ShowClix Unleashes Superpowered RFID Solution At New York Comic Con

  • By Anthony | Tuesday, October 15th, 2013

Our ShowClix on-site team trekked to New York Comic Con in Manhattan this weekend to unveil our exciting new offering for major events: RFID admissions.

Among over 100,000 costumed comic book fans, our team and the pop culture convention geniuses at ReedPOP welcomed attendees to the massive four-day event. How did we handle the throngs of tech-savvy folks for our biggest event ever?

Earlier this year, we began working with our partners at ReedPOP on a plan for this event. We needed a system with enhanced security, faster admission and better engagement with attendees — RFID (radio frequency identification) was the answer

So how did it go?

Well, Lance Fensterman (Global V.P. at ReedPOP) told us, “What we did as a collective team was mind blowing. It was the most successful entry experience in the history of New York Comic Con.”

The technology worked flawlessly, and we couldn’t be prouder of our amazing on-site team of account managers, IT specialists and engineers.

Best of all, we’re excited to announce that we’ll be rolling out RFID for other huge events very soon.

While we still believe in good old-fashioned tickets, complex, multi-day events such as NYCC require a little something extra.

Paper tickets can be hard to hang onto over the course of a few days. You need the ticket for re-entry, but what if it gets ripped? Lost? Soaked and smudged on a rainy day? RFID fulfillment solves that problem with a special chip inside a durable plastic badge. As an added bonus, it makes a neat keepsake for the attendee.

RFID scanning at NYCC

Finally, when you’re dealing with waves of tens of thousands of guests, you need the fastest, easiest admissions solution around. RFID has an advantage over barcode scanning because of the wider scanning radius. Rather than relying on staff members to facilitate scanning with legacy hardware, guests can simply tap their RFID badges for immediate verification. Using quantum physics, we have determined that RFID scanning works about eighty zillion times faster than traditional scanners.*

The RFID development here at ShowClix wouldn’t have been possible without our brilliant engineering team, who utilized the off-the-shelf power of the Google Nexus 7 to build our in-house RFID solution. What would have taken millions of dollars and years of research, we were able to construct right here in our office.

Our Director of Software Engineering, Nate Good, believes that this is a great sign of opportunity for businesses in a variety of industries:

“Android’s open-source software and the Nexus 7 offered the perfect combination of portability, speed and advanced connectivity features like NFC that all worked together to make implementation easy. Access to open-source platforms will create major opportunities for businesses of all sizes to innovate and solve problems faster.”

*Of course, we’re not actually quantum physicists, so y’know, there’s that.