The Incredible Fee Table Update. Online Event Software

Hello there event managers! Just a quick post to let you know that your favorite online event management and ticketing system has updated our Fees category by adding in a new competitor. We've decided to do this as one of our clients did use this certain competitor, and to show them the saving they have made we developed an extra formula to our site.

Once again, Prof. Participant saving the day and saving you time and money. This time to the tune of £2 on a £40 ticket! Sometimes even we don't understand why our fees are so low. But it seems to keep our loyal customers happy, and loyal.

Regards,

Prof. Pwww.participant.co.uk/register

A Brief History of Transactions. Part 1. As told by Prof Participant.

Good afternoon all. This weeks Participant blog is a discussion about the demise of the cheque. As we are a company that deals with online tickets, event management and payments it is of paramount importance to us and many of our clients to understand and discuss emerging and dissolving trends.

In this weeks blog post we will start by discussing the popularity of the cheque, our main aim is to find out if anyone in 10 years time will ask for the cheque.

We will discuss why the market share has devolved, what the threats to the cheque are, and what new technologies may assassinate or perhaps revive this most ancient of modern monetary transaction medium.

The popularity or usability of the "cheque" has dropped fast (70% reduction since 1990). For a tool that heralded the new age of banking, it is now exhausted and withering fast (we are still talking about the Cheque, not DC).

The first cheque was first written in 1659 on February the 16th, reference, coincidentally the same day and year that Samuel Pepys ate scallops and went to the pub reference. 

They did of course account for a disgustingly large amount of transactions even in recent years, although, arguably in 1990 cheque payments reached their denouement with 4 billion payments made in said year, an amount not surpassed since reference.

To give you some tangible perspective of the number 4 billion; there are 4 billion inches from the most northerly point of Alaska to the most southerly tip of South America, and here is an example of a common cheque.

                                       

1990 was an important year for cheques, not only was that the year of the cheque, it was also the year that banks realised that the cheques days were numbered. Predicting a peak and gradual descent into obscurity the banks needed to create a new method of transferring capital, this heralded the age of magnetic ink.

However, magnetic ink only staved off the inevitable decline, whilst other technologies were being created and developed, it could be argued that magnetic ink did little to suture the hemorrhaging of the beleaguered cheque. The final nail in the coffin for our friend the cheque was the introduction of ....

Tune in next week for part 2.

Enjoy your weekend,

Prof Participant

Funtastic Friday

As you may have guessed from the title, each Friday we will be henceforth known as Funtastic Friday. This invariably means that as your most trusted event management software company we will be making strictly industry jokes and puns for you all to share.

So to kick things off, we will be having a speedy look over some of the content we posted this week. Starting off with success baby.

Success Kid, sometimes known as I hate sandcastle kid came onto the Meme Scene in 2008. Since then Sammy, as the child is known in the real world has even had his image used by Virgin Media in a campaign in February 2012. Seen below.

But what exactly is a meme? According to Google's definition, a meme is as follows;

MEME/MĒM/

1. An element of a culture or behavior that may be passed from one individual to another by nongenetic means, esp. imitation.
2. An image, video, etc. that is passed electronically from one Internet user to another.

A very specific definition that is not. However, we're sure you understand. In terms of Event Software related memes, there are plenty. Here are a few of our favorites for you to enjoy and share. We hope you have a good Friday and a even better weekend. Thanks for stopping by, Prof. Participant.

  

Participant.co.uk System: Mobile and Tablet Integration

Hello and welcome to new visitors and old. Today we will be talking about the importance of having a mobile friendly event page to sell your tickets through. As many of you are aware, each and every event, ticket and registration page set up on Participant.co.uk is now mobile friendly.

Image courtesy of Salty Waffle

What are you talking about Prof?

But what exactly does mobile friendly mean and how will it benefit your ticket sales and performance?

The coding team at Participant.co.uk saw that none of our competitors could offer a fully mobile optimised event and course management solution for their customers, infact, they don't offer many of the products we have as we discussed recently here.

So what we have done is to allow your ticket website to fit and change to what ever size screen it is displayed on. This mobile optimisation allows 24/7 access to your content on a range of devices, so customers can register or buy tickets with ease.

Show me the facts!

According to Pingdom; the mobile share of internet has increased by 183% between 2010-2012. What's more, 90% of adults who own a smartphone say they use it predominantly to browse online content & check their emails.

In Europe, we are the biggest growth sector bar the Asian market for mobile traffic and transactions. In essence, we want our customers to reach the widest audience possible as 95% of mobile users search products with their phone and 22% then proceed to purchase products online.

Mobile share of web traffic

	2010	2012	Increase 2010-2012
Africa	5.81%	14.85%	155.59%
Asia	6.1%	17.84%	192.46%
Europe	1.81%	5.13%	183.43%
North America	4.71%	7.96%	69.00%
Oceania	2.88%	7.55%	162.15%
South America	1.46%	2.86%	95.89%
Worldwide	3.81%	10.01%	162.73%

Image courtesy of Pingdom

To summarise, mobile optimised websites not only make your ticket selling website look good, it also saves your customers energy and that of their mobile phone! How about that. You can read more on the benefits of mobile optimised websites on mobile phone battery life click here. If you would like to read more about purchase behavior of customers on mobile websites you can find more information here. We hope you have enjoyed this brief insight into the benefits of mobile optimised web page.

Have a great weekend, & come visit us again at www.participant.co.uk.

Thank you for reading,

Prof. Participant

The Mask

Hello, Prof Participant here.

In this post we will be discussing why we offer our customers the choice to mask the URL for their events. To start selling tickets with our event management software simply create an event page and we can quickly customise your event to fit within your existing website.


What does it mean?

As we all know URL stands for Uniform or Universal Resource Locator. In essence, this will mean that with our tailored made piece of code we can change your website from containing this www.particpant.com/yourevent to this www.yourwebsite.com/yourevent or yourevent.yourwebsite.com.

But why mask it?

We offer the choice to mask the URL for several vital reasons. Firstly and arguably most importantly, our primary objective is not to detract from your brand. Participant is an event registration system which will improve the service to your current and new customers. Our customers have found that their website traffic has increased by up to 30% after they integrated Participant into their website.

We like to offer something different! All of our competitors prefer their logo and name to appear on every site built within the system, selfishly using your hits to improve their bottom line.

This aggressive marketing method may compromise your brands integrity and also may lose you customers as they are put off by being directed to an external website which will increase the amount of time it takes them to buy their tickets.

In conclusion

By offering you URL credibility we can assure you that your website reflects the prestige of your brand, which in turn will maintain a high customer experience resulting in an increase in those vital ticket sales.

If you would like read further on the issue of agressive marketing and it's inherent dangers, click here

System Specials Part 2 - Are you paying too much and waiting too long for your hard earned ticket sales revenue?

Hello Participators,

This week has seen the beginning of many new projects and features for Participant, online event registration and payment system.

In today's post we will be discussing a new feature for our event registration and online ticketing system. All releases are exclusive to Participant and our customers.we will be publishing more modules and releases throughout the first quarter of this year!

To get things going we briefly wanted to let you know about our fee and price tool that we recently released and you can use here! This allows you to quickly see how much you could save by using Participant when compared to similar providers.

As many of you are aware, Participant has the lowest fee in the UK for ticketing and registration software. Not only is our ticketing software robust and multi-faceted but our price is also what sees many of our customers using our system in the long-run.

Our fee is simple, £0.99p per transaction and 2.50% payment process fee. Whats more is that we pay you every week, we won't hold onto your hard earned revenue as we realise that cash-flow and solvency is key to the event industry.

The pricing tool is a new edition to the site, developed by ourselves we've consolidated our competitors latest fees and created a tool which will allow your to see in seconds the price you will save. We decided to create this feature for our users to visualise the prices and cost, and therefor make a more informed decision of who to use for your event ticket and registration needs.

To use our new price comparison feature, comparing event software companies please click here.

The Botnet Threat

A superpower of the online ticket world has been somewhat violently exploited in late 2012 by an interesting piece of devious software. We call it devious as it is still questionable whether this type mass buying/ exploitation is illegal.

The largest company targeted was, and most likely still is Ticketmaster, and they are not getting off lightly. The program called "Botnet" is designed to read Captcha codes. And they have taken a large scalp as the whole purpose of a Capthcha code is to differentiate between a computer and a human purchasing a ticket. However Botnet does not only pose a threat to ticket software companies, have a look here to see the Zombie Army Botnet threat to other prolific platforms.

Three men from California were arrested at the end of 2012 for allegedly commissioning a group of Bulgarian hackers to write the Captcha reading program.

This program is the latest play in a cat & mouse game between hackers and E-commerce anti fraud teams. Perhaps this new development may spell the end of Captcha as we know it. And sure enough a new style of Captcha code has been developed. It is called NuCaptcha. No points for originality there, however NuCaptcha heralds a simple alternative to its now easily exploited cousin.

Opposed to to traditional use of a still feature, NuCaptcha will be a short marketing video with a not so secret message, we're not talking about subliminal messages, which have been proved ineffective. In brief, Proffessor Participant's passing prose is that; this will undoubtedly keep the hackers at bay for at least a few weeks, if not longer.

The question which may now be burning your lips is "But what has Prof Participant done in the battle against the bots?"

Well, firstly, we have secured a very reputable payment service provider and merchant provider, this will mean that your revenue is guaranteed to be safe through many mechanisms we have implemented  The most integral mechanism would be our use of HTTPS.

HTTPS effectively means that no person or computer can track your payments once it has been made. As it is a secure payment gateway, all information is terminated once the portal is closed. This ensures that all your (and our) private information is cached and is therefor inaccessible to any third parties.

Have you got any thoughts on how to improve security for event websites and ticket selling systems, feel free to post a comment, tweet us or send an e-mail, we love talking tech and especially future technology options with our friends and clients. And if Ticketmaster are reading, dump the Captcha code guys, surely it's crippling you?

Thank you for reading,

Kind Regards,

Prof P.

Introductory Post

Happy New Year! We at ParticpantUK hope you all had a jolly Christmas and cracking festive period. We certainly did! Mostly we spent our time fiddling, tweaking and snagging our brand new shiny website, whilst all of you were at home relaxing. Well, we are pleased to say that our Event Registeration System has officially launched in the UK today!

Written and developed by event managers, for event managers our system will fit seamlessly into your current and future projects, and here are a few reasons why we stand out among the Event Management Software crowd.

1. We are cheaper that our competitors! 
2. We don't hold onto your cash! We transfer your ticket sales to your bank account weekly!
3. We can mask our URL to help strengthen your brand.
4. You will never need to create a merchant or PayPal account.

These are a few of the reasons why we have over 5,000 happy customers.

But don't just take their word for it, sign up here for free and experience the new online ticket software all the event managers are talking about. If you're not sure click here to enter a live chat session with us.

And remember to bookmark this page for our regular blog posts.

Happy New Year!

The Participant Team + Professor Participant

System Specials Part 1

Hello & welcome to system specials, episode 1. In this monthly www.participant.co.uk blog post we shall be mostly discussing new and exciting features & updated modules we have developed and implemented since the last system specials post.

As you may or may not know, we here at Participant specialise in Event Software and Event Registration for organisers online. Now the context has been set, lets talk System Specials.

Without further delay, lets see what this months system specials has in store for our lovely customers/reader base. Our latest module that we have developed will be sure to grab your attention, it is, the much awaited, much anticipated automated SMS reminder and ticket function.

Oh sweet, divine, radiant SMS text message reminder service from the heart of God himself. At a mere £0.10p per text you can send SMS tickets, reminder and messages to your attendees.

This feature is useful for both large and small events, and we at Participant have been pleased to see many of our existing customers adopt this extra module. Although there is still and emphasis on using our e-mail system for no extra cost to send your reminders, tickets and updates, we wanted to allow you access to the powerful medium of mobile messages.

To use this new module to its full potential you will be required to gain access to your attendees telephone numbers, this process is infact very simple & all you will be required to do is add an additional field for your attendee to complete when they register for your event.

This, in turn, will allow you to gather the data you require.

Any information gathered by our users will be protected and we can assure you that in no circumstances will it be passed on to any third parties. This is applicable to all data gathered by yourself through our system.

If you have any questions, please get in contact with us on Twitter @ParticipantUK or via e-mail or telephone here