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How Klook made it out of the woods during Taylor Swift’s Singapore ticket sales

This travel platform survived the great war!

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July has been an eventful month for Swifties — fans of Taylor Swifts, in case you still don’t know about them.

Speak Now (Taylor’s Version) was dropped, while tickets for The Eras Tour opened up in Singapore and Japan, prompting fans all over Asia to fight and enter The Great War.

While ticketing platforms face an enormous battle of high volume and demand for ticket sales, Klook — Asia’s leading travel and experiences platform — stood still.

Surviving the great war

On July 7, Klook’s Experiences Packages for Taylor Swift’s The Eras Tour in Singapore sold out in just hours. My confidante and GadgetMatch‘s lifestyle writer, Betty, was also able to purchase a package through the app along with Filipino Swifties.

More than 600,000 fans across the region waited online to secure their tickets without hiccups. With Klook’s robust infrastructure, the app was able to handle a seamless ticket sale for the Singapore tour.

Bernie Xiong, CTO and Co-Founder of Klook, shared that the company capitalized on the opportunity to ramp up the systems during the pandemic-induced event hiatus, allowing the app to deliver an unparalleled booking experience.

Klook can now handle over 10 million users queuing concurrently and has the capacity to scale even further, thanks to its near real-time capacity management and resource provisioning.

How did they get out of the woods?

By leveraging a Content Delivery Network (CDN) system combined with Edge Computing technologies, Klook’s in-house queuing system adjusts its pass-through rate to accommodate millions of users worldwide.

It ended up having no crashes even with a massive surge in demand during peak times. Undergoing rigorous load and stress testing helped the app in providing a harmonious experience without compromising system performance.

While Klook was handling ticket sales, the app is still functioning normally for other users who were browsing the app for other activities, experiences, hotels, and mobility options.

Onto some vigilante sh*t

To fight off ticket scalpers and bots, Klook implemented an app-only approach to ensure that genuine fans with a unique ID had a fair chance of securing tickets.

Klook used AI in its in-house fraud prevention and security system, employing techniques such as device fingerprinting and behavior analysis to detect and mitigate suspicious activities.

Closely examining user accounts and identifying anomalous behaviors allowed Klook to reject fraudulent orders and subject them to manual verifications.

These security measures helped level the playing field to ensure that fans have a fair and square chance of securing their tickets during the great war.

Long live the walls they crashed through~

Of course, Klook’s successes didn’t happen overnight. Three years in the making, the app already had skin in the game, supporting high-traffic events such as JJ Lin and Jay Chou’s concerts.

Aside from ticket sales, Klook curated value-added bundles from multi-day experiences and services such as play (attractions, experiences), stay (hotel nights, staycations), and move (rail, car rental, or transfers).

After all, Klook’s data revealed that when tourists attend a concert or event, their incremental in-destination spending can range from 4-5 times the face value of the ticket.

Now, Swifties who were able to book an Experience package can look forward to more moments of joy when they visit Singapore in March 2024.

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Apps

X glitch misplaces most photos from 2014 and beyond

Only a few were restored

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August 22, 2023

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Archiving social media is a real problem today. Because most of public discourse happens through social media platforms, a single break in infrastructure can easily wipe out entire conversations and milestones in the modern era. Over the weekend, that exact scenario happened. A glitch on X reportedly erased most images and links from 2014 and beyond.

As spotted by Tom Coates on the platform, images from before December 2014 disappeared from the site. Likewise, links from the same period are also broken and lead nowhere. Among those that disappeared, one of the most notorious losses was a photo taken by Ellen DeGeneres at the Oscars — a tweet that garnered an enormous amount of retweets at the time.

X has not publicly commented on the supposed glitch. However, after the deletion was noticed, the platform restored the iconic Ellen DeGeneres photo to its full glory. It’s not a complete restoration, though. A lot of content are still missing.

The single photo’s restoration suggests that the content wasn’t outright deleted but rather misplaced. As some have pointed out, a few instances are still directly available from the servers. Users have also speculated that the glitch was intentionally done to free up valuable server space.

Regardless, the glitch — intentional or accidental — opens up an important issue on how the world can archive content on social media platforms. Despite how inane our conversations can be from day to day, losing a section of social media also means losing entire swaths of public discourse to the ether.

SEE ALSO: Twitter is rebranding to 𝕏

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WhatsApp now lets users share photos in HD

Video coming soon

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August 18, 2023

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Quickly sharing smartphone photography can be a chore. Not every messaging platform allows lossless media sharing. Often, a platform will sacrifice image quality for speed. Finally, WhatsApp is getting with the program and allowing users to send HD photos on the app.

Today, Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg officially announced a new feature coming to WhatsApp. Starting now, the messaging platform is rolling out an update to enable HD image sharing.

According to WABetaInfo, the feature will bump up image quality to 4096 x 2692 resolution. Now, an upper limit naturally implies that there’s still compression going on, especially for photos taken at much higher resolutions. WhatsApp has not explained how compression will work under the new HD feature. However, it’s still a good improvement.

Alternatively, if users don’t want to handle the increase in storage or bandwidth use, they can continue to send images in standard quality. The option, once the app is updated, can be accessed by an HD icon when sending images.

Besides image sharing, WhatsApp is also working on adding HD sharing for videos. However, Zuckerberg did not share a timeframe for the improved version of the feature. The update should be rolling out now for WhatsApp users.

SEE ALSO: WhatsApp is working on 32-people voice chats

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X is working on adding video chat to the app

Confirmed by the CEO

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August 11, 2023

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X is continuing its arduous trek to become an all-in-one app. This time, after reintroducing native livestreaming, the platform is moving towards the next natural evolution: video chat. X CEO Linda Yaccarino has officially announced that the feature will come to the platform soon.

In an interview with CNBC, Yaccarino, who took the reins from Elon Musk earlier this year, announced that “soon, you’ll be able to make video chat calls without having to give your phone number to anyone on the platform.” As if that’s not enough, Andrea Conway, a designer at the company, also posted that she “just called someone on X.”

Given Conway’s post, the feature should be in a relatively stable part of the development process. However, it’s not clear when and how the platform plans to launch video chats for the public. It’s also unclear whether the feature will be available to all users or only to those who pay for X Premium, formerly known as Twitter Blue.

With the evolution of all social media platforms (and not just X), it’s not a surprising development for the company. The industry is dedicated to creating the next “everything” app or a hub where users can find everything they’ll need for their digital world: social media, communication, commerce, and other functionalities. TikTok, for instance, recently started tests to support podcasts.

SEE ALSO: X is bringing back livestreaming

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