Festival culture is on the rise. With the introduction of several new festivals around the world, existing events become even bigger in scale to keep up with the high demand. Technology has been following this trend as well, in an effort meet the changing nature of the festival experience and concerns promoters have about efficiency, safety, and social media presence.
In the last few years, RFID (radio-frequency identification) technology, originally used in an industrial context, has been introduced to the entertainment industry and is changing our ticketing experience as we know it. Wristbands using RFID technology created by Intellitix have been developed to address crowd control, gate crashing, counterfeiting, lost tickets, social media integration, and identification of guests in case of emergency. It's a pretty impressive list for one chip.
Wristbands with these capabilities have already been implemented at major music festivals across the globe such as Coachella, Bonnaroo, Lollapalooza, SXSW, Electric Zoo, and Eurosonic Noorderslag. “Live Click Stations,” featured at Coachella and Bonnaroo, allowed festival goers to automatically check in to the events on Facebook. 30,000 guests registered for this service at Coachella with over 70,000 at Bonnaroo. Bonnaroo also featured a “Live Click Photo Station,” which made it possible for guests to take pictures that were simultaneously uploaded to Facebook. The new wristbands were also very successful at this summer's Wavefront festival in Chicago, where they easily differentiated between VIP and GA ticketholders and made the festival run smoothly.
Serge Grimaux, the founder of Intellitix, is currently working to develop a cashless payment system that would allow guests to make payments at festivals using their wristbands. The system would either be set up as a debit account with people transferring money before the festival or as credit with guests linking a credit card to the account. This development would improve the speed of transactions and reduce fraud by introducing a way for guests to purchase goods without having to carry cash or credit cards.