tickets

A year or so ago I was looking around for a good ticketing system and came across OTRS. Looking around the ticketing system landscape, it's hard to miss OTRS. There are others, of course, like Request Tracker, but based on the numbers OTRS appears to be the leading ticketing system.

It's an impressive system with an equally impressive list of over 150 paid customers, including Nokia, Siemens, Lufthansa, Boeing, NASA Ames Research Center, Amnesty International, and Fujitsu Microelectronics America. If you believe that technology companies are good bellwethers of smart technology decisions, then OTRS has this in spades (… Read more

Prices for airline tickets are one of life's great mysteries. A travel agent tried to explain it to me once, and without getting too detailed, it's a combination of segmentation, demand-based pricing, and ensuring that seats are filled. Segmentation's the reason why last-minute tickets cost so much--most vacationers plan far in advance, and business travelers are much more likely to accept high prices. Demand-based pricing is why it's way more expensive to take the same trip over Thanksgiving than over the second weekend in November, and why prices can fluctuate from moment to moment--as one "… Read more

There are tens of thousands of people for whom Burning Man is an annual certainty: They and their friends and families know for sure where they'll be during the week leading up to Labor Day.

For these people, this morning is a D-Day of a sort: The first day that tickets to the counter-cultural arts festival go on sale.

And, as always, tickets are being sold in a tiered pricing structure, with 10,000 tickets going for $210, 10,000 for $225, 10,000 for $250 and whatever supplies are left at $295. Burning Man asks people to buy … Read more

I've always preferred prognostication to nostalgia, so rather than replay the best of 2007, I'll use these late December doldrums to make 10 predictions for the coming year. Some editors will warn you that this kind of list is suicide--it's too easy for everybody to look back a year later and see where you were wrong--but it hasn't hurt Cringely, so here goes. In no particular order.

DRM will die. The trendline is clear--Apple's been selling DRM-free tunes on iTunes since May, Amazon's DRM-free MP3 store has three of the four majors signed up, … Read more

I just came across SimpleTicket, an open-source ticketing system. I haven't used it, and there are several open-source ticketing systems, but I think the idea of an open-source ticketing system, generally, is a really good one.

After all, you'd find a decent amount of crossover between the consumers and the developers of it. They're often going to be the same person.

SimpleTicket sounds cool:

SimpleTicket was developed by Architel in 2005 for internal use. We looked at Heat, Remedy and hosted solutions like Parature, but most of them were too complicated and expensive for our needs. Next we looked at lowend solutions like Intuit?s TrackIt and found it lacking in several ways. We needed a simple to use system that was flexible enough for us to add features on the fly. We decided to build it ourselves. SimpleTicket was the result....… Read more

Chicago-based start-up SeatQuest is offering a way to search online for seats for games, concerts, plays, and other performances.

The site offers up a search box for venue, event or ZIP code. The full public launch is set for November 27, which might explain why not all of the venues offered for San Francisco had tickets listed for sale and some venues were missing for the Bay Area. For instance, searching for musical group "Iron and Wine" shows venues in San Diego, Portland, and Dallas, but not Oakland, Calif., where they are playing at the Paramount later this … Read more

Urban events site Going.com, which targets party-friendly 20-somethings with a hipster slant, announced earlier this week that it has expanded into local event ticketing. This means that promoters and event hosts on Going can now sell tickets for their concerts, benefits, parties, and other social get-togethers through the site.

The structure is much like a standard ticket site's "will-call" option; no paper tickets are mailed. "You go to the venue or the place of the event," Going CEO Evan Schumacher explained in an interview with CNET News.com, "and we tell (you) to … Read more

If you haven't bought tickets to a traveling Cirque du Soleil show in the last few months, I recommend that you do right away.

Not for the privilege of going to see the Cirque--though if you know me, you know that I will always pimp for that--but actually so that you can experience what I can unabashedly say is the best online ticket-buying interface I've ever seen.

I am always amazed by the fact that here we are in 2007, and company after company after company still shows that it hasn't got the first clue about what … Read more

Both the New York Times and Wall Street Journal posted stories this weekend about ticket brokers.

Ticketmaster has sued a Pittsburgh-based company, RMG Technologies, for providing software that allegedly enables brokers to bypass Ticketmaster's online security provisions and snap up all the good tickets minutes after they go on sale. Brokers then turn around and sell these tickets for a hefty profit on sites like StubHub or Craigslist. Both stories quote Chris Kovach, a former broker who was originally named in Ticketmaster's suit, but settled with the company. He claims that he used RMG's software to buy … Read more