Ticketing: Smartphone is passed!
Major ticket sale outlets dominate the market when it comes to selling tickets. For small organizations the link to those big ticket systems are often too complex and expensive. Even using smartphones drops out as a low-cost alternative. Indeed with its internal camera and various apps, barcodes can be captured, but an effective ticketing with smartphones is hardly possible. The software producer Leomedia from Leonberg, reports exclusively why they actively decided against smartphones for their ticketing and why using the PANMOBIL scan technology also helps small organizations to be able to use an effective ticketing system.
“No bits and pieces”
“We also want to provide small organizations with low-prized ticketing services” explains Alex Groß, project manager of the customer service at Leomedia. “When an organizer works together with one of the big organizations, he has to specifically establish the infrastructure of the ticketing system by himself, train its staff extensively in handling those systems. For the most of them that is too much work. The requirements of our customers are the system and the scanner for the ticket registration must be as simple as it gets to operate. They are no technicians; they are artists who has to work with that technology. They don’t want to have so many bits and pieces around it, the organizer just want to know: if the ticket is valid or not. And that works out perfectly with the PANMOBIL SCANNDY!”
Ticketing with system
The ticketing proposal of Leomedia complies with organizers like “Kultur auf dem Hof”, or also “Salten Gastspiele”. These are mostly theatres with 3 to 4 stages that offer events for up to 4000 people. The ticketing experts provide the organizer with individually created event websites and interfaces with which they can organize the ticket sales. With the sophisticated management system “LEO-Ticket” visitor can buy a “Print@Home” online ticket and easily print it and bring it to the event. On the ticket is a barcode, which carries all necessary data for the identification of the ticket. For the event location itself Leomedia provides a tiny mobile computer, which has been configured with the help of LEO-Ticket. The ticket data which includes who bought a ticket for which seat, will be transferred via the tiny computer and Wi-Fi to the mobile barcode scanner of PANMOBIL. At the entrance the staff just needs to scan the codes on the tickets.
“The whole thing works on the “Zero-Configuration-Principle”, which means the organizer doesn’t have to individually set up the devices before the application, the scanner connect automatically with the provided Wi-Fi and configure themselves”, explains Thomas Maier, technical project officer. ”Thanks to the scanner with the help of the mobile networking the system always knows, who enters the event with which ticket or for example who steps out in the brake time. Every time a ticket is been scanned the data synchronizes, via the available computer with all available devices. So it works out perfectly for event locations with multiple entries.” With this self-explanatory and fully automatic ticketing system, the organization is a piece of cake. The staff just need to turn on the scanner and the tiny computer at the event location and connect via Wi-Fi and everything is set up. So the staff is ready to greet the guests at the entrances and scan the barcodes on the tickets.
Smartphones: unsuitable for a proper ticketing
For the application Leomedia needed a simple and fast scanner. The developer thought of smartphones, because capturing QR-Codes and barcodes are possible with the internal camera. However it is very slow and hard to handle the staff had to look at the display for too long. Greeting the guests and targeting the barcode at the same time was not an easy task using smartphones. Quickly it became clear. The whole thing just works out with the right barcode scanner. It has to be a Barcode Scanner with a laser that recognizes and captures the codes very fast. They voted for PANMOBILs SCANNDY, because of its OLED display that shows the ticket information and captures barcodes very fast.
“The great thing for us about the SCANNDY is that it is freely programmable” enthuse Thomas Maier. “Our firmware is the only application on the device, which the user reaches without any detours. That is very important for our application. A lot of other Scanners are based on Android for example, which have correspondingly complicated menus and thereby make the handling more difficult."
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