tickets

I'm a die-hard Yankees fan and a season ticket holder for the most storied franchise in sports history. I've been buying the tickets online through the Yankees' "My Yankees" pane that it operates with Ticketmaster. Until now, I was happy with my package of games and the affordable seats I got.

But 2009 is a different story. The Yankees have a new stadium, higher pricing, and a relocation process that has caused Yankees fans to question the motives of their favorite team.

Right now, there are season ticket holders with seniority dating back more than five years that are still waiting for their season tickets, while others, who do have seats, have been moved from the infield to the upper deck. The main reason: Yankees brass decided to use the Web as their main source of adding new season ticket holders, which combined with more people wanting to see the new stadium, created demand that caught team officials off guard.

"As it turned out, we had an unexpected number of fans who wanted the full season, not dropping down because of the economy, but going up," Chief Operating Officer Lonn Trost told Newsday in an interview. "We didn't expect there would be such a demand for fulls and we have to salvage 6,000 or 7,000 seats a game for general sale."

To address concerns, the Yankees are now offering "premium seats" to displaced season ticket holders or newcomers for $325 per game for a full season package and $350 per game in a partial season plan. Those seats are located "dugout to dugout" just above field level. Good seats. But there's one problem: last year, a comparable seat in the old Yankee stadium behind home plate was selling for $100.

There's a lot of blame to go around. Some say that the Yankees shouldn't have been so "greedy" in their attempt to add more season ticket holders, while others are saying that it's the relatively recent availability of season tickets online that has substantially reduced the barriers to entry and made it possible for so many people to quickly and easily buy season packages.

Nowhere are both arguments more pronounced than in the place where the fervor started in the first place: online forums. As of this writing, NYYfans.com forum has a 177-page thread on the relocation process dating back to 2007. On average, more than 30 concerned fans are adding comments to that forum each day.

With under two months until the season starts, now is the time for most teams in the Major League to start making their big pushes for season tickets. Season ticket holders are important to any team because they basically guarantee cash for a certain number of games before the season even starts. That's precisely why the Web is such a key component in ticket distribution across Major League Baseball: Ease of use translates into more revenue.

I ventured around the league (online) to find out if fans in other cities were having as much trouble as Yankees fans trying to get season tickets and good seats. Fortunately, the Yankees debacle looks like an isolated event.… Read more

In a scary online-offline Internet scam, hybrid cars in North Dakota have been tagged with fake parking citations that include a Web address hosting malicious software that drops a Trojan onto the computer.

The yellow tickets found on the cars in Grand Forks, North Dakota, read "PARKING VIOLATION This vehicle is in violation of standard parking regulations. To view pictures with information about your parking preferences, go to" and gave a Web site, according to a blog posting on the SANS Internet Storm Center site.

The site referenced shows photos of cars in parking lots in that town … Read more

FanSnap announced Monday a $5.5 million funding round, which it aims to use on completing the build-out of its search engine.

FanSnap, which launched its ticket search engine beta in September, received funding from existing investor General Catalyst Partners, which led the round.

The FanSnap site is designed to allow users to search for tickets based on a number of criteria, from price range to number of tickets sought, as a well as an at-a-glance ticket price range based on the stadium section using a colored map.

The site gleans its data from 56 ticketing providers including StubHub, Ace … Read more

Music giant Live Nation announced on Thursday that it has partnered with SMG, the operator of 216 stadiums, arenas, convention centers, and concert halls, in an agreement that lasts through 2011.

The announcement is in anticipation of Live Nation's ticketing service, which launches in January and will sell tickets for venues that Live Nation already represents as a promoter as well as third-party partners. Under the terms of the agreement, Live Nation will be the exclusive outlet for SMG's tickets; Live Nation expects the SMG deal to raise its potential ticketing volume by 25 percent.

Live Nation recently … Read more

Today in New York, my driver was not happy. He is a New York Giants fan. The new NFL season begins tomorrow, with the Giants hosting the Washington Redskins. Despite being on the waiting list for season tickets since 1984, Tony has given up hope of ever buying a ticket.

"The Giants are moving to a new stadium in 2010," he told me, only one eye on the Lincoln Tunnel crawl. "And they're charging people $20,000 for the privilege of buying season tickets at the new stadium."

The $20,000, Tony explained, doesn't … Read more

As a big World of Warcraft fan, I was extremely excited that Blizzard was once again having its annual Blizzcon convention in Anaheim, Calif., this October. Blizzcon is a two-day event and celebration of all of Blizzard's properties, which include Warcraft, StarCraft, and Diablo. It typically contains Q&A panels, social events for players and developers, and hands-on gameplay of the latest Blizzard games. Think of it as a mini-E3 just for Blizzard fanatics.

So I woke up early Monday morning to purchase tickets for the show, which were set to go on sale August 11 via the Blizzard Store. The log-in page loaded like molasses, and when it finally loaded, I found out I had to create an account before I could buy tickets. Which I then tried to do, but it kept giving me errors and kept pushing me back to the first page. I finally gave up in frustration and left to go to the office.

It turns out, I wasn't the only one to suffer from Blizzcon ticket snafu. Comments from Wowinsider as well as Blizzard's General Discussion forums indicate that Blizzard had been suffering from ticket store problems all morning. Even after they took the store down for maintenance in the afternoon and placed it back up, site errors and traffic problems continued to plague the ticket store. The murloc on the Error Page has even gained a nickname, dubbed "Failoc", perhaps in reference to the Twitter "Fail Whale." From comments and forum posts, it seems like only a handful of people managed to buy tickets Monday.… Read more

Zebra Technologies just announced their new "G-series" line of thermal printers. These little guys fall under the four-inch desktop printer category and, while not specifically for the consumer market, will still appeal to industries that deal with printing labels, receipts, price marking tags, shipping and return labels, boarding passes, ID wristbands and tags, and admission tickets.

The new offerings from Zebra include the GX420t,GX420d, GX430t, GK420t, and the GK420d. Across the board, these printers feature a wide range of convenient, easy to operate printing solutions in the work or home office. Notable specifications include:

What could possibly be better than seeing The Dark Knight, the highly anticipated sequel to Batman Begins?

How about a non-date with the host of CNET's Loaded, Natali Del Conte!!! The guys at The 404 have scored a single "golden ticket" to an exclusive IMAX screening of The Dark Knight tomorrow night (that's Tuesday, July 15, 2008) at 8:30 p.m.

So what do you have to do to win? Listen to day's episode of The 404! And send a haiku about Natali and Loaded to the404@cnet.com or record it on a … Read more

Fandango, the movie-ticketing company owned by Comcast since 2007, announced on Monday that it has acquired Movies.com, a movie news and reviews aggregator. Movies.com had previously been owned by Disney's Walt Disney Internet Group.

Financial details were not disclosed.

The aim of the acquisition is to provide a one-stop movie hub for the Web, executives said.

"We are pleased to expand our rich-entertainment reach through this strategic addition of Movies.com," Chuck Davis, CEO of Fandango, said in a statement. The ticketing site currently sells admission to 15,000 theaters in the United States. "… Read more