Brightspot Market

Building online festival apps for ticketing and to provide official information to festivals such as lineups, tenants and news.

OVERVIEW

Brightspot Market is an annual culture festival that started first in 2009. The first event put together 25 carefully selected tenants across fashion, lifestyle, food, art, collectibles from Jakarta & the surroundings in a raw warehouse space that brought in 5,000 people over 4 days.

Fast forward to today, the event has grown to take in up to 190 vendors with hundreds more on the waiting list & the attendance number has grown to more than 60,000 people over 4 days! There have been additions of features such as music, art & knowledge combined altogether during the festival.

The Brief

Brightspot Market is the biggest cultural festival in Indonesia yet with the majority of users between 18-40 years old making it an ideal platform for digital marketing campaigns. A highly used social media platform is Instagram which brings festivals and customers together in a successful manner. Instagram however has limitations, meaning they can’t just rely on it. It is a tool used only for pictures meaning written festival information cannot be used. We were briefed to create an app to fill this hole.

The application will contain information about tenants, Music, Art, F&B, including their location and how to get there. The application should also be able to notify their onsite customer in real time during the event for promotional purposes such as flash sale, tenant discount, free drink and others. Not only that, the application also functions as an e-ticket for customers to enter the festival.

Brightspot Market also wanted to be able to collect meaningful event information, which will help to provide customer insight to help them grow even bigger. It was also important that the app was highly available during high traffic times.

Multiple Challenges

For Brightspot Market, the event date is fixed. Application release should not be delayed and must be error free during the 4 days event, failing to meet these conditions will result in angry customers because they won’t be able to enter the festival.

Challenge 1

Time. Time range between briefing and festival date is 1.5 months and we need to deliver 2 native apps: Android and iOS, dashboard and website. No room for error.

Challenge 2

The crowd. Brightspot Market estimated there will be 20.000 – 30.000 users entering the festival per day. Since most of the festival is held inside a mall, a data connection may be an issue if accessed by the crowd at the same time. Application should be able to handle it.

Challenge 3

The server. They should be able to handle the spike during the festival. The code should be executed very fast and optimized, auto scale should work flawlessly and server architecture should be designed correctly.

SOLUTION

We knew that poor communication and coordination between all stakeholders are one of the biggest causes of the delayed project. Unmanaged expectations, programmers not getting correct information are some of the factors. We used scrum methodology and daily stand up meetings to avoid all of the above mentioned. On top of that we also follow all crucial iOS and Android guidelines to make sure Apple and Google approved the app.

Caching strategy was implemented when we designed the customer application. Tenants, Maps, Art and Music information are saved to the device and available in offline mode. This strategy can save customer data usage and also reduce a big number of data connections during the event. Versioning is also implemented so if any information changes occured on the server, the customer device will automatically download it when there is an internet connection available.

The server is also carefully designed by our DevOps to survive high traffic using multiple instances and load balancer. We use the Infrastructure as Code (IAC) approach so that we can easily deploy a new instance if another server is not healthy. Caching strategy also implemented on server side code to reduce access to the database and prevent too many connection errors. On top of that a monitoring tool is installed in case something happens during the festival.