For the Rahman concert, the mobile is the ticket

NEW DELHI: For the AR Rahman concert in Bangalore on October 8, as hundreds of people will be clutching their precious paper entry tickets, others will head to a high-tech point and get their mobile phones scanned for entry.

While you might have heard of mobile ticketing, welcome to the new world of the “mobile ticket”.

So how does it work? You simply call 9844100777 on Spice, where you'll get an interactive voice response, which will tell you of your choice of seats with other details. When you choose your option, you'll get a picture message which will have a barcode and other ticket details. Now this picture message will itself act as the ticket. Then you've to go to the Spice website within 48 hours and pay the amount with your credit card.

On the day of the show, you simply have to go and get your phone scanned. Simple.

But how secure is this system? Very much, says Parthasarthy Madhukar, Head, Enhanced Services, “The bar code looks different from that of a physical product and is very difficult to reproduce or crack. After you've scanned your phone, the ticket becomes invalid. Further if someone comes to know your mobile is an expensive ticket and decides to steal it, then the people at the counter can be notified.”

Madhukar further explains that the advantage of this service is that anyone from anywhere in the world can buy a ticket. In fact someone from Australia did indeed buy one!

This is just one in many unique services offered by Spice Telecom. Earlier they had introduced Sabeer Bhatia's Telexo service which converts any normal mobile into a PDA. You can simply feed all the phone numbers, information and schedules you have on the Spice website and access it from your mobile whenever you want.

Says Madhukar, “While everyone can't afford PDA phones, there's also the issue of privacy. What if someone picks up your mobile phone and goes through all your private information? With Telexo, all your information is tucked away securely on our server and you can recall all the information you want with just an SMS. You can even choose to get SMS reminders and send them to a group of users.”

Spice also has exclusive Java-based games, which subscribers can download for anything between Rs 50 to Rs 125. Some of the popular games include Ducarti, Harry Potter and the Incredibles. There's even Mobile Yoga that demonstrates various asans and a game on cocktails, which tells you how to mix more than a thousand different cocktails and mocktails.

Explains Madhukar, “Subscribers have to subscribe to our WAP services and can download games on trial which they can play upto three times. After that they are free to buy. Spice also gives city guides and location based services for Bangalore.”

Another popular service from Spice is funny voice mail, where you can leave voice mail messages in the manner of Bollywood villain Ajit and other filmi voices. These are available in Kannada, Malayalam and Tamil versions too.

Madhukar says that Spice plans to roll out many more such value added services and feels, “Success lies in our customers simply saying 'Hey! I like this service' and telling others about it.”