As an event organizer, you have hundreds of things to accomplish each and every day, but you still need to stay on top of your ticket sales. Live, our new, powerful mobile app, will help you monitor each ticket sold to your event with a beautiful display available on your mobile device.
We sat down with our Director of Software Engineering, Nate, and got the low down on Live. Read on as he covers how it works, as well as the technological guts of the app and what’s next in store for ShowClix analytics geeks:
So, what is Live, really?
Live is a mobile application, designed to deliver critical sales data to an event organizer’s smartphone as it happens. For example, if a ticket buyer visits your event page, Live can inform you of the visit — and where they came from — before their browser even finishes rendering the page. I’m not exaggerating; try it out!
Tell us about the technology behind Live.
We power Live with a real-time messaging system that is baked into the core of the ShowClix platform. This system is made of a cluster of servers that perform various tasks such as internal message passing, background processing, caching, data archiving and external real-time communication (e.g., communicating to an iPhone).
The system is language-agnostic, which means we can tie normally disparate languages and devices together quite nicely. Much of the system is built upon open-source technology, so we hope to eventually distill pieces of the system to be open sourced as well.
How will Live help event organizers?
I believe that event organizers are marketers at heart, and it’s widely understood that to be a great marketer, you have to understand your audience.
In the ticketing industry, one way to understand that audience is by studying sales reports. Six years ago, generating these reports online was still a novel idea in ticketing — however, today, it is ubiquitous. As this trend has grown and evolved, technology has also changed significantly, affecting the way we all engage with technology as well. Many of us repeatedly check our phones throughout the day for texts, tweets, photos and email notifications.
Live is intended to appeal to the same impulses for event organizers in a way that is not only convenient, but also beneficial to the ticketing and event planning process. Live presents the stuff that organizers care about (such as revenue, sales, traffic sources) in as few taps as it takes to check the weather or the score of a baseball game.
We’ve effectively killed the refresh button. The organizer can literally watch their ticketing data in the moment it happens.
What is your favorite feature of Live?
Well, I’m admittedly a data addict. The idea of data finding me really excites the marketer in me. As a result, I love the real-time traffic source breakdown. Imagine you just sent out a massive PR blast to multiple channels at once: social media, broadcast advertising, content channels, or anything really. Once you open Live, you’ll be able to watch ticket buyers flow into your event page in real time. It’s a marketer’s dream.
What’s next for Live?
Live is the first aspect of the ShowClix system to use our real time messaging platform. I don’t want to give too much away, but we have some exciting features planned for which Live will be the backbone. We’re even going to begin integrating Live with some preexisting features to make them join the streaming current of information that Live provides.
We like the idea of ShowClix actively communicating with our event organizers, so you can expect even more of this in the future.
Go Live today. Contact your account manager to learn more, or start selling tickets with ShowClix!