This year’s Noise Pop has signed on as its official web and mobile sponsor a service called Whrrl. I work for them, but don’t take this as a shameless plug – if you’re attending the festival this year (or you wanna see how your cell phone can be transformed for free into a local discovery and social networking hub) read on…

As the official web and mobile sponsor of Noise Pop 2008, Whrrl puts the entire festival at one’s fingertips via a mobile device. The Whrrl service combines a massive wealth of factual information on locations and events with the ability to share subjective information on these same places and events in the form of reviews and comments. For Noise Pop 2008 in particular, the result is a unique festival discovery experience that allows attendees the ability to find relevant information on venues, artists and performance times as well as share and discover the location of their friends and their concert experiences in real-time, all from a cell phone.

Noise Pop 2008 attendees will be able to sign up for the free Whrrl service by texting the code “NP” to Whrrl (94775). Once registered with Whrrl, festival-goers will be able to use their mobile devices to access information about the various venues, their locations, artists and performance times. Noise Pop attendees will be able to share their locations in real-time by texting the name of their location to the Whrrl short code just mentioned above. Whrrl will also allow status updates whereby concert-goers can share their thoughts on particular performances with others in real-time. So, if you’ve got friends that’ll be at other venues, you guys can use Whrrl to do group notifications about live shows and find out in real time from each other which bands are killing and which might be dead. It’s pretty sweet…