Technology Proposal
Enhancing customer experiences must be the aim of any technology deployment, while allowing capture of data and information in real time. The Music and Food Festival have immense opportunities for allowing technology deployment. Technologies like Bluetooth, QR Codes, and Wireless Networking, among others can be effectively deployed in the Music and Food Festival that is being planned, along with benefits to the main sponsor.
Bluetooth – Bluetooth offers an excellent wireless communication protocols at short distances and has ample bandwidth to carry data back and forth. Bluetooth hot spots in the festival venue can be deployed in a number of ways. At the entrance of the venue, the festival participants can be encouraged to switch on the Bluetooth on their mobile phones and to fill in a form that is deployed over Bluetooth, which will capture their personal information like name, e-mail ID, and phone number. This will make them eligible for a lucky draw raffle; the winners of which will be randomly selected by the computer system, and this will make them eligible for a free credit card and a free bank account with the bank. Every 50th person filling in this Bluetooth form and submitting it back will be eligible for a gift hamper. This is aimed to encourage more and more users to fill in the Bluetooth enabled form. The entire venue will be Bluetooth enabled, which will allow the participants within range to download ringtones from the song being played at the moment at the event. Also, the same technology can be used to allow users to cast their approval ratings on the numbers being played at the event. This will also add-on the feature of user approval rating to the music being played.
QR Codes – QR Codes can be displayed on posters featuring the band players and when any participant of the event scans the QR code using a QR Code scanner will take them to a website that will give them information about that particular artist who is participating and performing in the festival. As a matter of fact, anything and everything at the venue can be QR coded, and those can in turn be programmed to point to internet sites that will give the participant information about that particular player or even the instrument. QR codes have become a very popular form of “ïd-ing” and offer instantaneous information download to the users.
QR codes essentially machine readable matrix of black and white squares. They usually contain an embedded URL or other information and can be easily read by a camera of a smartphone. QR code stands for Quick Response code and is also informally referred to as a two dimensional bar code. This was first tried and applied in Japan for the car manufacturing industry. The major advantages of a QR code is that it can be read very fast and have a much larger storage capacity when compared to the conventional machine readable bar codes.
QR codes have become immensely popular outside of the auto industry because of their quick readability and the volume of data that they can hold. They are used across a variety of applications in the industry like tracking of products and assembly systems, time tracking, document tracking sometimes even can be seen in individual resumes which when scanned would take them to a LinkedIn page or a personal website! There are a number of innovative applications that can be used for QR codes and they are becoming more popular almost across all industry segments. The QR codes which are essentially black squares on white background can be read and interpreted using the Reed-Solomon error correction method. It was first created by Denso Wave in 1994. There have been a number of standards that were applicable for the QR codes and the latest one is the “ISO/IEC 18004:2000 Information technology – Automatic identification and data capture techniques – QR code 2005 bar code symbology specification.”
QR codes off late have become common in consumer advertising. It has become very useful in advertising because it allows users to access quickly specific web pages instead of typing in the whole URLs. It also has been observed that using QR codes quickens the sales cycle. The QR codes are now being popularly used in a variety of applications like commercial tracking, transport ticketing, entertainment etc. QR codes can also be used to store bank payment information and can be programmed to work only with specific payment providers. QR codes can be used to log in into specific web sites.
These applications named above can have the uses for the sponsorship for the Food and Music Festival 2015. The bank can allow the participants to directly go into their backing accounts / credit card web pages. They can use them to hasten the sales cycle which is of paramount importance to the bank as the main sponsor. The bank needs quicker closures and higher RoI on the dollar that they have invested into the sponsorship of the event. QR codes are free and do not need a license to be created and used.
The only seeming risk with the QR codes is that the embedded URL may have executable java files that could be a potential risk to the users’ systems or phones. However since in this case the applications are legitimate, there is no such risk and such risks may be safely ruled out.
Wi-Fi hot spots: Wi-Fi hot spots can be created at the event site. This will allow they current generation of users to post actively on the social media sites, the advantage of this is that the marketing material of the sponsors and the complete event will get more eyeballs than what is envisaged. The users can be encouraged to post on Facebook, Twitter and even Instagram that will bring more publicity that is user driven to the event. There can be a competition of the number of posts on Facebook, Twitter and Instagram during the event and there could be a lucky prize for the winner. Now how will all this matter to the sponsor?
The answer to this moot question is that as more posts happen on the social media the sponsor is also getting so many more eyeballs. This is added bonus to the sponsor.
Creating wi-fi spots is not a difficult task any longer. All it requires is a robust internet connection connected to a good, reliable wi-fi router. The access must be open and not be secure by a password.
Secure connection will make the users ask for password and only those participants who are really keen on the matter will invest the time in figuring out the password and accessing it. If the access is without security more number of participants will be encouraged to access the net. Several studies have found out that the first few things that a normal internet user would do on accessing the net is to access social media – which is an advantage to the sponsor. This does not really cost much but can increase the reach of the event multi-fold.
Several and all of the initiatives in this proposal are of direct benefit to the main sponsor the bank that is sponsoring the food and music event. As a matter of fact QR codes can be assigned to each of the food item on display. These QR codes when scanned can be programmed to go to the web page that shows the name of the item, its preparation, the owner of the item, a brief biography of the owner, the history of the food item, its multiple variants etc. The possibilities are humungous and limitless, limited only by the human imagination and the time that the event organizer is willing to invest into spreading the foot print of the event.
Investing in technology will also in many ways reduce the carbon footprint of the event by consuming lesser paper based systems. Paper tickets to raffles is left out – lesser paper consumed. Paper for making notes of the items presented in the food festival is left out – lesser paper consumed. Paper for making note of the music players is left out – lesser paper consumed. The event itself can be a paperless ticketless entry by sending out short text messages of the ticket. This can be inspected at the gates and appropriate codes can be entered into the system there that will not allow duplicate entries. For more than one visitor on the same ticket, the facility of number of entries per ticket can be customised and this will even free the groups from congregating together before entering into the venue and allowing each person to come in at their convenience and interest. This also creates a validated database of the participants at the venue that will be of commercial interest to the sponsors.
Using and applying technology in an entertainment event has unlimited possibilities and more technology that is used reduces the negative environmental impact and reduces the carbon foot print of the entire event. This will also make the festival one of its kind in having a minimal carbon footprint and go on to attract more environment conscious visitors too for this purpose.
Overall there can be many technologies that can be applied, some of which that have been suggested like the short text messaging, Wi-Fi, BlueTooth and QR codes can be innovatively applied for and used at the International Food and Music Festival 2015.
