Sauder student entrepreneurs develop award-winning app for paperless ticketing
A team of Sauder and UBC student entrepreneurs has come up with a mobile app called “goodnights” that will give Ticketmaster a run for its money.
Available free from iTunes, the goodnights app provides a convenient paperless event ticketing solution.
Users can buy tickets on their phone using the app, which stores a digital copy of the ticket that allows them to gain entry to the event. The app further helps fans, artists and promoters by addressing the resale of tickets in the same mobile platform, allowing the simple and safe transfer of tickets between people.
Capitalizing on the inherently social nature of events, the goodnights app also allows fans to co-ordinate their social activities as well as promote their favorite artists by sharing ticket purchases directly on their social networks.
For their innovation, the student team of Sauder Commerce student Michael Moll, Sauder Commerce/Computer Science student Jeff Blake and Justin Locke, a UBC student in the Faculty of Arts, snagged first prize at the University of Mobile Challenge on March 1 in Barcelona at the GSMA World Mobile Congress, the premier event for the mobile communications industry. This year’s GSMA congress attracted more than 67,000 visitors from 205 countries. The UBC team competed against 13 international student teams from countries including India, France, the US and UK.
A few months ago, Moll, Blake and Locke formed a company called Good Nights Entertainment to bring the app to market, and have launched their first iPhone and Android versions of the app.
Moll, a fourth-year commerce student at the Sauder School of Business, says he and his partners are negotiating with a number of Vancouver-based companies to begin selling tickets for a service fee of eight per cent.“We’re not like Ticketmaster with multiple fees,” he explains. “We have one fee and we show our users one ticket price and everything is included.”
Moll says that goodnights will also serve the significant ticket resale market. “The ticket resale market is worth $9 billion a year, and most venues, artists and event organizers sit by and watch scalpers reap the majority of the market value of their events. At Goodnights, we have built our platform to capture some of this value, direct it back to the venues, artists and organizers, creating a new revenue stream and we are very excited about this.”
Moll and his co-inventors are receiving support and office space from the UBC University-Industry Liaison Office through the entrepreneurship@UBC initiative.
Adds Moll, “goodnights is looking to attract additional venues, promoters and ticket buyers who can all benefit from the strengths of our mobile platform and smaller transaction fees.”