Last weekend in Shanghai Beernanza, the beer festival, celebrated its 5^th edition. Nice weather and cool vibes were combined with the best brews. However this year was clear that in order to enjoy the festival, carrying a smart phone in your pocket was indispensable.

Same location, same nice atmosphere. Attending to the three-day beer festival in Shanghai is becoming a regular social event for the coolest people in town. After taken a close view to the visitors it was very easy to see that in one hand they had a beer and in the other their smart phone. In this edition the use of the smart phones was a must, from the very beginning to the last one.

A few weeks ago on Wechat was circulating a flyer about the upcoming Beernanza. It explained all about the location, days, musicians and prices. If no doubts about going there, they gave an early bird tickets with a nice discount, but it was mandatory to follow their account through scanning the QR code in the post. To get the tickets were given two options: pay by Wechat or Alipay. Really easy and convenient. Once paid the organizers sent you a message with an assigned QR code and a bar code to just show it up at the entrance.

On the day of the festival, at the entrance, just after scanning the Alipay’s or Wechat’s QR codes to pay the ticket the visitors received a token interchangeable for a free welcome beer supplied by a local brewery. Back in the old days, this token would had been enough to get the first brew, but not anymore because the only way to enjoy it was going to their stand and first scan a code and follow their account. It might sound annoying but the truth is, that as usual when it comes to get something for free, this small step was considered worth it enough by the crowd. As you can imagine, every craft beer or food trucks followed the same pattern and all the items were sold using the e-money platforms.

Besides just drinking lots of beer and enjoy the music performances, there was also space to do some business as Marc, a regular visitor, pointed it out “This year I discovered a delicious beer from Beijing,  so I just bought a couple of big cases and tomorrow it will be delivered to my place”. How he did it was so simple. He added the sellers Wechat, paid it and sent his address and phone number. Once the data were collected the sellers introduced all of it to the SF application and next morning the delivery guy would pick it up and sent it to Marc right on time.

At the end of every day many people were obviously at least tipsy so many attendants, just before finishing their last beers, took one more time their phones out from their pockets to book one Didi to drive them safe back to home.

To sum up, in this autumn Beernanza edition there were two items crucial to enjoy the festival at the most: your smart phone and your power bank.