July 9-10, 2013
San Francisco, CA

Tickets On Sale Now

Today TiqIQ is launching SellerDirect, a new “more civilized” way to sell tickets to same-day games, events, and concerts. It’s like Craigslist but with identity verification and details like the view from your seat.

Oh, and it’s completely free.

“This is a more civilized option than buying a ticket five minutes before the game on the street corner,” TiqIQ CEO Jesse Lawrence told me last week. “You can see someone’s Facebook icon, click through and see their Facebook page, and decide if you want to make an offer. You can also see the view from the seat and get venue details and location.”

TiqIQ — yes, tiq as in ticket, IQ as in intelligence quotient — started out as a publishing platform focused on blogs and local ticket sellers. Now, the service powers ticket sales for thousands of sites, including the Washington Post and team-specific blogs like Lakers Nation. Lawrence says TiqIQ lists millions of tickets for every major event in the U.S. and Canada, from every major seller, including last week’s Super Bowl.

“We have thousands of sellers and brokers, and we aggregate about nine boards like eBay, TicketMaster, and TicketsNow,” he said. “Last year we sold a Super Bowl ticket group for $25,000 … but this year the average price is down a bit.”

One aspect of TiqIQ’s competitive differentiation from services like StubHub is the massive aggregation on the site, which almost guarantees that tickets will be available for every major event. But perhaps TiqIQ’s most interesting opportunity is its social media tie-ins. While TiqIQ only has about 4,300 Twitter followers itself, via relationships with sports blogs and local personalities, it has an overall audience of over six million followers.

It uses this massive following intelligently, funneling tweets and status updates about tickets and events to audiences who are geographically and demographicly most likely to be interested. Each of those partners, who allows TiqIQ access to his or her Twitter feed or other social media outlets, then gets paid based on performance. And it’s working.

“We sell 30 percent of our tickets through social,” Lawrence told me.

TiqIQ has three ways of selling tickets: fixed price, auction, and make an offer, giving sellers a wide variety of options to attempt to maximize the value of their asset. For example, auction might be best for an in-demand event that is a week away, while make an offer might work for events that are not in very high demand, but might sell at a discount.

All of which adds up to much better opportunity than standing on a street corner hawking tickets.

Updated 12:08pm: TiqIQ doesn’t sell tickets itself; it lists them for sale. Also, it doesn’t list tickets for sale on StubHub. We’ve corrected the story to eliminate these errors.

photo credit: RMTip21 via photopin cc

July 9-10, 2013
San Francisco, CA

Tickets On Sale Now

The recently launched Redbox Instant streaming service isn’t the only thing Redbox is doing to expand its business beyond physical DVD and video game rentals.

Yesterday, the Coinstar-owned company began offering customers in Los Angeles the capability to purchase tickets to sporting events, standup comedy shows, theme parks, night clubs, concerts, and more through its new Redbox Tickets service.

The ticketing service, which was first tested with a select number of events in Philadelphia last year, is available on both Redbox’s website as well as the 1,300 DVD and game rental kiosks in the area. Buyers can then either print off their tickets at home or pick them up at the event box office before the show.

But here’s why you should care about Redbox Tickets: It’s charging a $1 flat fee for processing, which is much lower than what other services tack on to the original ticket price.

The only downside is you likely won’t have a selection of premium seating to choose from. Venues that provide Redbox with tickets will be doing so to minimize the number of unsold tickets prior to an event, the company told the Wall Street Journal back in October.

In other words, people who are planning to buy tickets at top dollar as soon as they go on sale will get first crack at tickets like normal, along with the higher processing fee. Whatever is left will then become available through Redbox, which isn’t a bad deal when you consider that less desirable seats will now cost less.

Initially, Redbox is offering venue tickets from Caesars Entertainment, Improv Comedy Clubs, NASCAR/ISC at Auto Club Speedway, Universal Studios Hollywood theme park, Guinness World Record Museum, and Playhouse Nightclub. To do this, Redbox made agreements with five existing ticketing services, including Agile Ticketing, Paciolan, ShoWare, Ticketfly and TicketMob. My guess is that Redbox will add to that list of partnerships in the future and eventually roll out its ticketing service to more cities.

Despite charging just a $1 fee on ticket sales, Redbox will still probably bring in enough business to make it worthwhile. This is partially because selling tickets isn’t much different from selling DVD/game rentals, at least from a consumer perspective. Tickets are now just one more thing you can get through Redbox, and I wouldn’t be surprised if we started seeing those Redbox kiosks pop up near concert venues, stadiums, and night clubs.

With all the potential sources of anxiety, spending too much for flights shouldn’t be one of them.

This holiday season, VentureBeat worked with Kayak and Visual.ly to create an infographic of the best and worst times to travel. Kayak analyzed more than a billion search queries and unwrapped a few key findings, and well as some interesting comparisons between holiday travel general year-round travel and between international and domestic journeys.

The most important takeaways? The earlier you book, the better, and traveling on Christmas Day or New Year’s Eve can save you significant amounts of money. Kayak also discovered that Florida is a hot spot for holiday travel as well as for weather.

The three top trending Christmas destinations (based on a year-over-year comparison) are all in Florida, and Orlando is the number one holiday destination this season. But spending your Christmas in the sun has its drawbacks. Miami, Phoenix, and Orlando have the highest increase in airfare this Christmas. While New York remains the most popular place for New Year’s, Las Vegas and Orlando are also high on the list.

No matter where you are going, flying around the holidays is going to be expensive. The average airfare is $528, and this number is on the rise. To keep costs in check, Kayak offered two main pieces of advice: Be flexible with your travel days, and book well in advance.

As for dealing with your family once you arrive at your destination, the team at Kayak has no advice. Although maybe this explains why so many people head to the beach.

Nobody wants to attend a concert or a sporting event alone, but buying tickets for a number of people is a hassle. PayByGroup has added a “fixed price” feature today to make it easier to collect funds for group ticket buying.

PayByGroup is payment platform where people can pool their money to make a collective purchase. Users create a “PayByGroup” for a specific purpose, dictate the amount that each person needs to pay, invites participants to join. No money is charged until the goal has been reached, at which point the initiator can collect the funds. The new fixed-price option specifically targets occasions when every participant throws in the same amount.

The fixed price feature is also useful for merchants who can implement PayByGroup’s technology to create a group checkout option. Any business, from a theater to a vacation rental site, can use the platform to lower friction during the payment process and increase conversions. PayByGroup has formed partnerships with “marquee merchants”, although it has not yet revealed who these partners are. It distinguishes itself from crowd funding site Crowdtilt in this way, which does not currently work with vendors.

PayByGroup was founded by a team of “group organizers” who were consistently frustrated while planning parties or orchestrating trips. Their ultimate mission to have fun was tainted by the awkwardness of asking friends for money and the sting of never getting paid back. Rather than relegate themselves to a lifetime of passive aggressive text messaging and check collecting, they built a better alternative themselves.

PayByGroup received investment from 500 Startups and is based in Mountain View, CA.

Check out this video about the fixed-price feature below:

“Big data” to the rescue.

Now that at least some cities have open public data, anyone with a little programming skill, the inclination to use it, and the burning desire to know, can check. For instance, if the distribution of when tickets are issued is heavy at the end of the month, that could be a sign of quotas that need to be filled.

That’s exactly what Robert Picard, a university student and intern at alternative search engine DuckDuckGo,  did, grabbing a public dataset of tickets issued from 2009 to 2011 in Baltimore. I talked to him this afternoon.

“The original dataset is about two million tickets,” he told me. “I live in Jacksonville, but used data from Baltimore because it was the only place I found any.”

After removing traffic camera tickets (which wouldn’t be affected by quotas, theoretically) as well as correcting for more frequent dates and the fact that only eight months have 31 days, Picard graphed the remaining tickets in a normalized view. The normalized view shows positive (above the line) when more tickets are issued than an expected average, and negative (below the line) when fewer tickets are issued than expected.

Source: Robert Picard

Above the line is more tickets issued than a straight average, below the line is fewer tickets issued.

The data certainly shows a lumpiness. It doesn’t show an average number of tickets issued on each day or in each week. In fact, the date shows more tickets issued near the end of the month — and the beginning of the month.

A possible explanation:

Departments have quotas, and officers do rush to fill it, and that enthusiasm or emphasis carries over into the first week or so of the next month, at which point officers forget about tickets for a while until they are reminded again in the last week of the month.

That’s conceivable, Picard told me, but it’s just one hypothesis. Based on the data alone, he couldn’t really say with certainty why more tickets were being issued on those dates.

Ultimately, I guess, big data can’t answer all questions, and a full explanation has to go beyond the data to the rationale behind behavior.

photo credit: Thomas Hawk via photopin cc

Secondary ticket sales startup TickPick has revamped its site and sales algorithms in a new effort to take on StubHub and Craigslist, the company revealed Tuesday.

TickPick offers a marketplace for reselling already purchased tickets, but it differentiates itself from StubHub by costing less to use and giving more support to buyers and sellers. Similar to Priceline, people can place real-time bids on tickets and sellers can accept or reject the offers. The service also includes algorithms to highlight the best possible deals on tickets.

“TickPick is a user-friendly ticket supercomputer,” TickPick CEO and co-founder Brett Goldberg told VentureBeat. “Behind the design is a monster set of algorithms that chew through ticket data, feeding our users the best tickets only, leading them to make smarter purchases.”

As of Tuesday, the TickPick site (see the above photo) has been revamped with a more polished interface that will highlight the tech behind the service. Clicking on the “New York Yankees,” for example, brings up a page of game dates available with Buy, Bid, and Sell icons. When you click on Buy, the company runs the number and rates tickets with A+ through D grades. In the near future, the site plans to add more partnerships with professional sports organizations to help it expand.

As someone who attends many sporting events and concerts himself, Goldberg said he particularly disliked StubHub’s approach to secondary sales. He said StubHub charges sellers 15 percent in fees; it charges buyers 10 percent. On TickPick, sellers pay a 10 percent fee and buyers pay no fees.

“StubHub is no different from Craigslist, just more organized,” Goldberg told us. “It’s old and lacks the technology to guide users to the best tickets.”

New York-based TickPick launched in 2011 and has raised $250,000 in seed funding thus far from various angel investors. Goldberg said the company has three full-time employees and is currently looking to hire a head of customer support and a head of digital marketing.

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.

July 9-10, 2013
San Francisco, CA

Tickets On Sale Now

Just months into their new careers at Live Nation, the always entrepreneurially minded Eric Garland and Ethan Kaplan have taken over the asylum (their words) and will bring back bleeding-edge innovation to the ticketing-and-promotions conglomerate, which is comprised of Ticketmaster, Live Nation, and Front Line Management.

The pair are heading up LN Labs, Live Nation’s first-ever investment vehicle created to acquire, invest in, and partner with the most cutting-edge early stage music, entertainment, and infrastructure startups.

The just-announced acquisition of Setlist.fm, a live-music community site for curating concert set-lists, represents the first of LN Labs’ strategic investments.

The notion behind the fund, first envisioned when Live Nation entered into talks to acquire Garland’s consumer-data startup BigChampagne last year (the deal went through in December), is to try and marry innovative startup culture with the advantages of an existing ecosystem like Live Nation, Garland, now executive vice president and general manager of LN Labs, told VentureBeat.

Eric Garland (left) and Ethan Kaplan (right) at SXSW

“You find your holes by walking into them,” added Kaplan, vice president of products for LN Labs.

Kaplan, also new to Live Nation, came to the company from Warner Music Group, where he served as senior vice president of emerging technologies, and spearheaded development around new technologies for some the label’s hottest bands.

In an exclusive conversation with VentureBeat, Garland and Kaplan both came off as quick-moving, sharp-witted brainiacs gung-ho about keeping ingenuity alive at an enormous, aging company. So bright, in fact, that they’ve done a little prototyping of their own in order to solve one of the biggest mobile challenges around: providing app users with information they need, when they need it most, without interrupting life’s richest experiences.

With that problem in mind, Live Nation is furtively field-testing a mobile application called Laminate with roughly 100 alpha testers at the SXSW music festival in Austin this week. The application, released little more than 12 hours ago, aims to help festival goers find the best stages and shows, tell them when to leave to get there in time, and instruct them on other practical matters. The app also provides users with a real-time, streaming experience for sharing photos as they capture them at live shows.

But the boys are also anxious to tackle even bigger problems beyond their scope, and LN Labs will make as many deals as it takes to find the types of products and services that solve big challenges for concert fans, they said.

Specifically, LN Labs will make investments in or acquisitions of consumer-facing products that enhance the before, during, and after-show experience or infrastructure companies that make the overall experience more seamless for users.

For some perspective as to why the fund could prove an important opportunity for nascent companies, consider that Ticketmaster has 27 million monthly unique visitors, and that Live Nation Concerts produces more than 22,000 shows annually for more than 2,300 artists. Reach to that large of an audience and events database are the things upstarts salivate over, especially when fighting off obscurity.

Live Nation did not disclose the size of the fund.

Photo credits: crsan/Flickr and Kris Krug

“We’re not some flighty Web 2.0 music discovery platform,” SeatGeek co-founder Jack Groetzinger told VentureBeat by phone. “We’ve gotten big because ticket sales is a powerful business, and now we’re offering to split that revenue stream 50/50 with developers who build on top of our data.”

Groetzinger offers this example of how the platform might work. A popular music blogger in Seattle writes about undiscovered local talent and the best big name shows that are touring through town. With the SeatGeek API, that blogger could start showing their audience when and where the best time is to buy for upcoming concerts connected to these posts. For current partners, which include the massive concert site Pollstar and the local calendar startup Gtrot, that has worked out to $170 for every one thousand referrals.

A mobile check-in app could also tap into SeatGeek’s data, which includes the geo-location info about each live event. A check-in at a restaurant in a new city on a Saturday night could prompt a simple follow up with links to live concerts and sports happening nearby that night.

The Y-Combinator startup Songkick offers a similar API for anyone interested in concert tickets. But it doesn’t do sports, predictive pricing, and most importantly, says Groetzinger, “You have to have a certain level of traffic before Songkick will work with you on an affiliate basis. We don’t have any such threshold.”

Right now the SeatGeek platform is wide open, there are no API keys and developers can store the data locally if they choose. In the future it may begin to include taste graph data from Columbus, its event recommendation platform, which learns users favourite bands and teams and suggests good deals. If and when that data is shared, says Groetzinger, it will be completely anonymous.

“We’ve built the company with the help of big content partners like Yahoo and Hearst,” Groetzinger said. “Now we’re excited to let the little guy start making money by working with our data.”

Image via Flickr user Mavis

The company, which makes online ticketing and registration software, has released a mobile app that does away with paper tickets and processes payments at the door of an event.

Event Farm’s newly released iOS and Android app can sell tickets, check guests into an event, and process credit and cash payments. The payment system works with a card swiper from ROAM Data, the same company that makes Intuit’s mobile payment system. The software is fully electronic and eliminates the need for barcodes or paper tickets.

“What is groundbreaking about what we are doing is that our app is fully integrated into our ticketing platform,” said co-founder and CEO of Event Farm Ryan Costello in a statement.

“We are not just independently charging credit cards on a mobile device. Ticket inventories on the app are synced with sales happening in real time online and vice versa.”

Event Farm’s new app competes with Evenbrite’s Entry Manager app for Android and iPhone. Eventbrite has a slightly different system; the general public can use Eventbrite’s website and general mobile app to purchase tickets and then go to the event and check in with their phones. Event Farm is used by event organizers to check people in at events and sell tickets at the door. Unlike Event Farm’s new app, Eventbrite’s Entry Manager app can’t process credit and cash payments at the event.

Event Farm was founded in 2003 for event producers to making registration and ticketing at events easier.

Both companies crunch mountains of data to forecast the price of tickets, helping fans decide on the best time to buy. Both work with publishers to power ticket sales on their sites. Up until now, only SeatGeek had a consumer facing site, which is why it was better known. But TiqIQ has now launched a destination site of its own.

“We were a white label platform for publishers, only nominally competing with consumer facing sites like SeatGeek,” founder Jesse Lawrence told VentureBeat. “But we had all the data, so it made sense to put in the extra effort and go after the consumer market.”

TiqIQ widget on the Washington Post

TiqIQ has some notable publishing partners: The Washington Post, New York Post, and perhaps most impressively, the fast growing sports blog network SB Nation, run by AOL vet-Jim Bankoff.

Lawrence and his co-founders are survivors of the dot.com bust. “We ran into 2000,” is how he put it.  After his time as an entrepreneur, he did a stint as a venture capitalist and then worked at the Programming Group for IAC, helping to start or acquire businesses like College Humor, Vimeo, and The Daily Beast. Lawrence runs TiqIQ’s New York office while his co-founders handle the development in Israel.

For a simple idea of how TiqIQ works, you can check out the widget they have embedded on the Washington Post Sport’s page showing the best deal on tonight’s Capitol’s game. The company also pushes tickets through social channels like the WashingtonPost’s Facebook page.

One of the things TiqIQ hopes will differentiate it is offering three options for buying tickets: Fixed Price, Auction, and Make an Offer. “We allow consumers to interact directly with the sellers by making the offer they think is fair,” Lawrence said. The goal is to give fans insight into the market they might not otherwise find. ”The SuperBowl is a great example because the highest price tickets are going down in price and the cheapest seats are going up. We expose that information for our users, then let them decide how best to buy.”

If you can stand to watch the Knicks play...

Sports fans in San Francisco, Seattle, Houston and San Antonio will have a new way to search or the best deals on tickets. New York startup SeatGeek is partnering with Hearst to power ticket search on the websites for four of the media giants biggest metro newspapers. It’s another prominent partnership for a small company that has been on a hot streak in the last year.

SeatGeek crunches data to tell customers when the best time is to buy tickets on secondary markets like Stubhub, ebay, and TicketsNow. It also models stadiums to give users a sense of where they can get the best view and weighs that against price to give consumers a verdict on which seats are the best deal overall.

“SeatGeek has a compelling platform,” said Karen Brophy, Vice President and Director of Digital Product at Hearst. “This partnership helps to solidify our flagship sites as one-stop destinations for readers to tap into the best of what their local area has to offer.”

In October of 2010 SeatGeek partnered with Yahoo, one of the biggest portals for online sports, and eclipsed its older, better funded rival, FanSnap, in terms of traffic. In December FanSnap was acquired, reportedly not for a big premium over their venture funding, leaving SeatGeek to lead the pack of search engines for tickets on the secondary market.

More recently SeatGeek expanded beyond sports to cover tickets for concerts and theatrical. It launched Columbus, a sort of Pandora for live events, which learns users’ tastes and recommends upcoming shows.

Two of the papers in this new partnership, The San Francisco Chronicle and the Houston Chronicle, are in the top ten nation wide in terms of monthly unique visitors and pageviews, so the Hearst partnership is likely to be a big boost to SeatGeek’s revenue.

July 9-10, 2013
San Francisco, CA

Tickets On Sale Now

Startup SeatGeek will be partnering with Yahoo Sports websites to help boost usage of its ticket aggregation service, reports All Things D.

SeatGeek aggregates sports, concert, and theater ticket listings from several different ticket vendors and arranges them on an interactive seating chart. The new partnership with Yahoo will allow the company to add links to SeatGeek’s service into athletic team’s schedule pages, sports news articles and all of its Rivals.com college sports pages.

This is a huge win for the two-year-old startup, since Yahoo’s web news properties have well over 50 million unique monthly visitors.

SeatGeek makes its profits from affiliate fees it collects from over 50 secondary ticket markets (Ticketmaster, TicketsNow and others). However, that fee — which is about 10 percent of the ticket purchase — will be split with Yahoo in some cases, according to the company. The average ticket price varies between $250 and $300.

SeatGeek faces competition from similar ticketing sites like FanSnap and TicketsBuy. Since its founding in 2009, the startup has had a total investment of over $2 million from PKS Capital, Founder Collective, Stage One Capital, Trisiras Group and angel investors Mark Wachen, Thomas Lehrman, Sunil Hirani, Allen Levinson, Arie Abecassis and Ashton Kutcher.

Apple is looking to get into the concert and event ticketing business, according to recent patents discovered by Patently Apple. The patent describes an iTunes-based system and accompanying iPhone application called Concert Ticket +. Its aim is to simplify ticket purchasing and usage at a variety of events, including concerts, sporting events, amusement parks, trade conferences, and even weddings.

There’s no telling how this relates to the current concert ticket industry. Everybody hates Ticketmaster, the largest concert ticket company in America, which just recently merged with Live Nation to become Live Nation Entertainment, a veritable powerhouse (and potential monopoly) of concert promotion and ticket sales. Consumer advocate groups are fighting against the merger via sites like ticketdisaster.org, but it was recently given the go-ahead in the U.S. by the Department of Justice, and it also received regulatory approval from Norway and Turkey.

Apple could potentially compete with the Live Nation Entertainment empire by offering lower fees to consumers. And of course, there’s the potential for discounted merchandise and other benefits. But it would still have to work through Live Nation Entertainment to gain access to the majority of event tickets, so it remains to be seen just how revolutionary Concert Ticket + will be.

On the surface, this appears to be Apple’s attempt at pursuing “360 deals”, which are basically arrangements where companies pay exorbitant advance fees to artists in exchange for a stake in every aspect of their revenue. For companies like Live Nation, it usually includes concert tickets, merchandise, and album sales — although Apple probably isn’t as concerned about album sales since it’s already getting a nice chunk of that via the iTunes Store.

A major benefit of a system like Concert Ticket + is that it avoids the hassle surrounding paper tickets. A completely electronic ticketing solution means that you no longer have to wait for tickets in the mail, get them printed out, or pick them up at the ticketing office of an event — instead, your iPhone holds your ticket. The patent demonstrates ticket kiosks scanning a bar code from the iPhone’s screen, but also hints at the possibility of near field communication interfaces in upcoming iPhones — technology like RFID which would allow your iPhone to communicate with nearby devices wirelessly.

In addition to ticketing, the Concert Ticket + system also gives users access to bonuses like discounts on merchandise and refreshments, and access to additional media related to your event. Potentially, it could be used to get access to a live recording of the concert you just attended.

In terms of other events, the patents show how it could be used for something like Apple’s upcoming Worldwide Developer Conference, which is slated for June 28th to July 2 this year. It could just be for demonstration, but there’s a possibility that we may see Concert Ticket + in a few months.

[Image via Patently Apple]