Through the turnstiles on your mobile phone
Mobile ticketing is the next step in a mobile world. The market has already responded and offers mobile ticketing - a service which is slowly but surely conquering the world of trade fairs, too.
On August 1, 82.8 million mobile phone cards were registered in Germany, more than the German population, the German Association for Information Technology, Telecommunications and New Media (Bitkom) has announced. The huge potential of that handy omnipresent gadget has now been discovered by service providers, and not only for the German market. So in May of this year, Orbit-iEX, Switzerland's largest IT trade fair, welcomed visitors with an innovation at its gates: Organiser Reed Exhibitions launched facilities that allow exhibitors to offer their customers electronic tickets. They in turn could either print out their entrance ticket conventionally or load it onto their mobile phone. This service was used no fewer than 10,000 times. To gain entry visitors merely had to call up the ticket on their mobile and then swipe it across the electronic reader.
Giancarlo Palmisani, director of Orbit-iEX, implemented the service with a young enterprise from Germany. xsmart AG, headquartered in Bad Rappenau, which walked away with the Innovators Show Award 2006 at CeBIT Hanover in the category "Mobile Payment / Mobile Application" for best business idea, had already been responsible for a number of projects in the mobile ticketing, mobile parking, mobile couponing and mobile marketing sector including a mobile payment platform. Together with Mobile-City GmbH, xsmart AG operates Germany's largest "HandyTicket-Community" which offers an invoicing platform at www.myHandyTicket.de. Several cities in Germany have also implemented a mobile parking solution. In 2005, more than one million mobile phone tickets were issued over the "myHandyTicket" service. According to xsmart, one in ten parking fees in Wiesbaden is paid for via mobile phone.
Nevertheless, the introduction of mobile ticketing for his trade fair proved a challenge for Giancarlo Palmisani: "This is the first time the system has been used on this scale. We set up a help desk at the turnstiles for emergencies. But by and large the system worked well and we are already working on technical improvements such as barcode recognition for the next Orbit-iEX." Before this service can be offered to all trade fair visitors the infrastructure of the Zurich exhibition site will have to be adapted. "We wanted to try out the system on a small technophile target group. But, in future, we will increasingly be going over to electronic solutions."
Needless to say, this new ticket service considerably reduces the logistic effort for Reed Exhibitions. Then there is the added advantage of automatic visitor registration. For the exhibitor this innovation means not only simple and paperless processing but also additional marketing value-added: Vouchers or coupons for competitions can be integrated into the entrance ticket code, increasing visitor frequency to the stand. The tickets issued by xsmart comprise barcodes that are sent to a mobile phone as a GIF file, thus making them displayable on every type of mobile phone. The link to the file is transmitted as an SMS. Mobile ticketing can only be used with GPRS-capable mobile phones which can download the barcode image. Even if the GPRS connection does not work, entrance by mobile ticket is still guaranteed: The SMS also contains a ticket ID and a 24-hour code which assigns the ticket to the user. xsmart provides the entire infrastructure that is needed for mobile tickets - Internet pages for registration, automatic barcode generation and decoding, barcode readers at the trade fair entrance.
The technology was used at the Small Business Expo 2006 in New Zealand, x.days 2006 in Interlaken and the GRID ICT Forum 2006 in Lucerne. "We have received dozens of inquiries from Germany and abroad on other possible applications of our core technology", reports Marco Mezger, CEO of xsmart, who views the future with optimism: "According to current prognoses by the market research experts Juniper Research, revenue from mobile ticketing will increase to US$ 44 billion by the year 2010."
Matrix Solutions of Hamburg also offers mobile tickets. Their "PicTickets" can be ordered online and transmitted directly as an SMS to the mobile phone of the customer. "PicTickets" can be sent to almost all mobile phone types and are not limited to MMS handsets. The system has already been used successfully at more than 200 events. And two conventions in Berlin have also used it: the German Federal Ministry of Economics and Technology's conference e-mobility and e-Fussball that ran concurrently with e/home. According to Tanja Ackermann, responsible for marketing and sales at Matrix Solutions, negotiations are underway with one large German exhibition company. "We have developed a special solution for the trade fair sector: The user receives an e-mail that contains a link, user name and password. He or she loads the ticket onto a mobile phone. On entering the trade fair, the user swipes the mobile phone across a scanner and a badge is printed out on the feedback terminal. The advantage for users: they receive their entrance ticket immediately and at short notice, and they can't forget it. The advantages for the fair organiser/event promoter: good service for the visitor, increased turnover through last-minute accreditation without stress at the point of entry, lower distribution costs, mobile marketing in the form of trade fair information dispatches."
m+a report Nr.6 / 2006 vom 22.09.2006
m+a report vom 22. September 2006