MWC: bringing SMS and mobile barcodes to railway tickets – the wrong way and the Masabi way

Mobile ticketing company Masabi has an interesting theory about mobile: most people really don’t care about it. I happen to agree with them there – most people just use voice and text. So over the last 8 years, Masabi has concentrated on making a railway ticketing system so simple and pleasant to use that even people who find SMS “new fangled” will appreciate it. I sat down this morning with CEO Ben Whitaker to look over the service… and I liked it. A lot.

There’s a market of early adopters who use their phones for banking, shopping, social networking and other activities… but these are in the minority. Even when it comes to smartphones, a lot of iPhone users really just the device for voice, SMS and playing music. So on the consumer end, the Masabi service is based around two major rules:

1) It has to be unbelievably simple to use from any mobile
2) It has to be marketed at the point of greatest pain

Let me give you an example of the “point of pain”. Lets say its rush hour, and you’re queueing for a ticket at a small station. There’s only one ticket machine and the queue is huge. Then you see this sign:

This is pain marketing. Masabi is making a point of throwing people a line when they need it the most.  The sign doesn’t mention apps, data or anything beyond SMS. If you do send an SMS to the text, you get an installation package for the Masabi app. Again, this isn’t complicated. It’s a small program that tries to replicate the familiar on-line ticket booking feel as much as possible. You enter the start and end station for your journey (like the online version, the mobile text box predicts what station you’re typing as you go). Then you pay by credit or debit card.

What next?

Next, you get an SMS from Masabi. This contains all of your ticket details, along with a mobile barcode. And that’s it! You’ve now got a ticket. If you had decided to try Masabi out because of the above poster, then you’ve probably done all that while queuing for the machine. That ticket can either be visually confirmed by a ticket inspector, or the barcode can be scanned.

Where can you use that ticket?

“Ah ha!” I hear you say. “That’s all well and good, but who the hell accepts a mobile ticket anyway? I’ll only be able to use this service on one or two routes in the middle of London, won’t I?” That’s not entirely true. Masabi already has all of its cards in place. As of last December, the major railway standards bodies in the UK (ATOC and RSP) accepted the Masabi system as a mobile standard. It also works with the two ticketing providers that service every rail operator in the UK. So Masabi mobile tickets can currently work with every single rail line in England.

Using your ticket

One of the things I like best about this service is that Wasabi isn’t relying solely on ANYTHING. The app doesn’t rely on data – if you don’t have a 3G connection, it will do everything through SMS. The tickets don’t rely on barcodes – it also sends a text-based version of the ticket. So if the station you’re in doesn’t have a barcode reader, the ticket inspector can check your ticket visually. And he can confirm its not a fake by checking the ticket number with central office.

What about scanners?

Scanners are an important part of any automatic ticketing service, but its a part that Masabi is approaching cautiously. It has taken the example of the Oyster card in London to heart – the Oyster card can be scanned and confirmed by a reader in less than half a second. It’s hard to get that kind of speed with a barcode, but Masabi claims to have done it:

I got a hands on example of how fast this scanner can read a mobile barcode – and it was less than half a second. The barcode that Masabi is using is called Aztec. It’s a kind of 2D barcode that is already used by ticketing companies all over Europe, and has been accepted by the airline industry as the standard code. The reason for this is because it has lot of redundancy built in. Only around 70% of this code needs to be readable by the scanner for it to be confirmed. So people with scratched or warped phone screens can still use Masabi.

What we think?

Honestly, I’m extremely enthusiastic about this service. It really does push all my buttons. It’s a mobile service that offers something genuinely useful to a huge number of people.  It’s not devoted to smartphones. It can be used quickly, and entirely from within one app – it doesn’t require you to confirm on-line from a computer, or collect your ticket from a booth. It’s an entirely contained mobile service. It’s also incredibly easy to use. The most complicated part of the entire system is entering your credit card details. And Masabi has very good anti-fraud mechanisms – Ben Whitakers background is in security.

It is my belief that this is the kind of thing that the public wants to use, and will use. On top of everything else, Masabi very carefully cultivated all of the deals with standards bodies that they needed LONG before roll-out. At launch, this service will be useable in every train station in England. It may not be USED in every train station, but it will be useable. And that’s important. It’s already in use by three different UK rail services (one of which has the above barcode scanners installed in its train station gateways). I reckon that this is big, and that it’s coming. Get ready.

Hey, maybe I’m wrong. But I really think that a lot of rail travellers in the UK will be using Masabi in the near future.