Wazzup Local Blog

As I mentioned in our high tech after hours posting, Tix•R•Us belongs to a local group of e-tailers. At one of our meetings someone suggested that we should cross promote by linking to each other. My own philosophy and experience about recriprocal linking suggested a guarded approach to this idea. I would like to help my neighbors but I don’t want to annoy my visitors with a bunch of links that are not related. Neither do I want to have a “link whore” page tucked somewhere in the bowels of my site that no human ever really visits. That is frowned on by the SEO powers anyway. Each e-tailer in our group has a very tightly defined niche market, and it would be difficult to fabricate an organic tie-in with most of them. However, we all share a passion for our community. So we put together an aggregate page that lists each etailer’s Quickie Elevator Pitch and their logo. Since I made the page, I had it in reverse alphabetical order. Wazzup Local is always near the bottom in traditional alphabetical order, and Tix•R•Us being a T company, always gets lost after the “The’s”. Hey I should get something for doing the page! There is talk about jazzing it up and you can speculate on the time frame for that. Anyway the page exists, and that’s what I wanted. I have community type links down the lefthand side of the Wazzup Local home page. I used a small version of the Heart of Innovation Poster as the icon to represent my neighbors. If you’d like to see who my neighbors are, click the icon.

As promised, the nice positive “after” slideshow. Buying tickets online in the 21st century is nice and easy, but just a little BORING. Let’s see if we can actually suck a Javascript from the tixrus to render this.

Becky Clarkson of GraphiaCreative designed this poster featuring local tech-based businesses. It was printed by Core Communications. It is an immensely useful visual aid to convey the degree of vibrant technological fermentation that is going on in our little burg. I particularly like Becky’s attention to detail with the local landmarks. Originally a few folks who are more accustomed to the view from town thought she had taken poetic license and juxtaposed Mary’s Peak but she fooled them. The point of view is from Chip Ross Park, one of my favorite places to go with my dogs, looking south. And of course Tix•R•Us has its own leaf on the new growth portion of the tree.

Here is a high res jpg of the poster that you can download.

On 11 October, 2007 Tix•R•Us participated in a joint effort by the local etailing group to put together a booth at the High Tech After Hours annual High Tech show. It was a team effort to do the booth. We had a holiday tree featuring samples of our products, lots of SWAG, and information. Tix•R•Us displayed a “ticket angel” featuring samples of many different styles of tickets we have handled. Larry Plotkin of Precision Plant Systems snapped this photo and shared it.The event was well attended and quite educational. A lot of the local hi-tech businesses are primarily traded sector. They go about their business rather quietly and you just don’t hear much about them.

Check out our slideshow about antiquated 20th century ticket buying practices! You might find it mildly amusing. We’re not far enough beyond it yet to truly roll on the floor about it. We didn’t laugh about doing bookkeeping by manually checking columns under strong light until Quickbooks and spreadsheets became de rigeur. Ten years from now we will look at this slide show and wonder how we ever put up with all the inefficiency and hassles. And I’m happy to know that with a little minor HTML hacking we can activate a slideshow from inside the blog. Look for the POSITIVE slideshow about how much easier it is to buy tickets in the 21st century very soon, coming to a blog near you. Well, OK, every blog is as near to you as any other blog.

It’s been a year, and I finally got around to blogging about this. In summer of 2006 Oregon State Memorial Union Program Council (MUPC) signed on with Tix•R•Us and became the first client to use our Self Printing Tickets for a major high-pressure sold-out event. They were also the first to ever use our automatic ticket validation under combat conditions at LaSells Stewart Center on the Oregon State University campus. We sold out the 1200 seat house for two shows back to back and the event went smoothly. This is a photo of Colleen and Deb presenting Machelle Kennedy of the MUPC with a cheque for a whopping $89,000.

Tix•R•Us is undergoing some big changes.

Buyout: Colleen Dick bought out 100% of (ex) partner Deb Weitzman’s interest in the company for an undisclosed sum on 9 Nov. 2007.

Investment: Tix•R•Us has secured some F ‘n’ F investment. ’bout time. Some folks can just throw out some half thought-out Web 2.0 scheme and wham! they are instantly funded for several million. I guess cuz they know the right people or live in a place where there’s altogether too much money flying around. Here in good ol’ tightfisted Midwest-transported-to-the-West-Coast Oregon we have to have it a lot further along for a lot less $, but on the plus side, money buys more here.

Documentation: Tix•R•Us had been getting by on contextual help blurbs for documentation. This is useful if you’re stuck on some specific feature, but it kind of obscures the forest for the trees. We needed some coherent documentation to provide an overview and a quick-start guide for administrators. At Tix•R•Us we practice what we preach about doing business locally. Tix•R•Us has engaged local technical writing company Wordsworth and More to create both PDF downloadable and web documentation. Look for it on the website soon.

Service Change: Tix•R•Us will no longer offer printing services for old style centralized tickets. We have changed this service to a fee-based service where you can generate a request. These requests will be queued and will result in a PDF file of the ticket set that you order being emailed to you. The reasoning is this: Tix•R•Us is probably more efficient than you are at pulling and sorting ticket data and generating ticket documents. But you are just as good as we are at printing and cutting stock.

Web 2.0: Tix•R•Us will be unveiling Web 2.0 services as we get them implemented. The first one you will see seems small but it’s quite significant: On an event page you can add this event to your personal calendar with a button click. We’ll be offering instructions how to take advantage of Web 2.0 to leverage your Wazzup•Local / Tix•R•Us

SAO: Tix•R•Us has recently become affiliated with the Software Association of Oregon Corvallis chapter.