I've got this really serious problem that I want to tell you about.
I lose things. Not important things like phones, watches, cars or children. Little things. Mostly receipts. I can lose a receipt in the time between being handed it at the checkout and exiting the shop. I don't just mean that I've put it in my pocket and forgotten about it. No, I've genuinely lost it. It won't be in any of my pockets, my wallet, the bag containing my shopping ...
The thing is, my problem isn't limited to receipts. It extends to tickets and anything small and printed on paper. In the time between buying a train ticket and getting on the train - which, let's face it, in England is often a very long time thanks to our infamous delays - I've nearly always lost the train ticket.
Once I went to the local shops with a shopping list folded up and placed carefully in my pocket. When I got to the shops, the list - and only the list - had completely disappeared. I had to try and do my shopping from memory (this was only partially successful).
So for me, there's a lot to like about Passbook, Apple's digital wallet which has been installed on every iPhone since iOS6.
The idea is pretty simple. Instead of carrying loads of individual paper tickets, coupons, loyalty cards or even credit cards, you can add all of these to Passbook on your phone. Then, when you need to use the card you can open the Passbook application, find the card you want, and the shop or cinema or wherever can scan the card from your phone.
It makes sense on a lot of levels. From Apple's point of view it's tying you into their ecosystem and technology platforms a bit further. From your point of view, as a user of Passbook, it keeps all your cards together in one place. And from an environmental point of view it's quite eco friendly because all those tickets and passes no longer need to be printed.
And it's this last point which really struck a chord with us. Our clients are increasingly environmentally aware. For example, at Shambala Festival plastic water bottles are banned. There are water hoses throughout the festival site so you can fill other containers, but you can't buy bottled water anywhere on site.
So we're working hard on rolling out Passbook support accross all our events ready for the summer festival season. To support our customers we're going to publish a series of articles explaining how to use Passbook and its equivalents on other platforms. We think it's pretty simple, but we're also aware that it isn't as widely used as it could be, and therefore a lot of customers aren't totally sure what it is.
Check back here and on our website for further updates over the next couple of weeks. And in the meantime, try not to lose anything important...