Venue 1 offers comprehensive technology that enable sports and entertainment venues to better manage their customer service, food service, ticketing, and retail outlets.

Since 1989, Venue 1’s TangentPOS has been the leading point-of-sale & event control software system for sports & entertainment venues. TangentPOS products are installed in over 60 major league venues and over 100 other public assembly facilities.

TangentPOS provides venue operators with software solutions for concessions point of sale, event accounting, commissioned vending, wireless "in-seat" service using hand-held touch-screen POS devices, retail cashier stations, warehousing and inventory control, table service and touch-screen wait staff stations, and suites & premium seating capabilities.

Venue 1’s CTO Peter Miska is charged with identifying and integrating new technologies that enable the company to stay ahead of their competitors. Recently Mr. Miska’s team set to work integrating Visual DataFlex 10’s Web Services technology within their applications.

One of the features the "AllStar" version of the TangentPOS system has is the ability for customers at the venue to make purchases using a fob - a piece of plastic with an embedded RFID chip given to the customer - that is read by an integrated RFID (radio frequency identification) reader built into the POS device via a serial port.

The RFID reader and fob are supplied by Venue 1’s business partner Smart Systems. Each fob’s RFID chip is encoded with a TAG_ID, which uniquely identifies the customer at the event.

Smart Systems does an HTTP post to a waiting ASP page with an XML string as an argument when they want to add a TAG_ID to the table or change information about a TAG_ID. When an RFID fob is presented for payment a message is sent to a Visual DataFlex Web Application with the TAG_ID. The TangentPOS system then finds the tag in a table and returns a credit card number and zip code to the POS device.

When a tag is presented at the POS device and the TAG_ID doesn’t exist in TangentPOS database, then the system queries Smart Systems Web application for the appropriate Web Service to use.

"We asked Smart Systems to define a Web Service we could use for this particular purpose," says Mr. Miska. "We were testing Visual DataFlex version 10 and we felt that this was an ideal task to use the software’s new Web Services capabilities."

"We couldn’t be more excited about the transparent, platform independent nature of Web Services," says Mr. Miska. "Smart Systems is using Visual Studio .Net to create their Web Services, and because it’s based on the industry standard SOAP, we didn’t need to know anything about their actual implementation. They did their part, we did our part with Visual DataFlex, we connected it and it just worked!"

Prior to using Web Services, Mr. Miska’s team had implemented another solution based on the Visual DataFlex Web Application Server, Active Server Pages (ASP) and XML. While this worked, it was much more complicated than the team’s new Web Service-based solution.

"We’re also pleased that the conversion from an ASP model to a Web Service model only took about 20 minutes with Visual DataFlex 10," says Mr. Miska. "The integration of externally created Web Services is easy to do and the result worked exactly as expected. The other feature we think worth mentioning is that we are able to run ASP methods and Web Service methods in the same Web application. The methods run side by side without any extra coding."

Deploying the Web Services has delivered several benefits for Venue 1 and their customers. Mr. Miska says that the company is now able to support and extend their fan loyalty/affinity systems for their customers in a "straightforward, cost-effective way".

"The systems are very stable and don’t require many support hours," says Mr. Miska, "and sports teams’ management, for instance, are able to collect information about what their fans are buying and how they are buying it."

Visit Venue 1 or e-mail info@venueone.com for more information.

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