Barcode ticket
Do you tire of queueing for hours in the rain to buy tickets to see your favourite band, only to find the last ticket has been sold to the person in front of you? Then you will be pleased to hear that Edinburgh-based Mobiqa has pioneered a ticket-issuing system that uses your mobile. In future when punters order tickets online, Mobiqa’s ‘mobi-ticket’ system will send a ‘barcode ticket’ to the customer’s mobile phone as a picture message, along with ‘ticket copy’ text. All music fans have to remember to do then is to take their phones to the gig and present the barcode picture message to the doorman to be scanned.

Ticket touting
According to Mobiqa there is a huge benefit to the use of this new technology. The barcode on the mobi-ticket is scanned and validated on a database – the barcode is generated from the unique ticket number – so it can only be redeemed once. This makes the system more secure and more difficult for ticket touts and forgers.

Although this new system could herald the end of an era for those who collect imaginatively designed or sought after tickets it has the potential to reduce the cost as there would be no printing, post and administrative costs.

Mobi-ticket use
Ronnie, the technical architect of mobi-tickets, says this system has already been successfully trialled – at a Primal Scream concert in December 2002. Since then it has been used at the Edinburgh International Festival and at events in Australia and more recently in the Philippines. While music and arts events are the first frontier, the use of Mobi-tickets could expand into other areas. Soon tangible tickets could be something we tell our children about, the way our parents told us about those pioneering rock gigs.

This article is an extract from a longer article printed on the British Council’s Culture Lab web site. Why not check out other Culture Lab articles at: www.CultureLab-uk.com

Connie
June 2005

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