US : The Venice Contemporary, an art and music culture venue, will offer patrons to the "Digital Media Wire Mixer 2007" event, being held this Saturday, June 16, 2007, the ability to gain express admission using an Interactive Mobile Ticket. The event organizer is expecting more than 2,000 patrons to attend.

This Interactive Mobile Ticket will first enable the patron to jump the line and get express ticket entry into the event. The same ticket then turns into a Mobile Coupon that entitles the patron access to free beverages at the open bar.

Lastly, upon scanning, it allows the patron to play an interactive game on the multimedia scanner terminal for a chance to win 1 of 40 special door prizes at the event.

The digital and wireless nature of this mobile ticket enables far richer interactivity and better customer experience than a paper counterpart. The scanner terminal is self-service, so the mobile device will never have to leave the patron's hand.

The mobile ticket arrives on the mobile device as a plain-text SMS message the morning of the event. It contains a string of encrypted characters that store unique ticket serial data for scanning and authentication.

The mobile ticketing technology is provided by bCODE, a Los Angeles-based mobile technology company. bCODE's mobile phone scanning technology is the only technology in the world today that supports automatic scanning across all carriers for more than 99% of the 3 billion mobile devices in the market today, including all types of mobile phones, PDAs and Blackberry's.

Last month, bCODE broke the world record in mobile ticketing, with the Australian leg of CeBIT, the world's largest ICT Exhibition. It eliminated the registration lines using 10 bCODE mobile ticket scanners, allowing more than 10,000 patrons to mobile-scan themselves into the conference.

"We have chosen to work with bCODE to deliver mobile ticketing for our event because it is simple, easy and fun to use. We have looked at a number of alternate solutions in the market, but they do not compare to bCODE in terms of device coverage and user interactivity. We look forward to launching the service at the event this weekend," said Bill Lucas, CEO of The Venice Contemporary.

"We are very pleased that The Venice Contemporary has chosen bCODE to provide mobile ticketing technology for their event. This integrated Mobile Ticketing and Coupon application demonstrates the power of digitizing and mobilizing tickets and coupons, by delivering multiple consumer benefits with a single mobile token. Each of our multimedia scanning terminals are browser- based, and connected to the Internet using 3G networks. They provide our customers with an unprecedented ability to deliver different types of benefits, content and applications to physical venues in real-time," said Michael Mak, CEO of bCODE.

A report by Juniper Research predicts Mobile Ticketing to be a US$38 billion market by 2009. And another report from Jupiter Research released earlier this year states that 24% of US mobile subscribers would like to receive coupons on their mobile phones.