Masabi » Ben Whitaker

VACANCY: Java Server Developer – Develop something amazing and Useful

Ben Whitaker — Sat, 26 Jun 2010 19:16:51 +0000

Masabi are currently on the lookout for a server developer to join our team working from our London South Bank office.

Firstly: NO AGENCIES OR RECRUITERS! We are interested in pro-active candidates who are motivated enough to find us by themselves.

DEVELOP SOMETHING AMAZING AND USEFUL
Ending the pain of queues at Railway stations, Masabi is an award winning and established leader in mobile applications, focussing on mobile transport ticketing – turning anyone’s phone into a train ticket and ticket vending machine, eliminating queues and relieving stress for passengers everywhere.

See the 1 minute video below to get an idea about what we do. We’re working together with the industry giants The TrainLine and Atos Origin, giving the product the legs to get out into market.

Skills we look for in every candidate: passionate, clear thinking, flexible, confident working in small teams, fluent in English, and London-based, you’ll have a desire to be both critical and receptive to the input of other team members. Masabi offers the ideal candidates an exciting work environment with plenty of opportunity to excel in an exciting growing business solving a clear customer need with a working revenue share business model.

You must be a flexible JavaEE developer with experience using Spring, Hibernate, web services and creating interactive web front-ends, who is happy to work with various databases and webapp containers.

Of value, but not essential: an understanding of secure systems, clustering, automated testing (beyond unit tests!), experience in agile practices, working with remote teams from partner companies deploying products. Technologies you will be working with: Tomcat behind Apache, Weblogic, MySQL, Spring 2.5, Hibernate (via Spring extensions), Linux, proprietary SOAP APIs.

You will work alongside our existing server developer, as well as our tester and client developers and external customer teams.

Candidates selected for interview must have excellent English skills with the ability to think concisely and communicate clearly with others, which will be tested at interview.

About Masabi’s offices:

masabi offices

We work out of a funky loft office in a converted brick warehouse shared with some PR types, a couple of blocks south of the Tate Modern in Southwark. It has excellent transport links, sitting equidistant from London Bridge, Southwark and Borough stations in an area which is being redeveloped with some great lunching facilities, nice bars, world class modern art and a convenient river. Proximity to Borough Market is excellent news for gastronomes, if less good for their wallets. See http://www.masabi.com/find-us/

Again, please, NO AGENCIES! Really. We mean it.

If you’re confident you’re not an agency and are in fact the perfect candidate for us, please email us at jobs@masabi.com with a CV and covering letter, or phone Ben for a chat on 0207 981 9781.

Making Mobile Commerce Relevant for the Man on the Clapham Omnibus

Ben Whitaker — Wed, 06 Jan 2010 13:29:46 +0000

This is a re-print of an article we wrote for the new Mobile Money Exchange community forum set up by the GSMA

Making Mobile Commerce Relevant for the Man on the Clapham Omnibus

The unpleasant reality that we’ve learnt from 8 years working in mobile:

Just because you can do something with mobile technology

does not mean that users will adopt it;
does not mean that companies will promote it.

There has to be a compelling user benefit, or significant user pain to persuade somebody to try a new technology.
There also has to be a compelling business benefit, (preferably with a year-one breakeven these days) for the service to ever get the marketing and promotion it needs.

A surprisingly accurate quote from Douglas Adams sums this user adoption barrier up nicely:

everything that’s already in the world when you’re born is just normal;
anything that gets invented between then and before you turn thirty is incredibly exciting and creative and with any luck you can make a career out of it;
anything that gets invented after you’re thirty is against the natural order of things and the beginning of the end of civilisation as we know it until it’s been around for about ten years when it gradually turns out to be alright really.

(acknowledgement to Faris Yakob for bringing this insightful quote to our attention at the Cellcom Conference in Israel)
This gem from Adams proved almost completely accurate with my own deep suspicion of blogging, twitter and facebook, compared with a colleague a few years younger who likes blogging and facebook but still rejects twitter as the work of the devil. Rather typically, neither of us has ever sent an MMS message or made a video call.

So, as a result of that:
An average mobile user uses voice and text messages.
An average business user uses voice, text, and email.

Newer technologies like Mobile TV, MMS, Twitter, Flickr, Youtube and Facebook are not mass-market user requirements outside of media land and the internet youth – so what can the mobile industry do to get the normal mobile user into using m-Commerce or more advanced phone features?

Normal people only try a new technology if the old way of doing it is painful enough to make them get over their fears and give something new a try. The trick is that it is exactly when the user is in pain that you must offer them the improved mobile service – they won’t bother to sign up later on the internet.

mock-up of the ideal location to advertise a new mobile service - next to a big queue, and at the point of most customer pain.

We are following this exact mantra with the Mobile Ticket Machine that we are building at the moment for some of the UK Railway companies. Late-running customers regularly miss their trains – queues are a frustrating pain point for them. It is in these painful queues that we display adverts to persuade normal people try using their phone to buy the ticket – and then use their phone as the ticket, never having to queue again. We make purchasing streamlined, without any usernames and passwords to get in the way, and use technologies like SMS fallback to ensure reliable access. Immediate servicing of the customer is the main requirement.

Our early trials in 2007 with Chiltern Railways on mobile ticket purchasing via credit card revealed a startling result – many of the mobile ticket trial users were not just middle-youth technophiles. Going against our stereotypes, we discovered they were older and more female, on average, than we expected and had never before use their phone for anything but voice and SMS. The potential benefit of avoiding queues in the future was enough to make them willing to try five new technical steps in one go:

They were sent a WAP push
They progressed to a WAP page
They downloaded and installed an application
They entered a Credit Card number into the application
Then used their phone as a ticket.

Staggering, really – these people had never had any motivation in the past to download ringtones, logos or games and certainly no desire to do Twitter updates. Note that the service didn’t target just smartphones – it was available on standard phones as well, because a service with mass-market appeal should be available to the entire mass market.

After trying a mobile application for the first time because of significant need, a user will have a lower barrier to trying new mobile technology for less critical things in the future. They have already faced their fears and learnt the tricky steps to download an app and make a mobile purchase.

A discussion of the business case (and the related business politics) for mobile rail ticketing is another article in itself. Suffice to say that the service has to have a measurable effect on Cap-ex and Op-ex for the Rail Operators, be acceptable to a multi-franchise ecosystem of seperate and competitive companies, and also enable a quick and cheap “soft rollout” launch to prove interest and benefits before significant hardware Cap-Ex commitment is incurred. This can be contrasted to the stalemate existing with the chicken-and-egg issues of NFC service rollout.

Mobile is not the mini-internet. It was essential that this particular project offer a mobile service, not just an extension of the internet. It offers a complimentary service to in-station ticket machines and staffed wi
ndows, which still account for well over 70% of rail ticket sales in the UK, whilst solving problems for the customer in a way that fits tightly to their existing habits. It was never expected to compete with the web, or service web customers when they were away from their PCs.

I think that many of the future mobile commerce success stories will involve providing more traditional self-service options in the physical world – certainly, mobile banking in the developing world is an established success in this mould. Cramming the internet experience onto the small screen may miss the point of mobile entirely.

3 Job Vacancies: Mobile Tester, Server Dev and Mobile Dev

Ben Whitaker — Mon, 17 Aug 2009 09:05:00 +0000

Firstly: NO AGENCIES OR RECRUITERS!
(We are interested in pro-active candidates who are motivated enough to find us by themselves.)

Masabi are currently on the lookout for three new members of staff to join our team – a tester, a junior mobile programmer and a more experienced server programmer.

The three jobs currently available are as follows:

QA GURU
We need a tester with experience across the full range of mobile devices, testing consumer-focused applications on real handsets and online simulators, as well as related web resources. We view a testing mindset as pretty opposite to a developer mindset and are really interested in someone who actually wants to work in QA, with a pedantic perfectionist attitude, who revels in finding problems and obtuse bugs whilst having the skills to explain exactly how to reproduce them, on which handsets, without bruising egos. We’d also love it if you’ve experience with automated server testing, and have ideas on how you’d like us to develop our funky internal mobile testing system.

JUNIOR MOBILE DEVELOPER
A Java developer with a Computer Science degree and passion for programming, wanting to learn about creating beautiful usable products to solve real world problems on mass-market mobile phones. Blackberry and Windows Mobile programming experience a bonus.

SERVER DEVELOPER
A flexible J2EE developer with experience using Spring, Hibernate, JMX and creating interactive web front-ends, who is happy to work with various databases and webapp containers. Of great value: an understanding of secure systems, broad experience and flexibility with maintaining working servers, and skilled at working with remote teams from partner companies deploying products.

To get a better idea about what we do and how we do it, read blog.masabi.com, look through our flickr feed, and our website.

Candidates selected for interview must have excellent English skills with the ability to think concisely and communicate clearly with others, which will be tested at interview.

Again, please, NO AGENCIES! Really. We mean it.

If you’re confident you’re not an agency and are in fact the perfect candidate for us, please email a full CV with salary expectations and details on all relevant work permits to jobs@masabi.com

p.s. for those that want to see the office that you might be coming to work in:
Photos:
Exterior
Interior, Interior again
Ed pretending to do testing

(map shows it has great access to food heaven at Borough Market, Tube stops at Borough, London Bridge and Southwark, and commuting access from the Thames Water Taxi, and trains from Waterloo or London Bridge stations)

StreetVendor – Mobile Financial Services platform

Ben Whitaker — Thu, 30 Jul 2009 09:38:00 +0000

Today we put out a press release about StreetVendor, the product we’ve built together with financial services and international payments experts Mi-Pay.

The press release can be found if you click here, and to accompany it there is a video interview below:

Screenshots of StreetVendor, showing both Arabic and English Script:

StreetVendor is available in many languages including complex scripts such as Russian, Simplified Chinese and Greek. (This is never as easy as you might first expect when it comes to mobile development for multiple handsets)

Like most Masabi products, StreetVendor has been built to work on old and new handsets, including 7 year old handsets, right through to the latest smartphones. This makes it easier to source suitable handsets cheaply in areas that you wish to operate in.

The encrypted SMS back-up system enables reliable comms from anywhere in the world that you can get SMS reception, and without needing any local integration.

Most importantly – this means that from one central server you can roll out your new Remittance or Financial Services anywhere in the world that you comply with banking regulations, and can get SMS.

New authorised agents simply need to find a supported colour screen mobile phone, and load the software onto their phones just once using any install method from PC cable, WAP, Bluetooth or old fashioned CSD download. Then the rest of the application’s work can be safely performed over SMS or any other available connection.

(Of course, all communications over SMS or GPRS are protected by EncryptME’s 1024bit RSA and 256bit AES security)

Speaking at Train Communications 2009

Ben Whitaker — Mon, 08 Jun 2009 13:53:00 +0000

Another chance to meet up with Masabi, when we speak on the Thursday afternoon of Train Communications 2009, held at the Royal Horseguards Hotel, near Charing Cross in London on 11th June 2009.

http://www.traincomms2009.com/

(This conference used to be known as the Wifi on Trains conference.)

Among the presenters will be train companies from India, Japan, Taiwan, the US, the UK and across Europe, including Indian Railways, Department for Transport UK, Virgin Trains, Thalys, National Express Trains, Arriva, NTT, Japan Rail and Orange

Masabi will be talking about mobile ticketing, credit card transactions, and the infrastructuire issues and design approaches to mitigate those issues when rolling out robust distributed authentication systems in an operationally challenging environment, such as rail and bus.

If you want to schedule some time with Ben at the event, please drop him an SMS on +44 7788 895 894.

ITS Transport Standards Seminar – summary

Ben Whitaker — Thu, 04 Jun 2009 17:30:00 +0000

Write up of the recent Intelligent Transport Systems‘ Seminar on Standards in UK Ticketing Wed 27th May 2009:

[ WARNING: The top third is mobile ticketing, the rest is more general transport stuff ]

Chair: Chris Queree, ATOC (Association of Train Operating Companies)

Speakers:

Ben Whitaker, Masabi

Andy Donelan, Virgin Trains

Grant Klein, Detica

Mark Cartwright, RTIG (Real Time Information Group)

Roger Slevin, DfT (Department for Transport)

Masabi got to speak first, and played a potentially unpopular opening card by pointing out the marked difference in Capital Expenditure between the expensive rollout of a smart-card system, and the much cheaper rolling out of a barcode ticket system.

Specifically, because of the fact that self-print and mobile delivered barcode tickets all have a human readable version of the ticket alongside the machine-readable barcode, means that in initial rollouts the vehicle guards can simply check the tickets visually, the same way they check existing paper tickets.

Occasional spot-checks of the e-tickets can be made by texting the manual ticket number to a central service, and a small number of shared scanners that guards or stations can use on rotation.

Permanent rollout of scanners and gates can then be staged for areas that see large volumes of e-ticketing, but completely avoided in those areas that only see a low frequency of e-tickets.

Smart-cards by comparison have no visual indications at all, and even the card owner cannot know what is on the card without a machine to interrogate the card. Any area that wishes to use smart card must be fully equipped with scanners before launching the service, meaning that the full capital expenditure must be comitted before the first users can start.

It was also pointed out that in London there is a significant financial penalty for people that refuse to use Oyster, with many fares being twice as expensive on a paper ticket. The proposed national ITSO smartcard system for rail tickets will almost certainly not have such a price difference (if any) to drive uptake.

We also haven’t got to the bottom of how a national rail smartcard journey would be purchased by the consumer – I think you would still need to buy on the web, or queue at a ticket machine at the station to configure your journey before collecting it onto the smartcard, which won’t reduce queues at all. (Oyster-style charging is not an option outside London.)

Masabi’s presentation then got into the main topic of the new RSP barcode standard for UK rail tickets on mobile and self-print, highlighting some of the enhancements that provide better security, robustness, and cross-sales opportunities than previous barcode standards, and encouraged operators and other ticket sales companies to find ways to exploit it more.

The 3rd party opportunities come from the fact that under this scheme you can freely give away the ticket scanning software and public security keys, so that Coffee Shops, Retailers and major attractions like Alton Towers can all integrate ticket scanning and validation into their EPOS (tills) and gates (as long as they have an off-the-shelf 2D barcode scanner), and be able to read/verify the new rail tickets and any cross-sale entitlements that are inside, such as your early morning coffee and bagel, bought at a preferential rate, or alternately your group purchase of a weekend getaway including a music gig entry in one ticket.

Masabi also showed off a bit of their mobile ticket sales product, and the opportunity for it to reduce rush-hour queues at stations, and reach out to users when they are most in pain and keen to try a new system, i.e. when the queues are long, or when the ticket machine is broken – that’s when a (non-geek) consumer will try a new way to purchase and travel.

(For people that haven’t heard of it yet – the Masabi Mobile Ticket Machine allows a customer to buy a ticket straight from the phone, using a credit card, and then get the ticket on the phone. They don’t need any sign up either, they can do it straight away, from the queue.)

Masabi Rail Ticketing ITS

View more presentations from Ben Whitaker.

There were a lot of questions from the floor, getting into the anti-copying and some of the low end (legacy) handset support issues that the new ticket standard addresses.

Then Andy Donelan from Virgin took the stand to tell everyone about Virgin Railways’ success with barcode ticketing, this time focussing on the printed barcodes, and their part in “driving down distribution costs”.

He said that consumers had been very keen on the new system, so the initial pilot has been rolled into full production use since September 2008 across all of their routes, taking over 4M in revenue, with over 1000 e-tickets sold per day.

For clarity – currently Virgin’s printed barcode tickets are only valid on advanced tickets on Virgin-only routes. Virgin are now in discussions with Train Operators such as Cross Country that they share routes with to agree to honour each-other’s barcode tickets too, so that these restrictions can start to lift, and more routes and fare combinations will be supported by the barcode format. (author’s note – paper barcode tickets and mobile barcode tickets share the same format and the same scanners, so every rollout of paper barcode paves the way for mobile too.)

He also revealed that as a long-distance route, their proportion of tickets sold on line was 35% – far higher than the national average of 12%, and they expected that to continue to grow.

Their strategy was to enable remote booking as much as possible to easily expand their sales capacity, as they can’t increase the number of ticket windows at their stations to cope with increasing demand.

One of the benefits Virgin found with the user-printed paper barcode ticket, (much larger than standard card rail tickets in the UK) is that they can contain the full travel terms and conditions of the ticket, which makes it easier for revenue enforcement officers (guards) to say that the traveller should know exactly what they are entitled to, in a way that the very small existing tickets do not. For our international readers, the “conditions of carriage” or rules of the railway ticket vary by route and ticket in an almost impossible to understand way, and there are large fines for mis-understanding the special restrictions known only to guards and railway experts.

In good news, they have had very few customer support requests about their e-tickets.

Interestingly, their initial trials of hand-held barcode scanners at Euston faced issues from dropping off-line when they went underground, so this would certainly be aided by the new off-line scanning capable ticket standard that has come in since they started their trial on previous on-line only tickets. It is exactly this sort of resilience that we have added to the standard to make it practical for real-world rollouts.

Andy agreed with the points that Ben had made, and saw mobile and self-print as complimentary, each suiting slightly different use cases, but both useful in servicing the travelling public, mobile especially suiting business travel travellers, self-print more for infrequent travellers.

The chair, Chris Querry summarised the morning talk by observing that barcode is growing of its own accord on it’s own commercial merits, but he could only see Smartcard gaining much ground through legislation and franchise commitments forcing it to happen. “People will vote with their feet, or more likely their barcodes about which e-ticketing platform to use.”

The next talk by Grant Klein from the hosts, Detica, covered some of the reporting and tracking requirements of e-ticketing, allowing more accurate data to be gathered about how many travellers there really are, and what their habits are. With paper tickets, just like cash transactions, all you can be sure of is the number of journeys, but you have no idea about how often those journeys are the same person – etickets instantly give you all of the benefits of loyalty cards in this respect for tracking users and building a history.

Chris Querree then gave a run-down of new public transport standards work in Europe, helping attendees to make sense of where each of the seperate, overlapping, and sometimes cooperating standards bodies is going.

From a ticketing point of view, I noted down the UIC 981-2 standard being used in Europe for long distance train tickets, CEN TC278 WG3 SG5 for ticketless travel, and security on self-print to follow up on later, but anyone else wanting to find the details on more standards work should get hold of Chris’s actual presentation.

Mark Cartwright from the Real Time Information Group (RTIG.org.uk) talkup us through the efforts to unify access methods for joining transport and journey information accross multiple sources and viewing platforms, to support web and physical signeage and querying, such as the in-bus shelter wait-time indicators, and the unified journey planner websites.

Roger Slevin then took the final speaking slot to fill us in on some of the work that DfT were involved in, mostly on the passenger information side, following on nicely from the RTIG talk.

Relevant standards covered in Mark and Roger’s talks were NeTEx (network and ticketing exchange protocol), DJPS (distributed journey planners), and IFOPT (with things like stop place models, alternate names for points of interest, where parking is etc). In the UK NaPTAN and NPTG are useful components too. With all of these people can model joined up transport much more effectively than ever before.

As a “how far have we got” statement, basically most of the South East of the UK now has a unified journey planner, and we should get in touch to find out more about it, or to gain access to the data.

There was some discussion about what shared standards there might be for exchanging this transport data, and the Google Transit Data format is gaining ground. Journeyweb in the UK may also be pushing a potential XML standard to get behind too, with EU-Spirit as a compromise against some competing European efforts, some of whom don’t seem to be as eager to work with other parties.

The closing remarks basically summed up pragmatism over idealism, and in the debate that followed there was only one lone voice bemoaning the lack of loyalty to the previously un-touchable ITSO smartcard programme, with most people seeming to be quite happy to look into faster, lighter, more open, and above all cheaper alternative standards for e-ticketing and data sharing, such as the PKI based barcode standard, and the more open XML based journey planning and transport information systems.

Please leave the queuing system here?

Masabi speaking at ITS UK Ticket Standards Seminar, and at European Telco Strategy event

Ben Whitaker — Wed, 13 May 2009 16:46:00 +0000

For those of you on the conference circuit, you can see Ben Whitaker from Masabi speaking about new mobile ticketing approaches for public transport including mobile payments via credit card this month at the UK’s ITS Passenger Information Interest Group’s seminar on Options for Ticketing and Standards in Ticketing which is on the 27th May in London. Other speakers include Virgin Trains, Department for Transport, and our good friends Consult Hyperion.

We will also be speaking later this year in Berlin at the European CxO Telco Strategy event on the 30th November and 1st December, alongside speakers from several European network operators.

If you are attending these events and wish to schedule time with Masabi, feel free to book in a time in advance, via the ususal channels.

Digital Money Forum – London 31st March

Ben Whitaker — Wed, 25 Mar 2009 18:17:00 +0000

This Tuesday I’ll be at the Digital Money Forum, at the Guoman Hotel in Charing Cross, London.

As well as being on one of the expert panels on the afternoon on the first day, I’ll be around all of Tuesday and Wednesday afternoon if anyone wants to chat.

The expert panel with the vague title “London Calling” sounds like it will have quite a wide ranging debate, but we’ll probably be working around the following talking points:

UK Digital Rail Ticketing,
and the battle between SmartCard/NFC and Mobile Barcodes, and which might offer more bang for the buck, especially where public money is being spent
UK Payments Council Project – Mobile P2P bank payments in the UK,
our opinion on how to give it a chance of success where so many e-payment initiatives have floundered
Open (PKI) VS Closed (Oyster/MiFare/ITSO) Security models,
we’re pushing the open approach, as Dave Birch knows.

All of which are topics with different points of view, and of course the debate will be steered by the moderator into which topics would be the best food for discussion between the panellists there.

The event is run by the security experts at Consult Hyperion, who Masabi strongly endorse for anyone looking for audits and advice on their business and technology security, especially if they are working in the brave new world of secure transactions on new platforms at the edges of conventional established practices.

You can also hear a chat between Masabi and Consult Hyperion’s Dave Birch on this podcast if you are interested.

New Mobile Barcode tickets for UK Rail

Ben Whitaker — Tue, 16 Dec 2008 10:50:00 +0000

Finally, after a year of work, the new mobile and self-print barcode standard for UK rail tickets has been approved by the central railway standards body, RSP, a part of ATOC.

The following post intends to give a more detailed understanding than that provided by the general media coverage.

What does this mean?

It means that mobile ticket systems have the chance to come out of the limited scale “Advanced Purchase” projects that they have been providing so far. Train companies can now being to offer instant ticket purchasing that will bring a step change in user convenience.

What’s new?

Until now all of the UK rail mobile ticketing trials have used proprietary barcode formats, eligible for “advanced ticket” purchases only. These were valid on a limited set of single-operator routes, limiting their scope enormously.

Previous systems also had ticket scanning restrictions – the scanning device would either have to check all tickets against a central database using a WiFi or GSM connection, or carry a local database of valid tickets which had to be synchronised for every journey. Both of these methods have drawbacks – it is difficult to guarantee a network connection on a moving train, and obtaining one can take time slowing the scanning process; if a local database is used, the time that it is synchronized before a journey represents the last time that a mobile ticket may be purchased.

The new barcode standard has changed all of that. Firstly, one barcode format can now be used across all RSP/ATOC rail franchises. Secondly, by adding proven PKI security, scanners can check the validity of tickets without needing to be online. This is critical for any mass transit system – even after a total failure of the central server systems, thousands of travellers can still have their tickets scanned and pass through gates or guards without any delays (assuming the gates still have power!).

What about the Oyster security problems?

The Oyster system uses vulnerable symmetric cryptography, where the security keys are stored in every card and every scanner. In contrast, the new barcode standard uses asymmetric public/private key cryptography, which prevents anyone changing the content of a ticket after it has been issued. The private key which actually signs the ticket is kept safe on the rail operator’s central ticketing server; the public key, which verifies the private key but cannot sign anything, is then installed on the scanners and ticket gates of every rail operator in the scheme.

Even if hackers completely take apart a guard’s scanner or a barcode they will only be able to retrieve the freely available public key – they cannot make their own tickets unless they are also able to break 1024bit RSA at the same time. One day this will doubtless be possible, but no-one has yet and it forms the backbone of the HTTPS standard which secures every purchase and financial transaction you perform through your web browser.

Can’t I just photocopy the barcode?

The more cunning readers of this blog are correct in seeing the opportunity to photocopy a printed barcode, and then distribute the copies to other travellers who show them to different train guards – as long as each guard’s scanner is offline and cannot verify the ticket with the central database. One commenter cleverly suggested using a radio jamming device to ensure that the guard would definitely be offline!

The travellers will ‘get away with’ the fraud, in that they can continue their journey. When the scanner gets back online or is synchronised at the end of the day, the post-processing systems will identify the multiple uses of the ticket and place an alert against the credit card used to purchase the original, preventing further purchases.

Once the fraud has been detected it is up to the Rail Operator or merchant to invite the user to pay a penalty and unlock their credit card, or (in extreme cases) pursue the credit card holder for the value of the fraudulent travel. If the fraud is detected during the journey and transport police are available, they may even choose to catch the travellers red-handed.

Whatever happens, the window of opportunity for fraud is limited to the period that the scanner is offline for each credit card that you are willing to ‘throw away’. A fraudster using a stolen credit card (that hasn’t yet been detected by back-end anti-fraud systems) may as well buy two tickets, but the overall scope is limited.

Does everyone have to pay Masabi to use the new system?

Unfortunately not. It is based entirely on open, proven, royalty free algorithms and standards. We designed it this way to encourage rapid uptake by operators and passengers; we hope that the other mobile ticketing vendors already servicing other rail operators adopt this system as soon as possible – so that those rail operators can agree to accept each other’s mobile tickets, and expand the choice of routes for mobile ticketing.

So what is the Masabi mobile ticketing product?

Masabi have two mobile ticketing options:

Mobile tickets can be bought on the web and delivered with an SMS link, allowing the customer to download and save the barcode image to their handset;

For best results, users download an application to their mobile phone, smartphone, or iPhone which allows them to purchase tickets as well.

Masabi’s new downloaded application provides the full “ticket machine in your pocket” experience, where a brand new user can instantly buy tickets without any prior sign-up. They can buy tickets through their mobile from the back of a long queue, when the ticket machine at their rural station is broken, or from the back of a taxi on the way to the station. First time users type in their credit card number and CV2; repeat users only type their CV2 to confirm each purchase, with absolutely NO usernames or passwords to get in the way. See our ticketing page for more details.

Isn’t the pricing too complicated?

Thankfully the new fare simplification process is cutting down the number of fare options on each route, especially for the “walk-up-tickets” that you buy in the station immediately before travelling. The mobile application makes a seperate price check with the server the first time that the user requests a ticket, and then uses those stored prices for any future purchase until the server indicates that they have changed, sending back new prices.

Does every rail operator get Masabi’s Pocket Ticket Machine?

Nope, the Masabi ticket sales application is a Masabi product that rail operators, or the operators’ ticket supplier, can choose to make available to their customers – we do a quick graphics job, a server integration and they’re ready.

Will I need a seperate ticket purchase application for each Rail operator?

As long as all operators involved agree to use the new shared ticket standard, you should be able to buy a ticket from Operator A and travel on a route served by Operator B.

What do the Rail Companies need to do to use the standard?

When the volume of tickets is small, guards or stations can operate a manual ticket check system by typing in the ticket number and requesting ticket details from the server, either by SMS or via their portable ticket computer. If the volume of tickets increases guards should be issued with barcode scanners – either the standalone pocket-sized scanners or a scanner integrated with their normal carry-on ticket machines. When volumes of barcode tickets get even higher, scanners can be fitted to their gates. Check out pictures of the scanner options here.

Masabi are already working closely with Atos Origin, one of the dominant rail infrastructure providers in the UK, who supply most of those portable ticket machines that Rail staff carry on the trains; the integration process can be handled by Atos if the rail operator wants.

Operators that already have a mobile ticketing system will need to ask their supplier to change the barcode format, which should in most cases simply be a software change.

Where has this new ticket standard been launched?

The new barcode standard has only just been defined and approved by RSP, so it hasn’t been used anywhere yet in it’s final form. The Chiltern and Heathrow Express mobile ticket systems were built with barcode formats that pre-date the standards work, but the National Express East Coast system is running the final precursor to the actual RSP standard.

Any More Questions?

If you would like to know anything else, please ask away in the comments!

Masabi’s mates "Hamfatter" on Dragon’s Den

Ben Whitaker — Mon, 21 Jul 2008 08:52:00 +0000

One of our recent clients, the band Hamfatter (who we built a mobile promo site for) are on UK TV’s Dragon’s Den tonight, making the normally aggressive investors sing for their supper, which should make for interesting viewing.

They should be on GMTV and Radio2 on Tuesday morning too, touting their alternative “direct” route to their own music promotion, using all the new distribution channels, and keeping control in the hands of the band.

To see the mobile site and get free MP3’s and other mobile stuff,
text HAMFAT to 86688.
(text costs 25p plus normal network charges, to cover the response SMS messages – we’d charge less if there was a cheaper SMS that covered the cost of the response SMS)

We love their music too, so go and buy their new single for just 70p at play.com or itunes!
(and maybe one day you’ll be able to buy music for download or postal delivery direct from the mobile using Masabi’s credit card sales technology – who knows? Watch this space….)

The Guardian “the business model would allow the group to make around £3.50 an album, as opposed to the 30p they would get in royalties from a big label”

The Times “Indie band emerges from Dragon’s Den with the cash – and a rock revolution”

The Independent “middle-aged telecoms tycoon looking to recapture his youth?”

‘THE GIRL I LOVE’ MUSIC VIDEO

NME – Hamfatter strike deal with entrepreneur on BBC’s Dragon’s Den

Our favourite Indie newbies Hamfatter have become the first band to sign a deal on Dragon’s Den.

Millionaire Peter Jones signed a £75,000 deal with the Cambridge trio in return for 30% of their profits.

The episode, filmed in April, was aired as the first in the new series on BBC 2 on Monday 21st July.

All five Dragons wanted to make a deal with the band but manager Jamie and band members Eoin, Jimbo and Mark chose Peter Jones.

“Peter Jones simply said ‘I just love music, I don’t play music but I love it.’ And that for me was something big“ said guitarist Jimbo. “…plus he was wearing stripey socks.”

“Plus he was like 7ft tall so he kind of feels like your dad.” added singer Eoin.

Jimbo summed up: “Yep, it was 33% music, 33% socks, 33% TALL.”

The band see the deal as a revolutionary new business model for the music industry, ignoring the concept of labels.

“We don’t get an advance so we’re absolutely skint.” explains Eoin. “But that is literally the only downside. We retain complete creative control over what we do; who we work with, release dates, tour dates, which tracks we choose. Hamfatter Ltd is essentially our own record lab el.”

“Normally record labels would be perfectly in their rights to rip out bits of your songs they don’t like and get somebody else to stick a bit in.” He continues “That way you end up with horrible mutilations of tunes. Hopefully, with Hamfatter Ltd we’ll sign a bunch of other bands and offer them a similar deal; ‘We think you’’ve got it, we won’t tread on your toes, here’s a bunch of money, make a load more for us please!’”

The new single is available digitally now and is available on CD and vinyl from August 11^th 2008. Keep checking the website for details of new tour dates coming soon.

event: Masabi at Cartes show in Paris