Editor’s note: Today’s guest blogger is Brett Dowling, founder and President of Tixsee, an innovative Fan Experience Management Platform for the sports, entertainment, and venue management industries. Read how Tixsee used Google Maps APIs to build a unique ticket-purchasing platform for the Dallas Mavericks.
When you go to a basketball game, you want to make sure you get great seats, secure an awesome view of the court and are able to find your way around the arena. That’s what we’re doing for fans of the Dallas Mavericks with our Tixsee platform, an immersive shopping experience that lets people see the view from their seats before purchasing.
From the Mavericks’ Web site, fans can take a tour of the arena, stroll the aisles to see the view of the court from any seat, then buy a ticket. They can also tour the Mavericks’ store and buy team gear. Visitors make their way around the arena using familiar Street View controls. We used the Google Maps Street View Service in the Google Maps JavaScript API to build this experience. We worked with Business Photos America, Google Maps Business View Trusted Agency, to take more than 12,400 images of the arena. We used those images to create more than 1,000 high-definition panoramas that re-create the arena in 3D.
The Mavericks’ ticketing platform is much more than just the site’s interactive interface. Just as important is the content management system (CMS) that lets the team do things like create special offers to drum up excitement and increase ticket sales. We use the Google Maps Embed API to embed the Street View imagery inside the CMS. The backend users can then orient the panoramas and preview campaigns before deploying to the live project. For a social media campaign, they hid a photograph of an autographed team ball in the virtual arena, and the first person to find the ball online was able to keep it. Traffic to the site spiked.
We’ve got a lot more planned, especially for mobile, because we know people will be bringing their phones to the arena. We have plans to release apps for iOS and Android in the near future. We’ll be using the Google Maps Directions API so people can find their way to one of the eight parking lots near the arena, then navigate right to their seats. It’s all part of our ultimate goal: to build a platform for the Mavericks that intensifies the fan experience and reinforces the value of purchasing tickets to live events at the arena.