Glownet brings years of experience and a fresh approach to RFID technology to expand into the European Market

Having first established itself as the major player in New Zealand with a tried and tested solution, Glownet are now leading the way in RFID technology with a system built by promoters for promoters.

Founded by Scott Witters, promoter of New Zealand’s largest festival Rhythm & Vines, and the CFO Nicholas Couch in October 2012, Glownet is the world’s most innovative RFID solution for the live event industry. Scott and Nick had been using RFID cashless technology successfully at Rhythm & Vines for several years. Through their learnings and realisation of the benefits, they launched their own RFID business in the UK, giving event promoters significantly more transparency, control, cashflow and engagement opportunities.

Glownet have delivered 7 fully cashless events in NZ, Taiwan, the Netherlands and the UK, including Standon Calling who were nominated in the ‘Best Use of New Technology’ category at the UK Festival Awards 2013. They recently rolled out the fully cashless service to all 26,000 attendees at Rhythm & Vines across two locations.

In early 2014 Glownet secured funding from an Angel group to accelerate its growth across Europe with an investment deal worth over £1M.

Says Scott Witters, “We are now looking forward to our next phase of growth, where we can demonstrate the benefits of a slick, robust RFID solution. We’ve built this service from the ground up and we understand precisely what our clients want because we’ve been promoters ourselves”.

Glownet works offline, even when the network goes down, we use mobile Android devices so we can be flexible and move our resources to where the people are. We have not used cash in our festival in New Zealand for seven years.  RFID revolutionised our business by increasing the customer spend, reducing our staffing costs and most importantly getting great feedback from the customer regarding the improvements to their festival experience.  We look forward to delivering similar success to promoters here in Europe this season” 

Glownet’s core product uses RFID technology and has four key elements;

gPASS – Check in and Access control with real time reporting
gPAY- Cashless transactions including pre event top up
gSMART –  Customer insight for smarter ticketing and transaction reporting
gSOCIAL – Social Media tool enabling festival goers to share their offline experience with their friends online

Unique features include;

Onsite Delivery – We provide a dedicated onsite Project Management team ensuring seamless delivery.

Network Independent – Glownet’s solution works offline, meaning that vendors can always sell and customers can always buy, even when the network goes down. The service works all the time, every time.

Tailored Apps – Add value to your Customer relationships and strengthen Brand & Sponsor partnerships.

Integral to Glownet’s success has been their own experience as promoters, which helps them understand and identify the needs of their clients to offer them the best possible solution and customer service.

Glownet have also been heavily involved in working with promoters to improve Health & Safety standards at festivals.  At Rhythm and Vines, Glownet managed customer behaviour through the use of a yellow carding feature, preventing abusive or excessively inebriated customers from purchasing alcohol during a “cooling off period”.  Strict licensing laws in NZ also have to be adhered to and Glownet enabled Rhythm and Vines to add validated ID data to each of the 26,000 customers records upon check in. This helped give the promoter and caterers peace of mind that customers were over 18. Also, the wristband could then subsequently be used to identify someone, for example in the case of a medical issue or theft at the event.

About Glownet
Founded by Scott Witters, promoter of New Zealand’s largest festival Rhythm & Vines, and the CFO Nicholas Couch in October 2012, Glownet is the world’s most innovative RFID solution for the live event industry. Scott and Nick had been using RFID cashless technology successfully at Rhythm & Vines for several years. Through their learnings and realisation of the benefits, they launched their own RFID business in the UK, giving event promoters significantly more transparency, control, cashflow and engagement opportunities.

For more information www.glownet.com

Notes To Editors
Press contact: Nikki McNeill at Global Publicity nikki@46.32.240.39
Case studies on Standon Calling and Rhythm & Vines available on request