On September 23^rd last year we opened www.fansnap.com and told you our goal was to create “a “fast, easy (and free) way for you to find your perfect tickets.”   In announcing our beta site, we told you it was big job and asked for your help.  We asked you to tell us how to make it better.  You did.  We did.  We especially appreciate your feedback on the interactive maps.

We are pleased to announce that the FanSnap ticket search engine has officially launched, and today we unveiled a new version of the ticket search engine.  We are also happy to announce:

• FanSnap’s ticket results now include more than 13 million tickets to 40,000 events from 57 ticket companies, with the addition of newest partner eBay tickets;
• FanSnap’s dynamic FanSnap Maps have been created for 215 of the top venues in the U.S., with many more on the way;
• FanSnap’s new “best value” feature, which highlights at-a-glance those ticket offers that are priced significantly lower than surrounding offers;
• FanSnap’s new “view from seat” feature for many venues (e.g., try Dodger or Angel stadiums, Fenway or AT&T parks, or Wrigley or US Cellular Fields) that will be rolled out over the next month.

Our goal was to launch in time for you find great March Madness tickets, MLB tickets for opening day, and concert tickets to all the new tours being announced daily it seems.  Check it out; the choices and values are really fascinating.

Even though we are out of beta, please keep sending us your thoughtful suggestions using the feedback link on the site.   We have learned a lot through this process, and we know we still have lots of work to do.  In fact, we have a number of great new features already in development!

The FanSnap team is working hard, and the journey remains exhilarating.  The path to being as comprehensive, accurate, fast, and easy as possible never ends…   You have played a critical role on our launch team.  We could not have launched today without you.  Feel free to put this experience on your resume.  Put us down as your reference.

Thank you for telling so many of your friends and colleagues about FanSnap.  Please keep sending them our way.  Going to events has always been a great escape from the news of the day.  Especially in these economic times, we want to help you get the best value for your entertainment dollar.

We remain focused on fans.

Mike

The map team has been working around the clock and we are pleased to announce that FanSnap now has more than 210 of our patent-pending interactive maps for your viewing pleasure.  We have built them out for MLB, NBA, NHL, concerts - we even have the NFL ready for when football tickets go on sale.

So many choices!  Cubs fans will want to use a FanSnap Map to check out the first Cubbies-Cards game of the year.  North-siders can check out the first White Sox-Twins game.  We have a little something for fans in pretty much every city.

Have fun checking out our comprehensive selection of ticket results from 57 ticketing companies (all at once!) in this easy-to-use way.  One day, sooner than you think, you will tell your kids about the old days when you used to have to look for tickets from a list!  Then you can tell them about walking to school in the snow, uphill, both ways.

Mike

By popular demand, FanSnap’s ticket results now include tickets from our newest partner, eBay.

Fans have been buying and selling tickets on eBay almost from the moment the pioneering web site launched.  Many ticket sellers only sell their tickets on eBay, so this announcement means lots of new ticket choices for you.

This brings us to 57 ticketing companies who have integrated with our FanSnap TicketData^sm system, giving “fans of FanSnap” by far the most comprehensive, accurate view of available tickets and prices from the best of the web.  Many, many thanks to the FanSnap and eBay teams that made this possible!

Mike

Eric Fisher of the SportsBusiness Journal wrote today about FanSnap and our great new partners, Bleacher Report and YardBarker, which display FanSnap results in really useful ways to their amazing sports communities.  In the article, our partners said of our relationship:

““This is another important step in our providing an all-around experience,” said David Nemetz, co-founder of Bleacher Report. “This fits with what a user expects to see on a sports site, but the great thing is that it’s not just a limited stream of inventory from one provider but an open range of options, which fits in directly with our philosophy.”

Said Pete Vlastelica, Yardbarker chief executive, “Aligning with FanSnap was about more than just offering a ticket solution to our users. We can do that with any number of partners. … We think FanSnap has solved some of the hard problems related to searching for tickets on the Web, and they do it with an elegant user interface that delivers satisfying results.””

Thanks Dave, Pete, and Eric!

Mike

Fortune editor/writer Stephanie Mehta put together a nice article today chronicling the state of the live event tickets market. In it, she outlines how the ticket resale market has gone online, gone ‘legit,” and is rapidly growing.

When we launched the public beta of FanSnap this past Fall, we started with about twenty dynamic FanSnap Maps (patent pending). The plan was that fans could take them for a test drive, and we could learn a bit more, before we rolled them out.

Fans told us how much they appreciate being able to using the colored “heat map” markers to see ticket price ranges at a glance. Fans still can’t believe that when you ZOOM into our maps, you can actually see specific ticket offers from multiple providers with specific row labeling. Quickly spotting those light-colored low price tickets among the pricier tickets on the map appears to be among many fans’ “top three” delights, along with scoring a backstage pass, and catching a fly ball.

We learned a lot from how you used the maps, and from your thoughtful suggestions. We made some improvements (stay tuned for more surprises very soon). Then we unleashed our map team, who have been absolutely on fire! I am pleased to say that, with today’s release, we now have more than 160 FanSnap Maps live on FanSnap. … and many more coming!

If you haven’t already, give FanSnap Maps a spin.  We made them just for you.

Mike

p.s. Can’t wait?  Here’s a few hot upcoming events:

SUPERBOWL tickets

NBA

3/15/09 Mavericks @ Lakers tickets

4/10/09 Heat @ Celtics tickets

4/12/09 Celtics @ Cavaliers tickets

NHL

4/4/09 Ducks @ Sharks tickets

4/4/09 Rangers @ Bruins tickets

4/9/09 Flyers @ Rangers tickets

MLB (Opening Day)

4/3/09 Red Sox @ Mets tickets

4/3/09 Cubs @ Yankees tickets

4/6/09 Royals @ White Sox tickets

4/6/09 A’s @ Angels tickets

4/6/09  Rays @ Red Sox tickets

4/13/09 Rockies @ Cubs tickets

CONCERTS

3/19/09 Fleetwood Mac tickets (New York)

4/1/09 Springsteen tickets (San Jose)

4/24/09 Britney Spears tickets (Glendale)

Fans have told us loud and clear that, along with the location of the seats and great service, the most important element of their ticket search decision is the price.  Some fans are on a tight budget.  For some lucky fans, price is no object.  What everyone wants are the best seats for the price point they have budgeted, whatever it may be.

FanSnap was built to help fans quickly find the best values.  We continue to add partners to give you the largest choice possible.  We now show more than 7.5 million tickets from 56 providers, with many more coming! FanSnap Maps show ticket offers color coded by price range.  Our listings reflect both the ticket prices and any commissions by the ticket provider.

FanSnap’s key feature to help fans get the most for their money is our price control, located on both the event listings and tickets pages of your search engine.  Yes, you can even select an event from many event listings using price.  You want to see the least expensive Duke basketball tickets or Sharks hockey tickets offered all season?  No problem on FanSnap.

The price control on the tickets page shows the distribution of tickets by price range, at a glance.  This lets you know right up front the choices that are available if you spend a little more or less.  The taller the bar, the more tickets available.  The color of each bar, with lighter colors representing lower prices and darker colors representing higher prices, directly corresponds to the markers on the FanSnap Maps.

Roll your cursor over each bar to see the actual price range highlighted. Select your price range by moving either price slider.  Or, enter your desired lower or upper price directly into the input boxes if you would rather.  You can even just click directly on a price bar to select that price range.  Any of these actions will be instantly reflected in the ticket listings shown and dynamic FanSnap Maps, where available.

The FanSnap Team is continuing to improve your search engine to make it even faster and easier for you to find the sports, concert, and theatre tickets you want.  If you think we are on the right track, please keep telling your friends, family and colleagues.  Many thanks,

Mike

One of the most unique features of FanSnap is that we let fans see all of the available tickets for a “series” of events (with the same team, artist or show - and location) all at once. This feature comes in really handy when you have flexibility in your schedule and other factors such as the price, or the location where you want to sit, are more important to you. There is a huge payoff to being date-flexible, as fans don’t always realize that price and availability often can vary widely from performance to performance.

There are many examples where this comes in handy. Going to New York for a few days to celebrate the holidays, and need Broadway tickets? Compare all the available tickets for several performances of the same show at once. What a great way to get Wicked tickets!

Is your favorite artist playing more than one night in your town? This is the perfect way to find those Guns and Roses tickets, at that magic time when they play several nights in Staples Center. Please tour, Axl!

Want to cheer on your baseball team as they play their hated rival? Select your tickets from the entire homestand all at once. What better way to get Red Sox tickets vs. the Yankees, or Cubs tickets when they play interleague vs. the White Sox?

FanSnap was created to save you from burning up your valuable time “drilling” into and out of one ticketing site after another looking for exactly the tickets you want. You didn’t think we would stop there and ask you to do the same thing, wasting time examining every individual event, do you? Sometimes the powerful ideas are the most simple.

Why didn’t anyone else think of this? Don’t know. At FanSnap, what we do know is, we are focused on fans… and we are just getting started. We have a lot more great features coming, and soon. Please keep sending us suggestions and let us know how else we can make your life easier!

Mike

Guided by your suggestions, the FanSnap team has been hard at work relentlessly refining your ticket search engine.  One of our most useful improvements is our industry-first “comparable tickets” feature.

When the event, section, and row (and even seller “notes”) information for various ticket listings match, FanSnap now displays the ticket details only once, with quick links to each provider and their price, rather than repeating the entire entry for each listing.  No more endlessly scrutinizing listings to see if they appear to be similar!  You can now easily see “comparable tickets” at-a-glance.

Are these “comparable” listings actually the exact same ticket set being offered by one seller on different ticket sites (which happens sometimes), or are they just different ticket offers in the same row? That is often not possible for us to know, since the ticket sellers, for a variety of reasons, rarely include the seat data in their listings.  What we do know is that these listings are literally in the same row.

Fans have let us know that they value choice.  By presenting your ticket search results in this way, once you choose which ticket location you want, you can then easily decide which provider to buy from based on the factors that are important to you personally - known brands, prior experience or existing account already set up, price, local provider, or perhaps other services such as local pick-up.  It’s your choice!

How do we do it?  If you don’t care and are just glad it works, great.  Have fun finding tickets to that next great event!  If you do care, read on…

FanSnap partners with many of the best ticket providers in the U.S. (we are now up to 56!) to receive the latest ticket-level data feeds, which we compile in our FanSnap TicketData system.  As you may know from visiting different ticket sites, each provider may use slightly different names for events, venues, and sometimes even teams, artists, or shows.  It’s part of what makes surfing for tickets across multiple ticketing sites such a pain.

So, for you, the fans, we “scrub” all this ticket data from our partners to make it fast and easy for you to compare the results you see.  It is a challenge and definitely a work-in-progress.  If you see any listings that do not look right, let us know by clicking on the feedback link on any page, and we will get right on it.  (If you have other ideas for improvements, please keep them coming as well!)

That’s the secret.  Don’t tell anyone.  Except other fans, of course.

Mike

We are getting lots of great feedback on our FanSnap Maps.  It’s a good thing we got all that patent application paperwork submitted!  Many fans seem to think we are on to something here.  The biggest request we are getting is how quickly can we roll them out?  Fans are clearly excited to see a ticket site with more than just a list of tickets and a bad map.

We launched with about 20 dynamic maps and, as we planned, have been making improvements based on all the great suggestions we are getting.  Better row labels?  You got it.  We will continue to add maps as fast as we can, based on fan requests and the event season.  Our goal is absolutely to build dynamic maps for every venue that you care about.  We also have more new features coming!

You have told us your favorite feature of FanSnap Maps is the heat mapping, which makes ticket values so obvious.  The lighter color markers reflect the lower prices and the darker color markers reflect the higher prices.  The delight of zooming in, spotting and buying the low-priced ticket offer surrounded by more expensive tickets seems to be many a fan’s new delight.

Many ticket sellers also are happy with the FanSnap Maps as they are a great tool for helping them set their asking prices.  You know, ticket sellers are a bit like house sellers.  Some really don’t want to sell that bad, so they ask a really high price (the web site Zillow calls this the “make me move” price) - these are the high prices you often see noted in news articles.  No one ever really pays these amounts.

On the other hand, you have motivated sellers who drop their price because they really want to sell.  Often when they do this on other sites, nothing happens. No one notices, amongst all the listings.  On FanSnap, that great value shows up immediately as a light colored marker for all potential buyers to see.  That’s why you should check back with us often for the events on your radar.

Check out the FanSnap Maps for Phillies tickets for the World Series this weekend - what a wide variety of providers and prices!   The news may be no fun these days, but whether you are looking for AC/DC tickets or Celine Dion tickets, it is always a great time to be a fan!

Mike