Shiny ‘appy people Appmiral Running for eight years, Belgian company Appmiral has focussed heavily on festival apps for the past four, building the official app for Rock Werchter in their home market as well as for Groovin the Moo in Australia, amongst others. While most apps are built from a customisable template, Robin Van den Bergh, sales and marketing director, argues it is essential to constantly refresh them – in part to keep up with improvements in smartphone operating systems, but also ever-changing market and consumer expectations. “We have a framework, so that means we have the skeleton of our application there,” he says. “Every two years we do a total rebuild of the skeleton as that is what the industry needs. It also works with the new operating systems on Android and iOS.” Extending the shelf life of an app is increasingly important, he argues, and brands are looking to become more involved to help bankroll them, but while apps can increasingly do more things and link into beacons and Bluetooth networks, Van den Bergh cautions that this should be done sparingly to avoid undermining the consumer experience. “For us it’s really important that we build an app with as little battery drainage as possible,” he says. “Battery power is a commodity – a rare commodity.”
Stikit Active Ticketing was founded by Lee Booth, Ed Goring and Andy Cleary in October 2015, and its Ticketing-as-a-Service (TaaS) platform, Stikit, launches in September this year. The white label offering can be used either as a complete box office solution or in conjunction with existing ticketing systems to deliver a highly-secure, fully immersive ticket. “Stikit has a sophisticated real-time fan experience engine that creates personalised tickets for events,” says CEO Lee Booth. “Tickets can now automatically contain social, travel, F&B, content, artist and event information to augment the fan experience.” Active believes that multiple layers of security, promoter/vendor-owned data, and the ability to create a transactional, emotional and personalised relationship with users will serve Stikit well. And with a football club, an F1 team, several festivals, major artists and a theme park already signed up, they might be right. “Mature ticket markets such as the UK and US have seen year-on-year growth in mobile and are rapidly moving towards ‘mobile-first’ consumer behaviour. Meanwhile, emerging markets such as Africa, South America and Asia have a ‘mobile-only’ generation,” Booth says. “Currently though, a lack of native mobile understanding within ticketing is holding back some companies from delivering genuine leaps of confidence in identity and security.”
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IQ Magazine September 2016