Ticketing has evolved from pre-printed tickets, to tickets printed at a ticket window at the time of purchase, to Internet sales where customers print their own bar-coded tickets. The latter method is becoming increasingly popular, since it allows ticket buyers to avoid long lines and enables ticket sellers to eliminate printing and distribution costs-ultimately providing better service to their customers.

The next step in the evolution of ticketing will be to replace home-printed and pre printed paper tickets with an electronic ticket that can be sent to a mobile phone or PDA via short message service (SMS). This mobile ticket (m-ticket) consists of a bar code that can be quickly read and validated directly from the mobile device's display screen.

This new form of m-commerce service is using mobile technology and existing barcode scanning to provide mobile phone users with mobile tickets and therefore better serve customer's needs. Mobile ticketing simply makes your mobile phone the ticket.

Applications of mobile ticketing can include the following:

• Tickets for Events, cinemas, concerts, theatres, museums.
• Tickets for Transportation such as trains, buses, etc.
• Tickets for Travel like flights, boats, etc.