coder Jordan Casey, 15, already has seven games on the Apple app-store and has now developed a free app for the winter festival in his own city, which runs until the end of December.

Jordan, chief executive of Casey Games, has travelled the world to tech conferences in the last year, including the prestigious TEDx conference in New Delhi; the Cannes Lions Festival; the Bett education conference in London and the Festival of Games and The Next Web conference in Amsterdam.

Last May, he made a presentation at the TiEcon conference in Silicon Valley to CEOs of firms such as Netflix, LinkedIn, Amazon, and PayPal.

He has also just launched Teachware, a new cloud app aimed at teachers to help them manage information about their students.

Jordan said the Winterval app will make it easy for visitors to navigate the programme of events.

“The app also works offline, so I think this is important for children and also for overseas visitors to avoid roaming charges. The app is currently available to download on the Android store and it will be available on the Apple App store in the coming days.”

He recalled going to Winterval last year with his brother and sister.

“It was really great fun so I really wanted to help out this year. This is my first app for a tourism event. I normally develop games, so this was totally new to me. And I had to use my coding skills in a new category and I really enjoyed that.

“I learned a lot about the event, too, so I’m looking forward to going now.”

#Winterval great buzz around town today

— Jordan Casey (@CaseyGames) November 30, 2013

App-users can also tune into an in-built Winterval radio station which plays festival music, and gives access to tickets, information about Waterford, information where to eat and where to stay and access trip advisor reviews for these locations.

* The 30-day Winterval Festival — dubbed Ireland’s Christmas Festival — started last Friday and runs until Dec 23 and then from Dec 27 to Dec 31.

Wow what an amazing first day at #Winterval we really hope you all enjoyed it as much as we did! Can't wait for the first full day tomorrow!

— Winterval Waterford (@Winterval_WAT) November 29, 2013