#tickaroo tech

This week our CEO Naomi Owusu shares her thoughts on how to acquire and keep quality employees! See what other business leaders had to say in the original article. 

It started with Bitcoin, but in 2018, Blockchain will be used by (practically) everyone. 

“Blockchain has become pretty well known, especially due to the meteoric rise of the cryptocurrency Bitcoin. However, the underlying technology also holds huge potential for the business world. A Blockchain is a worldwide database, onto which only new datasets can be added. Transparency and autonomy are big advantages of the technology, because central administrative bodies don’t exist. Despite these benefits, due to its technical complexity, it’s important for companies and developers to evaluate whether its implementation is worthwhile for its current and potential use cases. Even “everyday” IT solutions  still require a huge amount of research. It’s important for developers to keep educating themselves, because the technology of the the future will help make the digital world a bit more democratic and transparent.”  

Photo by rawpixel.com on Unsplash

People’s attention spans are decreasing continuously. The way they concentrate in relation to their reading behaviour has also changed. The consumption of digital media is a strong factor for this development. As a consequence of this, consumers are able to screen and compare content more quickly. Furthermore, online content is generally read differently than printed texts. How can publishers use this information to increase the retention time for their different formats? An article by Naomi Owusu, CEO of Tickaroo.

Know-how: How websites are read 

In this internet age, people hardly read an article word for word. A study from 2006 shows that most of the time people use a F-shaped reading pattern. What does this mean? First readers will read the top line of the text and then jump down the page to where they read another line. Towards the end of the article they only look at the first words of the lines. 

While reading styles like this are becoming more commonplace, it’s unthinkable to read a book this way. Another study presents a similar observation, namely that the retention time on websites is barely longer then 10 seconds. When publishing articles on the internet, it’s even more difficult to make the text exciting enough that readers are captivated, read the complete article, and also stay on the website.

More attention: What news coverage can learn from the F-pattern

By understanding the F-Pattern, reporters can deduce that the majority of readers won’t read the whole text - especially not word for word. In order to awaken the reader’s interest, the most important information has to be in the first two paragraphs. Here, it’s important to remember the “principle of decreasing importance”, which means that the most important content should be at the beginning while other details should appear in the lower part of a text. Since the readers notice the first words of a paragraph, it’s also best if paragraphs, subheadings and headwords are informative and significant words. This way publishers can grasp their audience’s attention and address reading interests.

Reader at first sight: Multimedia-based reading experience counts

The presentation of the website plays a major role in ensuring users stay on the page and whether they engage with the content or not. Therefore it’s crucial that the page have an appealing visual structure. It’s also important that the colour design is well-defined, the typography is legible and there is topic-appropriate visual content. It’s important not only to provide text, but rather a multimedia-based experience designed to attract the audience. For this reason it’s recommended to choose headings, the main picture and other details that awaken the desire to read more. A good option are Giffygraphics, which are a combination of GIFs and infographics.

It’s the intrinsic value that counts: “Content is king”

Without appealing content, even a perfectly structured website is useless. To gain the readers’ attention and increase their retention time, the whole text, just as the individual sentences, shouldn’t be too long. Furthermore, technical jargon should be avoided, as well as nested sentences. It’s also advisable to divide the text into paragraphs so that there is a new section for each point that is being made. Moreover, objectivity and the usage of active verbs are advantageous for making a text interesting. Important content can also be visually marked, for example, by printing some words in bold or italicising them. Links to different articles or websites can also have an influence on the attractiveness of content, but only if their inclusion benefits the reading experience. 

Invite to stay: Increase retention time with live content

For publishers, the website’s retention time is the measure of all things. Advertising providers also have to learn to adapt to this development. Live content tools will increase in popularity because of the strong potential for the improvement of user experience and the increase of retention times. They provide users with succinct and summarised content in real-time and satisfy the need for current and to-the-point information. In combination with conventional articles, the consumers’ interest becomes aroused this way. 

Conclusion

Tickaroo and its developers use the extensive experience they’ve accumulated over the past 10 years working in the digital industry to help effectively meet the needs (and wants) of clients like kicker and Neymar Jr’s 5 with its Digital Media Services.

kicker: Creating the Technology to Appease a Booming Audience

With an average of 8 million users a month (AGOF digital facts) and over 1.8 billion page impressions (ivw 09/17), kicker’s online presence is without a doubt a colossal one. As one of the most trusted sports publications in Germany, kicker has a duty to ensure that its content is accessible and available to its clamouring audiences. Having worked with kicker for many years, Tickaroo and its team of developers knows what specific technological aspects need to be in place and how to implement them effectively. With our highly efficient scaling technology, we ensure that on game days fans have no problem accessing the live content they crave. With each update, adjustments are made to ensure that users are able to more easily and quickly take in the latest information. The technology must grow with its audiences, and Tickaroo makes sure that it provides kicker with a technology that displays the media house’s captivating content. 

Neymar Jr’s Five: Communicating Across Borders

Communicating with our clients is a crucial part of our development process. For each step, from idea drafting to implementation, all parties need to be on the same page in order to ensure an optimised product is created that fulfils the desires of the commissioners. With the Neymar Jr’s Five tournament, working closely with the team from Red Bull is central to the project’s success. With a website redesign and implementation of our tournament manager software, communication with one office is not enough, thanks to the unique format of the tournament. Our team has to reach out to tournament managers across the world to make sure the technology and therefore the tournament go off without a hitch. With fan interaction playing an important role in this unique event, the latest update has created and adjusted the technology to fulfil Red Bull’s goals for the tournament. 

“Digital Media Service projects are especially thrilling, because here apps and websites are built from the ground up based on the client’s desires. In order to find out what exactly the client needs, we have to work particularly close with one another” - Laura Wagner, Key Accounts Manager.

Our second advent “candle” is Tickaroo Livestreaming. Team Tickaroo has been tinkering around with this exciting technology for quite a while now. Coming up in the New Year, we’ve got a special gift for our users in the form of new technology and features! 

Streaming sites like Netflix and Maxdome have been providing users with their favorite shows and movies via the internet for almost a decade. DAZN jumped on this streaming model and started providing sports fans with the ability to watch their favorite teams from underrepresented sports, i.e. ones hard to find on traditional airways via stream. With the trend of unbundling becoming more and more popular, consumers are turning to streaming providers for their desired content. 

With our streaming technology, Tickaroo has been striving to give even the smallest teams the ability to stream their games. From demonstrating our livestreaming camera prototypes at the CeBIT, to providing our users with 2 min worth of free streaming with our On.Air feature, to testing our technology in the Swiss Alps, to streaming entire tournaments for the German Tennis Federation, we’ve made some big strides in figuring out where we would like to go with our technology. 

This past year, our livestreaming department has been hard at work developing what we believe to be the next big thing in streaming! We can’t reveal too much, but we have this quote from one of the conceptors of the project, our CPO Matthew Ulbrich, to whet your appetite for what is to come! 

“Throughout our various development phases over the past few years, we’ve noticed that mobile video production just isn’t keeping up with the capabilities of the ever improving smartphone technology. Our sights are set on being able to provide users with the ability to produce a high quality stream with only a few taps on their phone. 1-2-3-Stream!”

To “light” the candles on our Advent wreath, we’ve decided to share our four products that we introduced to our users this year, by showing how these products can be used during the holiday season by sports teams, publishing houses, and reporters alike! First up: Live blogging. 

It’s the first Monday in December, and Team Tickaroo is ready for the Christmas season! Sipping glühwein on Fridays after a productive work week. Lights and decorations scattered around the office. The only thing missing is some snow! 

With December come Christmas markets, and with Christmas markets come many stories. Our live blogging technology is perfect for capturing the magic of these traditional “festivals”.  One of our oldest partners Nordbayern.de uses our live blogging technology to keep its readers in the region always in the know during many local events like music festivals, sporting events, and this December the team from Nordbayern covered the opening day of the world famous Christmas market in Nuremberg. Full of good cheer and detailed information, locals (and even virtual visitors) can experience the joy of attending a local tradition. 

Not only do younger audiences appreciate the crisp and snappy content that our live blogging technology provides, but reporters love the ease with which they can upload and integrate pictures, videos, gifs, and social media content into their storytelling right from their smartphones! Using this dynamic technology gives reporters the freedom to follow the story wherever it takes them! 

After discovering the inner workings of Tickaroo as a marketing intern, and then later as a marketing associate, Victoria Moodie has taken on the challenge of ensuring our current and potential users are always kept up-to-date with Tickaroo’s latest developments and projects.

What is your favorite Social Media channel to post the latest Tickaroo news on? 

I like Instagram! Because the focus of the content is on the image so the platform lets you be more creative. Plus we tend to use Instagram to highlight what our team is up to. This is the platform where you get to really see what each individual member brings to our team and the different steps we take to make our great technology. We tend to share the end results on the the other platforms, which are also great by the way, but on Instagram you get to see our journey. 

As a holder of a History Degree, what is your favorite thing about our historic Tickaroo HQ?

What strikes me most about working in such a wonderfully old building is the juxtaposition: here we are, a tech startup, and we’re working in a building that belongs to the Princely Family von Thurn und Taxis, whose principle residence (across the street) is a centuries old former monastery!

As a native Canadian, what is your favorite word that you’ve heard used in Bavaria?

There are one or two that I probably shouldn’t say, no that I won’t say, at least in the work place. ;) But there are so many good ones! Ok I’m going to go with...

Oachkatzlschwoaf!