Welcome to the Blocktix Development Update for July 2018. It has been quite the month for us yet again. After the official launch on the mainnet last month we had both our first ever hosted event; the Neverland Festival in the Netherlands and of course the Blocktix Pilot held during the event. Let’s jump right in to it, but first:
Social Media
As always, we invite everyone to keep up to date on our progress and to join the Blocktix conversation on our social media channels:
If you are not connected yet, we invite you to join our Discord server to explore the features of Blocktix, ask questions or just have a chat with other supporters.
Neverland Festival
On the morning of July 14th, after a good ten days of build-up, it was finally the big day many of us had been waiting for. At 12:30 the gates opened for the first hundred guests eagerly awaiting the awesome day in front of them. With 29 degrees Celsius (84 Fahrenheit), it was a little hot but everyone came more than prepared.
Over 9,000 guests attended the first day, enjoying performances of artists like Above & Beyond, Fedde le Grand, Laidback Luke, Deborah de Luca, Marek Hemmann and many others. There were many choices in food and drinks and people were chilling, dancing and partying until late in the evening. Our first day concluded with a huge fireworks display visible many kilometers away.
Our second day had over 6,000 guests, making the total visitor count touch the 15,000 mark. With Steve Aoki, W&W, Stephan Bodzin, Audio Bully’s and many other artists, we had another crazy day of Neverland with perfect weather.
The post-festival reviews came in and so far we have yet to find a negative review (bar some small problems any first year festival will have). Everyone has been very positive and impressed by the professionalism of the festival. We made a good impact on the local festival mark and believe that we’ll be able to grow quickly in 2019 with the Neverland concept.
For those that would like to see what we created, we highly recommend visiting both the ‘Experience’ page at the Neverland website and of course the Neverland Festival Facebook page. Keep an eye out for our aftermovie, which will be published on our channels as soon as it is available.
The Blocktix Pilot at Neverland
In addition to introducing the Neverland Festival to the general public, we also had an important day with our pilot of Blocktix. Our CTO, Ryno and our Project Assistant Bojan (w000t) traveled from South Africa & Slovenia respectively to help us during the pilot.
Members of the Blocktix Community even showed up to support both Blocktix & Neverland and we had fun meeting them at the festival, some of them even helping us out during the day.
With about a hundred Blocktix tickets issued each day, we used a seperate entrance where we could scan and redeem for the pilot.
The scanning went really well, however it happened to be the weekend after Augur launched so the Ethereum network was somewhat busy. We knew days before the event that the redemption on chain wasn’t going to be smooth, so we built in a ticket redemption cache and queue on the mobile app so that tickets are scanned and immediately marked as redeemed on the local scanning device.
While scanning, we realised immediately that there are areas we can improve upon, and enhancements we can do to make ticket validation easier and ticket redemption across multiple devices faster. These improvements have already been discussed and are on their way to being implemented.
The pilot and the event were both really awesome, and we look forward to the next event where Blocktix will be used by even more people.
- Ryno Mathee
The redemption cache is something that the first Pilot showed will be the right approach for the future and is something that we will further develop.
The Next Step: Our first USA Event — The Firebird Music Festival
We are now organizing our next event and our first in the United States of America: The Firebird Music Festival.
Jeffrey Osborne, Earl Klugh, Dee Dee Bridgewater, Rick Braun and Everette Harp (one of our advisors) are set to play the first annual Firebird Music Festival on Sept. 23 at WestWorld of Scottsdale in Arizona. Grammy-nominated saxophonist Harp is a managing partner of JEMrock Productions, the company putting on the event, which he says is the first of many. “We are looking forward to bringing our brand of exciting music festivals to cities across the country,” he said.
In an interview with Billboard, Harp shared, “There was an established jazz festival [in Scottsdale] a few years back that drew very large crowds. We’re hoping to bring that back to the Phoenix area in a very big way. This is part of JEMrock’s long range plan here in Scottsdale.”
Producer, bassist and Blocktix Advisor Randy Jackson will host the all-day event, which kicks off at 2 p.m. While there are a number of jazz-oriented festivals in the country, including the Playboy Jazz Festival in Los Angeles, he feels the jazz audience will support more activity. “The jazz marketplace is really underserved in my opinion and we wanted to resurrect the experience that big jazz festivals brought to communities,” he told Billboard. “The Phoenix/Scottsdale area is a great place to start. These artists are brilliant and have earned their place in the history of this genre and we wanted to give them all the thunder they deserve.”
Also on the bill are Bob James, and Harp’s bandmates in Jazz Funk Soul, Jeff Lorber and Paul Jackson Jr.
For more information you can visit the website: FireBirdMusicFestival.com
We’re implementing our learnings from the Neverland Festival pilot into this next pilot which will focus on the Firebird Music Festival guest list.
In Conclusion
As you can see, we had a pretty successful run of both Neverland & our first Blocktix pilot. We look forward to the end of September when we will have our first USA event and the next Blocktix pilot. See you guys near the end of August when we plan to give our next update.
