Palm’s Shine at the Red River Ex

I just returned from spending 12 hours with my family at the Red River Ex -- THE big exhibition here in Manitoba -- and besides having a great time and being extremely tired I wanted to share an interesting (I think) obersvation with you. Oh, and I spotted quite a few Treo’s, though no 700’s of either persuasion that I could tell.

The most interesting thing to me though, was that every ride on the midway, and half the “games” were equipped with Symbol PDA’s running Palm OS and something called “eTicket” (I think -- they were really hesitant to let me even look at the display and no one was going to let me hold one of them -- oh well!). Never-the-less, I made a few observations and scanned for WiFi networks with my PalmTX (yes, I did take it with me). I found about half a dozen access points to a common network. On a side note, I must say, they hid the antennas well, I was only able to spot one, and that was mounted on a trailer that obviously housed the communications hub and probably their servers too.

It was obvious to me that they were using the Symbol’s barcode scanners to confirm all-you-can-ride wrist bands, but more importantly, to track the status of the xx number of rides cards. This is the first time I have seen a completely electronic solution to the old “it’ll cost you 5 credits (tickets) to get on this ride” problem. Instead of issuing tickets, they sold barcoded cards that were good for xx number of rides. Each time they scanned the card, the Symbol software would pop-up authorising the “sale” of one ride, and displaying the number of rides left on the card. They only way they could have been able to track the cards that closely, was for the software to be performing a query on a central server, deciding if that was a valid card, and if so, how many of the original number of rides had been used so far, thereby determining the number of rides left on the card.

I must admit I was pretty impressed. Aside from the odd unit that I observed being temperamental about recognizing barcodes or screen taps, the system worked well, and demanded only a minimal level of training for the users. There really wasn’t much the operators needed to know other than what button to push to activate the barcode scanner, and where to tap the screen to clear the resulting message (on the message).

All in all, I found it an interesting and almost invisible (to most people) application of WiFi capable Palm (Symbol) PDA’s. In fact, I’d be willing to bet that the majority of the attendees of the Red River Ex didn’t even realize that people all around them were using PDA’s to “refine” an almost ancient business -- the carnie!