Category Archives: Web Development

Paperless Gig Technology is STILL practical

In a report on BBC Newsbeat this week, Amelia Butterly claims that “Paperless tickets could help combat touts but many venues still do not have the capabilities to support them, say independent music promoters.”

The argument from Anton Lockwood, Director of DHP Group which owns a number of UK venues including Rock City, and Rescue Rooms in Nottingham states that “It only works where the cost of introducing the system can be spread over high ticket prices.”

in the last year I have been to plenty of shows at larger venues the majority of which are using barcode scanning terminals for checking tickets on the door. I can imagine that these custom built handheld ticket readers are indeed expensive to implement  but that’s because these handhelds are being produced and manufactured by the large ticket companies namely, SEE, and TIcket Master. So who is to blame for this high cost to entry for paperless tickets, well to no surprise the companies who make money from printing physical tickets because they charge the client more for printing which has to be factored into the overheads for the promoter and thus ticket prices are higher. This is why I get so annoyed by these same companies because they have the balls to charge you extra for postage (it is not averaging £2.50 per ticket to be posted), and if you do pay for e-tickets when they’re available they find another means of increasing the cost of the ticket when of course in theory the overhead has reduced.

Well let’s just take a small (very small) step back here and think about that last claim. Is there a reduction in cost just because it is online? No not really, there still needs to be a system to produce your e-ticket, it still needs to be maintained, supported and tested. But Surely, a reliable system ensures a reduced risk of error and still should be considerably smaller. One of the positives for paperless billing and paperless tickets has been the fact that the cost of printing is passed onto the client.

There are several payment services and banks right now developing and testing alternative payment techonologies to reduce the cost of entry for small business to accept card payments and to do away with the card terminal. This is being met with huge success rates. How is it being done? By building web apps that are capable of running on any mobile device with a connection to the internet. What does that mean? It means whatever you have in your hand if you’re working on the door could be checking, those tickets and getting people into the venues, infront of the bands and having a great time.

In another section of the article a nameless Spokesperson from Ticketmaster said that paperless tickets are an artist led and it’s up to the musician and then cites Robbie Williams show at the O2. This is a great example of ignorance in the industry. If this clown from Ticketmaster honestly believes Robbie Williams himself has ever said to his manager ‘oh are we doing paper tickets this tour’ then Mr Ticketmaster Employee has no idea how the business works.

Yes there are exceptions. The holier than thou’s of the industry, the Radiohead’s and Trent Reznor’s who are trying to take control of what happens to fans at shows, but anyone who has read any of the reports from either camp will know the problems they faced in doing so, mainly by cutting out the Ticket Operator they were faced with disgruntled venues and also had to buy the tickets back and resell them, all to avoid touts. Trent Reznor on NIN Summer Tour 2009

But it is a double edged sword for venues and promoters. I know first hand how hard it is to sell out a show when you’re reliant on telephone bookings, and physical tickets being available in independent retail shops in your local area. The Forum in Tunbridge Wells celebrates 20 years of live music in 2013. From 1999-2002 I worked as a booker at the venue, we had good shows and bad shows like any other and were very much reliant then on a message board on the website to generate interest and ticket sales from the shops. We printed our own tickets, had 3 shops that you could buy from and would over subscribe our telephone reservations list (we couldn’t take payment by phone) because we would have an average drop off of 60% people not turning up. Every Friday and Saturday night was a gamble. We could never afford to use a service like SEE, Ticketmaster, or Wayahead back then because their rates would mean our average ticket price of £4/5 would have to double and we knew people wouldn’t pay that.

Now, the Forum uses MusicGlue, a service which has been created to do away with the big players in ticketing. These smaller services are what will change the face of paperless ticketing. As soon as they start to think about mobile application development seriously, venues around the country could be beeping you at the door.

How much does a responsive design cost?

In response to the post by Brad Frost,

 

The most crucial statement there was about changing you processes. This is the biggest sticking point in agencies I have encountered. There may be people reluctant to learning new methods of working in order to provide the service that everyone wants.

Question: Are you increasing your costs due to your own lack of knowledge, or because the work significantly increases when considering multiple devices? It would sound to me that people are increasing their development times and costs because they themselves have not been working on their own lab projects over the last few years. At the very basic level if you have been building liquid layouts instead of fixed width in recent years you are a great way there on a front-end perspective.

I worry that people are going to be put of a method of working which is striving for a utopian dream because ill equipped and managed agencies are suddenly going to ramp up their costs.

Implied consent for cookies

This week is Cookie week and ICO have already been busy getting their marketing machine drumming up awareness with several articles written by the BBC with numerous sound bites about what people should have done, should be doing, will need to do in the future.

XX has conceeded this is not an easy area to work in. Major sites use a vast majority of cookies for various needs and that evening auditing these is a massive challenge commercially.

The most significant nugget that I read today was that there is now an accepted level of implied constent from the user. We call me a total pleb who has never been on the internet but haven’t we been doing that since the very start? By looking on the website you accept the terms of usage and in most cases ignore the link in the footer which tells you what that actually entails.

My stand point is this.

  1. This is only relevant in the EU and websites are global
  2. We’ve always had privacy policies which said cookies were used

So how can you be compliant with this complete farce of a law? Simple just write a bloody good privacy policy. This law is bullshit and it has been from day one. It doesn’t come down to impact on the user experience which is what many industry loud mouths have been spouting off over. It comes down to it being sodding expensive to go through every site that provides service to people in Europe and audit them for a technological device that nobody even knew about let alone gave a shit about until somebody started threatening financial fines.

I will be encouraging all of my associates to update their privacy policies with encouraging and information plain English content instead of legalease and telling them to do absolutely nothing else.

UPDATE:

This is taken from the ICO blog (http://www.ico.gov.uk/news/blog/2012/updated-ico-advice-guidance-e-privacy-directive-eu-cookie-law.aspx)

First issued in May 2011, the guidance has been updated to clarify the following points around implied consent:

  • Implied consent is a valid form of consent and can be used in the context of compliance with the revised rules on cookies.
  • If you are relying on implied consent you need to be satisfied that your users understand that their actions will result in cookies being set. Without this understanding you do not have their informed consent.
  • You should not rely on the fact that users might have read a privacy policy that is perhaps hard to find or difficult to understand.
  • In some circumstances, for example where you are collecting sensitive personal data such as health information, you might feel that explicit consent is more appropriate.

Net magazine quote

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Quote from me (Detroit Michigan) in this months net magazine. The question was what do you do with the magazine every month. As with all things in the press it has been edited as it started by me saying that I get to the yellow pages then think I am done with this, but still great to see a pseudonym in print.

I am in the processes of writing my first article for net magazine which I hope to be coming out in the summer months.

Cookie Wars .net response

I wrote a response to the article on netmag regarding the forthcoming laws on cookie dropping in the UK/EU.

Here is my comment:

As an industry we have seen these kind of regulations before and they get cast aside with great ease.
There is no internet police force because it would be like policing a nation of billions.

This is no different to the laws on enforcing triple A sites or more relevant the use of javascript.

There is nowhere for this argument or regulation to go except for browser side. The fact that it wasn’t pushed there first is appalling. If you want to control the behavior of a website you do it with the viewing device not the site itself.

Think about your TV. If your favourite show comes in looking too orange, do you ring the network and tell them they’re streaming in a colour tone that doesn’t quite suit your taste? No, you grab the remote and change the saturation.

The browser is where this needs to happen purely by numbers, less browsers than sites/pages.

http://www.netmagazine.com/opinions/cookie-law-gnarly-truth#comment-3925