TJ Crawford’s Abstract Ideas

I am working on a project for the Las Vegas Monorail that has been one of the most fun, and rewarding, in my career.

We started working with the LVMC in late 2006, with a website redesign and a very basic purchase of tickets online. The delivery was all off line via snail mail however. Our contacts were new to the Monorail as they had just undergone a corporate purge from the top down. They had inherited a project that a 3rd party had been working on to bring mobile barcodes to the Monorail for their tickets. To make a really long story short the 3rd party was not equipped to implement such a project and ended up burning up a year and a half of time trying. We had been helping them with the integration to the LVMC’s current online purchase process and had formed a great relationship with the company that licensed the barcode technology to the 3rd party in the first place (Swiftpass UK). Swiftpass revoked their license due to non-performance and myself/Twelve Horses picked up where they left off.

In the meantime while all of this was going on we had been listening to the LVMC and their website needs as well as some of their pain regarding sales, specifically corporate sales. They had formed a corporate sales team and were going to be approaching all of the large trade shows and conventions as well as the hotel properties asking them to offer LVMC tickets. After talking to them a little while about how they planned on accomplishing, and more importantly supporting and scaling this it was evident the TH team could help. Since we had developed the purchasing front end, integrated with the credit card processor and with Swiftpass for the barcodes we were uniquely positioned to develop a ticketing platform that could transact tickets based on the varied targets the LVMC was pursuing.

Our platform uses a re-branded interface for the companies that did not have the time, effort or expertise to do a full scale implementation. This was the same process the LVMC used to transact tickets however we allowed for text and graphics to be completely changed and branded for whomever the partner was. Additionally for the large and sophisticated partners we developed an API interface allowing them to integrate LVMC ticket sales right into their established shopping cart, folio or purchasing engine.

Currently this system is powering the ticket sales for the likes of CES, ASTA and all the major trade shows that come to Vegas. In April we will be launching the next major phase to this and delivering a 2D Barcode directly to the purchasers mobile phone. they can then use that phone at a special eTicket kiosk to print their LVMC Ticket.

In the time we lost other industries have introduced mobile based tickets such as the Pirates baseball stadium, Continental Airlines and a Ski Resort in Bend, Oregon. unfortunately it will not be the first to market implementation we had hoped for however it will be the first to integrate with a Magnetic Stripe ticket so often used by Transit Authorities.

 We continue to build upon the features and extend the systems capabilities. We are in the planning phases to provide the hardware & desktop applications for extend the system to their customer service booths. Additionally an integrate with their other systems so we can aggregate their revenues from their other system (Scheidt & Bachmann) and give the LVMC real-time tracking & reporting of their revenues.

Cool & fun stuff.

This entry was posted on Sunday, January 6th, 2008 at 10:44 pm and is filed under My Work, Technology. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.