Meet Scott Witters from Glownet – our Startup of the Week
Welcome to the third episode in the Elevator Pitch series 3.
Every week we’ll publish a 30 second pitch from 12 leading startups from across London. In this series we took the founders to the top of 40 Bank Street in the heart of Canary Wharf for the most exciting pitch of their lives.
Festival goers rejoice – Glownet are making your lives much easier.
With the help of radio frequency identification technology – the same technology that is used in your Oyster card – they are transforming a regular festival wristband into much more.
Cash, be gone
Glownet have developed the technology to add RFID to festival wristbands, making the life of both the festival goer and the festival organiser easier.
For the goers, their wristbands become their tool for buying anything at the festival. No more lugging around a wallet for 12 hours at a time, now all need is your festival wristbands.
The advantages of multiple for organisers. ‘VIP lists’ are now built in to the wristbands, customer insight from all festival goers can be collected, and organisers can interact with their customers through social media like never before.
New tech from New Zealand
Scott Witters was the CEO of New Zealand’s flagship festival business, Rhythm Group, for 10 years and part-way through that time realised that there had to be a better way to run his festival.
He started by using a local RFID provider to provide cashless services and then came to realise that he could transform an industry by setting up his own RFID business. In late 2012 he set up Glownet in the UK to transform music festivals worldwide.
The business model is as you would expect. Glownet takes a project management fee for administering wristbands to every customer and staff member. This is payable on a per wristband basis.
For the cashless payments services, they take a percentage of all transactions and also charge on a per tag basis for our social media integration services.
The best is yet to come
Over Christmas and New Year Glownet delivered their new fully integrated service to all 26,000 festival goers at Rhythm & Vines in New Zealand. The new platform grants the power to manage all aspects of the Glownet experience from one place.
Having self funded the business for over a year until April, they recently closed an investment deal with an angel group worth over £1 million in the next twelve months.