No. 1 ticketing service Ticketmaster is finally ditching its terrible CAPTCHA system for verification and will use new tech that will make it easier to buy tickets faster.

Ticketmaster has used the CAPTCHA system, which provides hard-to-read text that you must type in, to help block automated bots from buying tickets. The problem is that CAPTCHA system is so effective that real humans often have a hard time getting the words right. When you are trying to buy tickets online before an event sells out, for example, this can be exceptionally frustrating and make you want to punch your computer screen.

To fix this problem, Ticketmaster got rid of the CAPTCHA system from Google and instead partnered with Solve Media to work on new verification systems. It’s still basically a CAPTCHA, where you have to put in text. But now the text will be much more readable. Sometimes you will also get questions or logic puzzles, and some times you’ll actually get an advertisement you have to interact with.

“While an important step in blocking BOTS, we know the current CAPTCHA solution has been a frustrating part of buying tickets for fans,” Ticketmaster CEO Nathan Hubbard said in a statement. “By working with Solve Media and deploying our own innovative mobile solution, we’re leading the industry forward through our buying experience and the aggressive fight against BOTS.”

Check out an advertising example with the new verification system below:

Top Ticketmaster captcha imaga via AngryWeb

Ticketing startup TicketLeap has relaunched with a new logo, webpages that encourage more social interaction, and updated iOS and Android apps that create a mobile box office, the company announced Monday morning.

TicketLeap competes in a similar space to Eventbrite and TicketFly, and, with the redesign, the company hopes to take itself in a more mature and modern direction. It hinted at its new direction a few months back when it added reserved seating options that its direct competition doesn’t offer.

The first major part of TicketLeap’s redesign is its new event pages with a standardized template with maps, seating charts, and the ability to socialize about the event beforehand. On top of the standardized template, there are also all-in-one organization pages so you can display a calendar with lots of upcoming events in the same place.

“We think the event starts when tickets go on sale, not when the doors open,” TicketLeap CEO Chris Stanchak told VentureBeat.

Second, the company has revamped its iPhone, iPad, and Android apps so organizers can set up a mobile box office. The TicketLeap iPad and iPhone apps allow users to take credit cards, sell tickets, and check-in people at the door, while the company’s Android app just allows for check-ins. Eventbrite offers a similar function with its iPad app and card reader, but it does not support it for iPhone or Android.

“We’re committed to web-based ticketing, but there are many ways people still use a traditional box office approach,” Stanchak said.

Finally, the site itself is designed to function better with Facebook and Twitter than ever before, so you can interact with people in a more social manner. The deep integration with Facebook and Twitter can help organizers too, because you get better analytics about your customers who have signed up using a social network. For example, an organizer could see that a woman who shared a event link on Facebook attracted 20 sign-ups and do something with that information like contacting her to spread the word more.

Philadelphia-based TicketLeap was founded in 2003 and has raised about $8.5 million to date from MentorTech Ventures, NextStage Capital, Seneca Advisors, Gabriel Investors, and Ben Franklin Technology Partners. It now has 25 employees.

Dave Morin, CEO of social-network Path, has joined ticketing startup Eventbrite‘s board of the directors, a move Eventbrite claims will help it continue innovating on the social front.

While Path had a major privacy blowup early this year, the company has carried on with its head high by raising a new $30 million funding round. Eventbrite doesn’t talk about Path much in their announcement, however, and instead lauds Morin’s role as a former head of Facebook’s platform group.

“Eventbrite has long been a believer in the impact of the social graph, and the work that Dave did while at Facebook has had a profound impact on our business,” Eventbrite CEO Kevin Hartz said, in a statement. “Our integration with Facebook Connect in 2008 predicated an exponential increase in traffic and engagement among event attendees. We are thrilled to welcome Dave to our board and believe his expertise and guidance will be an incredible asset to Eventbrite as we continue to grow.”

Eventbrite is arguably the hottest startup today with an emphasis on ticketing and events. In February, the company said it had issued more than 50 million tickets and today the company says it has issued nearly 60 million tickets. Eventbrite also recently launched its first hardware product with an “at the door” credit card reader.

“Eventbrite is fundamentally changing the way people create, promote and find events and gatherings in their local communities,” Morin said, in a statement. “I’ve been more than impressed by their level of innovation, their commitment to their users, and by their long term focus. The decision to join the board as they forge into making event discovery more mobile and social was an easy one. At the end of the day, we all live for great events.”

Morin joins former Netflix CFO Barry McCarthy, former Ticketmaster CEO Sean Moriarty, Sequoia Capital Partner Roelof Botha, and others on Eventbrite’s board.

Dave Morin photo: Flickr/Joi Ito

Ticking startup TicketLeap has become the first ticketing startup to add a reserved seating feature and the ability to create custom seating charts, the company announced today.

While Ticketmaster has offered the ability to do this for event organizers and ticket buyers for quite some time, the feature has surprisingly been missing from the startup ticketing scene where Eventbrite, Ticketfly, and TicketLeap have been battling it out. Basically, the new service will make it a lot easier to use a non-Ticketmaster solution to create ticketed seating at events.

The new service can do the following for the ambitious event planner:

• Create a visual representation of their venue: Including seating charts and rows of seats that can be color-coded based on section and ranked by desirability on a 1-10 scale.
• Offer handicapped seating: For any wheelchair accessible or closed caption support seating needs.
• Save venue creation for future use: Once a venue is created, it will be saved on the TicketLeap platform as an option for all future events.

“Our goal is to continue refining and simplifying the ticketing process for event organizers, and we’re stoked to be the first company to bring the self-service, reserved seating functionality to market,” said Chris Stanchak, founder and CEO of TicketLeap, in a statement. “We’re all about catering the ticketing experience to the needs of all our customers, and this new feature allows us to further the personalization and customization process of creating events and selling tickets.”

Philadelphia-based TicketLeap was founded in 2003 and has raised about $8 million to date from MentorTech Ventures, NextStage Capital, Seneca Advisors, Gabriel Investors, and Ben Franklin Technology Partners.

Update: Brown Paper Tickets, a 12-year-old DIY ticketing site, claims it is the first ticket site to offering reserved seating options. An April 2004 blog post shows the site introducing multiple pricing levels and assigned seating. The options it offers are not exactly the same as TicketLeap’s but there are similarities.

Check out a few more photos below of TicketLeap’s seating interface:

Seating photo: Karen Roe/Flickr

The news was first reported by TechCrunch.

SeatGeek uses algorithms to match the best deal with a customer’s specific needs for an event. Event-goers can then see thousands of potential pricing and seating options available for concerts and sporting events on the secondary market.

Under the terms of the deal, The Wall Street Journal Online will soon feature ticketing links provided by SeatGeek, giving readers one click access to area-specific deals in sports, concert and theater events.

The firm told VentureBeat that although it had been previously reported the paper would provide links on its Sports and Local pages, no specific placement has been hashed out quite yet.

SeatGeek said it will use the infusion to beef up its product and engineering teams. That money will be much-needed as the startup continues to grow. It recently revamped its website, with a newly redesigned home page, venue maps that allow fans to zoom in and find seats at the best prices, and a concerts page which now lists 10,000 of the most-searched for concerts.

The funding came from a consortium of previous backers PKS Capital, Founder Collective, Stage One Capital, Trisiras Group and angel investors Mark Wachen, Thomas Lehrman, Sunil Hirani, Allen Levinson and Arie Abecassis.

”SeatGeek has a strong vision of how to tap into the multi-billion dollar secondary ticket market,” David Frankel, managing partner of Founder Collective, told VentureBeat. “Their service is really streamlining the event ticket buying process for consumers and the SeatGeek management team is executing impressively.”

The new funding brings the total amount received by the start-up a total investment of over $2 million since its founding in 2009.

Today’s $20 million more than triples the four-year-old startup’s total funding to date to $29.5 million. Until now, its only venture capital investor has been Sequoia Capital, which also joined this latest round of funding.

The interest in the unorthodox ticketing venue, which specializes in collecting payment for smaller-scale and less formal events than the concerts and sporting events Ticketmaster is known for, is not without basis. This year, San Francisco-based Eventbrite projected $200 million in total gross ticket sales, a number which has doubled year-over-year.

The online ticketer’s representatives say much of that boom in growth is owed to a recent partnership with Facebook that allows people to share all Eventbrite’s upcoming calendar with their entire network of friends, thereby increasing the site’s brand awareness. It also has built-in tools to help organizers design their own social networking pages to promote an event.

Thus far Eventbrite said it has sold almost 8 million tickets in 2010. It makes most of its revenues by charging event organizers 99 cents per ticket sold through Eventbrite, as well as 2.5 percent of a ticket’s total cost. Events that are free are allowed to list on the site at no cost.

Still, Eventbrite has a long way to go before it can take Ticketmaster head-on—and remains coy about its prospects of going public. Because the site specializes in smaller, more independent events, it does not draw the sheer mass of ticketing business its larger competitors do, which could handicap it in drawing a larger audience heading into the future.

For now, CEO and founder Kevin Hartz said that Eventbrite’s ticketing niche is a boon, not a hindrance.

“We are changing the rules of ticketing,” said Hartz. “We are building a powerful service from the ground up to transform how event organizers sell tickets and how consumers discover and buy tickets for events of all shapes and sizes.”