An Irish technology start-up plans to challenge Ticketmaster's dominance of the market for concert tickets by signing an exclusive deal with Ryanair.

Ticket Text (www.ticket-text.com), which launched this week, will send tickets as text messages to mobile phones, which means it will not charge postage or packaging fees.

Purchased tickets are delivered as 2D barcodes that can then be scanned at the venue.

Ticket Text chief executive Mark McLaughlin says the company is currently in a "soft-launch" mode, and admits there are relatively few events for which Irish consumers can buy tickets at the moment.

"We have a number of Irish and English clients in the pipeline, and will soon be selling tickets to concerts, sporting events and tourist attractions," says Mr McLaughlin.

The exclusive long-term deal with Ryanair will see the budget airline promote the service on its home page, booking pages and in customers' confirmation e-mails.

Ultimately, Mr McLaughlin says the e-mail link will be time and location specific so that when users click through they will only be shown events and offers for the city they are flying to and the dates for which they will be there.

Ticket Text wants to sell more than just tickets and plans to provide relevant special offers and coupons to customers.

To encourage usage the Ticket Text site has social networking tools similar to MySpace or Bebo.

While admitting that there is a plethora of social networking sites on the market, he says that Ticket Text's advantage is the 52 million people that fly with Ryanair each year.

"By contrast, Facebook has just 34 million users, although clearly not all Ryanair passengers will sign up with us."

A former corporate financier. Mr McLaughlin says the new venture is well funded by venture capital and angel investment.