Monthly Archives:

July 2007

Posted on July 24, 2007 by Kamni Khan

Yet Another Round Against Ticketmaster

The summer concert season is well underway around New York City. There's nothing like hearing music on a warm night with the grass at your feet. If you purchased your tickets from Ticketmaster, you might be standing in the park trying to figure out exactly where the money goes for the company's convenience fees.

When buying tickets from Ticketmaster online, the user's only option is to pay surcharges, which can increase prices up to 25 percent. The cost usually averages $10 per ticket and can climb much higher.

For years, consumers have complained about the big jump in the cost of tickets purchased from Ticketmaster, either during the two-minute online transaction or via telephone. Given the lock the ticketing giant has on venues, most concertgoers don't really have a choice--they have to buy from Ticketmaster or not at all. There usually isn't an alternate method for purchasing tickets from larger venues.

An examination of Ticketmaster's service charges reveals that the ticketing company adds convenience fees ranging from 17 to 29 percent to the advertised ticket prices for Live Nation shows. In 2003, Rolling Stone reported that the convenience fee is divided with 30 to 40 percent for the venue, 25 percent for the ticket. During Pearl Jam's battle against Ticketmaster, the 1994 memo to the Justice Department charged that service charges are usually kicked back by Ticketmaster to promoters and venues.

Split from Live Nation?

The big news for frustrated consumers is that a major change could be in the works: the concert industry has been buzzing for months that Live Nation, which runs events in New York at the Fillmore NY at Irving Plaza, Gramercy Theater, Hammerstein Ballroom and Roseland Ballroom, may begin selling tickets for all of its concerts itself.

Live Nation is currently Ticketmaster's single largest client, but that contract expires next year. Live Nation also owns a stake in two major independent companies, Next Ticketing and MusicToday, which both rival Ticketmaster's capabilities for selling tickets online.

If Live Nation cuts Ticketmaster out of the transaction and sells tickets directly to concertgoers, industry experts say that it will be able to keep more of the ticketing revenue for itself—and hopefully reduce service fees for concertgoers.

Box Office Pick-Up

Although SummerStage tickets were previously sold through Ticketmaster, this season's tickets can also be purchased from Ticketweb or the Mercury Lounge box office.

If you are going to any of the Bowery Presents shows at Mercury Lounge, Bowery Ballroom or Webster Hall, you also have the option of purchasing tickets from Ticketweb or picking them up from the Mercury Lounge box office, located at 217 East Houston Street. It is open from Monday-Saturday, noon to 7 p.m. The box office only accepts cash but your fee is merely the transportation cost to Mercury Lounge. It doesn't add any service charges to the ticket price and you walk away with a hard ticket.

Ticketweb's online service fee varies according to the price of the ticket, along with the number of tickets. The fee for two tickets to a $15 show is approximately $9.11 while the fee for one ticket to the same show is approximately $5.31. The fee for two tickets to a $25 show is approximately $11.75 while the fee for one ticket to the same show is approximately $6.63.

You can also save yourself Ticketmaster's fees for summer shows at Prospect Park by picking them up from the Town Hall box office, located at 123 West 43rd Street (between Broadway and Sixth Avenue). However, tickets for events at Williamsburg's McCarren Pool are only available from Ticketmaster.

Text-for-Tickets

The Knitting Factory recently introduced the text-for-tickets system that allows fans to buy concert tickets via their cell phones. ShopText Inc. operates the new ticketing-by-text service as a secure technology which allows consumers to buy products by using their cell phones and text messaging a specific code to ShopText.

Before purchasing tickets, you are required to register with ShopText. If you opt to register via your cell phone, you will get an automated call from the ticketing system. You must provide your credit card information and verify your identity. Once this process is complete, you will get a pin number to complete all of your future transactions.

You might have to go online to get the even keyword for the specific even (the code is also listed on flyers and in newspapers) but you won't have to sit in front of your computer at the exact moment when tickets go on sale. You can also save up to $1.50 by texting for tickets. The savings may seem minimal for a single event but they will add up if you are an avid concertgoer.

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Posted on July 9, 2007 by Chris LoSacco

Build Yourself Out of a Job

It doesn't make immediate sense for a services company to deliver great tools to its clients--it makes sense for the company to keep the good stuff in-house, and charge a healthy premium for its use. This leads to high margins, low overhead and a generally steady stream of work. But there's a better way.

Here are 5 reasons to avoid this practice and, instead, build yourself out of a job.

  1. It makes the client happier. From their perspective, it's definitely better to have good, solid tools, because their employees can interact with the content directly and reliably expect turnarounds (or demand them). It makes sense that the fewer steps there are between the start and finish lines, the quicker the race will be.
  2. The requests get boring very fast. Software shops aren't about managing content and shouldn't be hiring people to do it. The staff of a good services company should be skilled developers who want to spend their time developing, and skilled developers don't want to be responsible for changing content.
  3. It's easier to focus on writing a great tool than it is to anticipate all of the possible software needs. Inevitably, the client requirements will change--most likely, they'll grow. A well thought out custom tool will do much better at handling changing needs than a one-off on top of an in-house solution.
  4. Your client saves money. For almost all recurring projects, they'll undoubtedly spend less on a tool up front than they would repeatedly buying the service or paying maintenance fees. This increases good will, and frees up funds on their end for additional projects, which leads to the next item.
  5. If you've done your job right, there's bound to be more work. This is the single most important reason to work strategically. There isn't a company out there that doesn't have another project waiting in the wings after the one you're working on is complete, and if you hit a homerun with the current project, guess who they're going to come back to with the next one? Show them that you can deliver for them, and care about their needs by not nickel and diming them with service requests, and the work will come back to you tenfold.

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Posted on July 9, 2007 by Joel Nagy

Brain Games

Video games have been touted as enhancing hand-eye coordination as well as providing skills that lead to better surgeons and soldiers.  But what about brain development, mental acuity and memory.  Look at how "Wii Sports" and previously "Dance Dance Revolution" have made people more active.  Retirement homes have now begun introducing the Wii to senior citizens as a way to get them moving and having fun, and schools are also bringing DDR to the gym to help fight childhood obesity.

Continue reading "Brain Games" »

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Posted on July 6, 2007 by Tim Meaney

Too Much of a Good Thing?

Hilarious - from Scoble the other day:

Its interesting, I see many of the same people in my friends list on Twitter, Jaiku, Facebook, and now Pownce. Pownce is growing faster than the other ones right now, though. 728 people have already added me on Pownce.

I can't take many more social networks. These are worse than email and that's just the "are you a friend?" requests.

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Posted on July 6, 2007 by Chris LoSacco

Ux is Holistic

When developing software for the web, it's easy to forget that the end user--the human that's clicking around in a web browser--doesn't necessarily view her experience as a collection of disparate tasks (although she may), but rather as a singular experience focused on one goal, that gets harder and more complicated with each additional destination.

Let me provide an example. When signing up for a new payroll system, if our user is asked to enter a provider ID for her primary care dentist, but doesn't have the number on hand, she gets frustrated.

Terrible dentist code box in ADP's TotalSourceA simple solution is the one employed during the enrollment process for the ADP TotalSource system: just provide a hyperlink to the insurance company's web site, and let the user search for the ID.

Except not only has her enrollment experience just gotten significantly different (she's looking at a new web site in a new window... for the same task?) but the search for the ID is many, many clicks away--clicks where she's making decisions she's already made (like plan choice) and entering information she's already entered (like zip code).

A better user experience would be one that incorporates this additional and helpful functionality without exposing the stitches underneath. In software buzzspeak, this is called making the experience seamless.

The burden on the ADP development team here is a serious one. They have to take information they don't have control over, slice and dice it down to the sought after results, and present it in the existing interface. In most cases, the initial cost-to-benefit ratio here will always prohibit the effort, since typical management will say, it's okay, it gets the job done (or something to that effect).

A breath of fresh air, then, when the time comes to enter an ID and I have a list of available choices inline; when designers take the time to craft every point of the process; when the user experience is holistic.

This effect isn't lost on users. This is how to make people happy, encourage product loyalty and create a market for yourself.

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Posted on July 5, 2007 by Richard Ziade

The Mobile Internet For The Rest Of Us

We've all seen how beautifully the iPhone renders web pages. It really is something. But there really are two major problems with the iPhone:

  1. It's still too frickin' small to surf the Web on until you zoom into to a readable level. Unless you really enjoy straining your eyes, you'll find yourself reading "Printer Friendly" pages on it. The human eyes are the new printer.
  2. I don't own one...and neither do 99.9% of you.

Number two is really a deal-breaker here. While I doubt I'll ever find myself spending hours a day reading on my phone, I do enjoy the occasional read in bed or while waiting somewhere...and alas, I don't own an iPhone.

awesome old-school mobile phone-1The kids at Arc90, in their infinite altruism, have put together a killer tool for browsing news on the Internet. It's called Rio and it's a dead simple way to read some of the most popular news sources on just about any Internet-enabled mobile phone. We've tested it on a slew of mobile phones including Blackberrys, Treos, Razrs and Windows Mobile devices, and yeh it looks pretty awesome on that iPhone thingy.

Just point your sub-par mobile phone to http://rio.arc90.com and bam a lean, mean mobile surfing machine is at your disposal. You can do one of two things here. You can either enter a news source or topic in the search box (like "lacrosse news" or "recipes") and you'll get the most popular news content for that search, all scrubbed and cleansed for your mobile reading pleasure. Alternatively, you can pick from the list of 50 or so popular news sources on the default Rio page. Once you find an article you fancy, simply click through it and it'll also be stripped down for mobile consumption.

Rio is the product of a wonderful mixture of RSS (RSS is a great way to deliver content to smaller devices - it's already stripped out the web junk), Live.com's excellent feed search (pretty much nothing out there like it) and Google's excellent little mobile web view. Rio is inspired David Winer's River of News style of news reading.

Awesome work by the Arc90 team on this one. I no longer need to pretend friends are SMS'ing me. You can learn all about Rio by visiting the Arc90 labs page.

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Posted on July 2, 2007 by Joel Nagy

Introducing : MultiSelect

Another new dynamic tool for websites or blogs has been added to the Arc90 Tools over to the lab. Check out MultiSelect, a sleek way to turn an HTML select into a stylish drop down that supports multiple selections in a compact view. It's a drag and drop installation, and you can change any select into a nice little MultiSelect.

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