TECHMUNDO 2.0

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Tommi (at S60 blogs) seems to have developed quite a fascination with 2D barcodes. Here’s something that might wet his appetite with those wierd looking barcodes. To me they looks like modern glyphs.

I was window shopping with my sister at a local mall (SM North Edsa) in the Philippines and I saw kiosks at the movie houses. I’ve passed by these kiosks maybe a hundred times in the last six months and I just went passed it, not paying any attention to what it does, since I’ve never seen anyone using it.

Today, my curiosity got the better of me, and I went closer. Those kiosks were actually thermal ticket printers for people who bought tickets via their mobile phones. This service is wittily called TickeTXT.

We have this thing called G-Cash (for Globe Telecom subscribers) or Smart Money (for Smart Subscribers) which is simply a virtual (or mobile) wallet that stores local currency like a debit card, which can then be used to purchase goods, send money (for payment or remittance, both locally and internationally) to people under the same network, etc. etc. I’m not sure if it’s a service that is widely used by local cellphone users, but it’s a service that being pushed aggressively by the local operators. One merely needs to pick up a sunday newspaper and be flooded with full paged colored ads for these services.

So back to the kiosks. Smart subscribers (people who signed up with Smart Telecom, not necessarily people who are smart) can purchase movie tickets using their Smart Money and they receive a text message as confirmation of the purchase. Here’s where it gets interesting. Embeded in the confirmation message is a 2D barcode that they have to scan (the kioks have scanners), then their tickets get printed.

I wanted to take some pictures to upload but I didn’t have my camera with me (and the E61 sure isn’t equipped with one). I also wanted to try it out, but I’m not a subscriber of Smart Telecom (I’m with Globe). Sadly, I wasn’t able to test this new service out. But here’s an account of someone who tried and failed.

The terminals were branded Gavitec. Click on this link to see a video of how this service is done.