Edinburgh Fringe gets digital guide

If you fancy buying a ticket for the Edinburgh Festival Fringe, you would do well to ditch the 160-page programme and check out their website.

Here, at the festival's virtual home, an online character called Ed Fringe will guide you through the database of 15,000 performances and help organise your diary.

The site also offers an online dating agency, where budding performers can network, and a daily weather report.

Partnership deals with Compaq, Nokia and Orange provide the technology behind the site, which has been designed by Glasgow-based tictoc.

The Edinburgh Festival, which starts on 6 August, is the first arts organisation to offer online ticket booking on this scale. Organisers hope the site will boost ticket sales by at least 15%.