Tech Bosses who have lost it!

Happy Friday and welcome to Prof Particpant's blog, your favorite online membership, ticket and registration software, even if you don't know it yet.

Today we begin our latest series "Tech Bosses who have lost it". A self explanatory title with frankly horrific content. Not has horrific as this website (see what happens when developers and designers aren't paid on time)

Our inaugural subject is Mr Jim Balsillie, 52 year old Canadian and co-chief executive of Blackberry. Estimated to have been worth roughly $800 million in 2011, Basillie today sold his entire share for a meager $434 million (roughly). Yep, that's right, a staggering loss of half his estimated worth within 18 months, or in relative terms it might be easier to stomach; that's a loss of $24 million per month for 18 months, no, actually that's not easy to stomach at all.

We're not sure how BB will recover, with further share prices set to fall after this very embarrassing and very public vote of no confidence by Basillie. 

It may be too early to start engraving tombstones for Blackberry or "Research In Motion" as they are now officially called, but what is certain, that RIM jobs will be at risk over the next coming months, with retailers already shunning the new blackberry device for the iPhone and windows phone, the future certainly holds bleak things for RIM. We look forward to seeing you here next week.

Prof Participant.

                                                       

A Brief History of Transactions. Part 2. As told by Prof Participant.

Hello all! Last week on our ticket management and online registration blog we were talking about the death of the cheque. And how our old friend is now looking increasingly frail and decidedly worn out. So, introducing part two of two; A brief History of Transactions. As told by Prof Participant from www.particpant.co.uk the online leaders of event management systems.

Continued from last week....

The final nail in the coffin for our friend, the cheque, was the introduction of the big banks vendetta against the cheque. Vendetta may be a strong word, infact, very possibly used in entirely the wrong context, unless you read the Daily Mail in the UK. Surprisingly enough The DM has refrained from calling the cheque "The last true British institution" or something else equally as sensational, however, their beleaguered defence is of interest.
"Many big stores, such as Tesco and Marks & Spencer, refuse to accept them, and most utility firms impose a penalty on those paying by cheque" Reference

Unfortunately this statement isn't exactly reliable, however it does highlight how some high street companies are beginning to phase out paper for pin. But does anyone actually mind? Cheques are inherently fallible in terms of security, so are there people clinging on to the hope  that we will never see a demise of the cheque?

"We need to give people a choice. I want cheques to be kept. I am sure if you go out and talk to people, they will say they want cheques." Reference

So that's exactly what we at Participant did, out of the few people we asked, not one of them agreed with the above statement. We received opinions that cheques can easily be forged and therefor were untrustworthy  others believed strongly that technology had already taken over, one young person even admitted they had never written a cheque, therefor why should they begin now?

In conclusion, it is apparent that cheques are already obsolete to the younger generation. However! There may well unexpected savior for the cheque, infact, the very nemesis in which the cheque is embroiled in battle with, yes, that's right, technology may well come to the rescue of the cheque. With the rate of advancement of technology it is highly plausible to hypothesize that through new technologies the cheque may find itself being brought back from the brink, although we doubt it.

Thank you for reading, happy eventing!

Prof.

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