Page 142 - AC/E Digital Culture Annual Report 2016

142Nevertheless, as we have seen, some of the functions QR codes could perform are beginning to be replaced by other technology. For example, wristbands tted with RFID chips work very well at large festivals with many attendees and speed up the ticket validation process, and beacons can provide up-to-date information relevant to the place the attendee is at, in this respect o ering possibilities that QR cannot.In short, QR codes are very useful in many contexts and can be an e cient and fast solution for management and visitors alike, as well as requiring very few resources.Another online tool that is triggering a certain amount of debate as to its usefulness is mass emailing in the form of newsletters with freemium tools (basic services are free, more complex or speci c ones are paid for), such as Mailchimp, or the Spanish version, Acumbamail. This consists in sending speci c groups of people (followers or attendees from previous years who have supplied their email address for this purpose, interest groups such as journalists or in uencers in a particular eld...) messages containing information – in this case about forthcoming dates, activities and promotions, as well as more special, speci c content.The fact is that it takes skill to word messages of this kind to make them relevant and appealing. Some experts in digital communication91 reckon that the newsletter format92 is becoming more widespread and useful. Others hold that the opposite is true. But newsletters may work better or worse depending on the type of audience, and on their design and the tone used.For example, the organisers of OFFF Festival told us that they used to send out emails of this kind for years, but after a time they noticed that they were not getting such a good response,so they stopped using them and turned mainly to Facebook and Twitter to communicate with their audience. In contrast, Kosmopolis festival divides its newsletter recipients into two maingroups – everyone who has lled in a form providing an email address for receiving these publications, and in uential agents in the eld of culture with whom they are in contact – with di erent objectives and approaches to relations, and this works for communicating and keeping people who are interested well informed.Every week Afropunk Fest festival issues a very attractively designed newsletter with carefully written content on art and African and Afro- American music that has been selected by the organisers (and is related to artists who have played or are due to play at the festival) or is commented on by the community. Promoting the festival appears almost to be a secondary concern of the newsletter, which is used to further its mission of giving impetus to and spreading contemporary Afro-American culture.If we have discussed beacons and the Internetof Things, we should also mention Big Data and advanced web analytics, as together they make up two of the minor digital revolutions of this decade.The term Big Data refers to the huge amountof data generated by humans and reproduced online as well as o ine in general. We are attaining record levels of data storage, and they are still rising. It is reckoned that we are about to hit the 300-exabyte mark for data generated and stored – trillions and trillions of megabytes.932. NT BEFORE AND DURING THE FESTIVALFocus: Use of New Digital Technologies at Cultural Festivals