SuperOyster.com, Inc. Official Blog

ps3 SPOT IN LINE WANTED

Yet more evidence of your positions being valuable.

As I mentioned in a previous post, I’m on the East Coast meeting with a few teams regarding the SuperOyster platform. As luck would have it, the PS3 was released in the US today. Funny, our platform is designed to facilitate the exact phenomena I am witnessing here in mid-town Manhattan – people are being paid for their physical position in line at game retail outlets for the right to purchase the PlayStation 3.  I didn’t believe the news articles at first, so I went down to GameStop in Herald Square to confirm that yes, the going rate for a position in line was $500.   The same thing happened for the XBOX 360 launch, so I’m not surprised that it’s happening again.

Many people have asked me if this is ethical? My response is that I don’t know, nor do I really need to have an opinion. The market is real, and we are the only platform designed to take advantage of it. In our platform, the merchant even has an opportunity to participate, thus it’s a win-win-win situation. This whole scenario can be leveraged by the masses to generate profit for the merchant, and we have the pending patents to make it happen.

So this goes out to all perspective merchants… why not take participate in this market? Facilitate and embrace this market, and your customers will be happier.  This market will exist whether or not you choose to embrace it, so why not help your customers and make a little bit of money for yourself?

Another day on the road for SuperOyster. I’m on another plane right now, heading out to the East Coast to meet with a couple east coast professional sports teams about our great platform.

I spent the last 2 days at the Vancouver Financing Forum in BC, where I swear animals were lining up two by two looking for the ark. I haven’t seen it rain that much in a very long time.

Now on to the forum – this event was really targeted at later stage companies who were looking for large Series B investment, so SuperOyster was a little out of place. Most companies were focused on biotech and IT so, it felt a bit stodgy. I decided to play it up a little and do something different. I went out and bought a Toronto Maple Leaf’s hockey jersey the day before. As you know, the Leaf’s have a 10+ year season ticket waiting list, and is probably the most popular hockey team in the world. I wore the jersey for the entire forum, even during my presentation. It was fairly well received, but I did have a bunch a people give me grief for wearing it.  Anyway, we made a great number of contacts at the meeting, but it wasn’t as good of a forum as we had hoped. Above all though, I did have fun wearing the jersey – really, honest I’m not a Maple Leaf’s fan. (

More updates as things happen…just got word that it’s raining in NYC as well. Ugh.

As I’m stuck on another plane, I figured I’d take a few minutes to discuss how the SuperOyster platform is being evangelized to our first market – sports ticketing.  

In the past, there has really only been 2 main ticketing sales categories, primary and secondary. These terms can be applied to most types of seats, regardless of location. “Primary ticket sales” is a term applied to tickets which are sold by a sports team or promoter directly to the fans. The sales intervals can be annual (season tickets) or individual (per event), and each sport entity will impose rules regarding how fans can access these tickets. Ticketmaster and other groups usually mediate these sales, for which they charge a processing fee.

“Secondary ticket sales” occur when tickets are sold for a “second” time between two parties. The tickets were originally purchased by an individual thru the sports team and then resold to another individual, sometimes for a profit. Some people also refer to this as scalping, and many states have laws which regulate how these tickets can be resold. There are thousands of legit ticket resellers (or ticket brokers as they are known in the industry) and plenty of not-so-legit sellers. There are at least 6 different software services which can help these brokers find and resell tickets – the most prominent one available is from TicketsNow.  

A sub category of ticket brokers has recently been born, which I’ll refer to as “sponsored” secondary ticket brokers.  These are resellers who are sponsored by a sports team, whereas a marketing agreement has been signed between the broker and the team.  The team directs its fans to use a specific secondary ticket broker in return for a small percentage of the revenue. There are many benefits to all parties in one of these transactions -- guaranteed sales, new revenue, controlled inventory, etc. The most prominent players in this category are StubHub, TicketsNow, and RazorGator. Ticketmaster recently announced that they are targeting this area as well, but they are very distant fourth.

The SuperOyster platform disrupts this playing field by establishing a new market for “pre-sales”. We work with teams who have such huge fan demand, that people are queuing up for access to the primary ticket sales. Many teams have waiting lists for tickets today and it’s expected that many more teams will have waiting lists in the future. We can take that “pre-sales” demand and turn it into a marketplace that harnesses the power of the internet to build hype around primary ticket sales.  As is mentioned on our website, we also participate in revenue sharing with the sports team, so that both teams and fans can benefit.  

I’m writing this blog from the athletic director’s office of a well known college football powerhouse. It’s been an interesting week for sure.

Last Thursday, SuperOyster was one of only 7 companies chosen to present at the TiE Funding Forum. 50 companies had submitted entries to present, but only 7 of us made the cut. These 7 companies were then provided 5 minutes to pitch our business to an audience of 300 investors. Talk about stress! Five minutes is a extremely short period of time to discuss the disruptive platform we’ve developed! Well, as luck would have it, my presentation was good enough to earn us an honorable mention (3rd place!) for the event. That’s a huge win for us! Time will tell if that will actually turn into investment dollars – I’m hoping that it will.  Most people say we have one of the best ideas for ticketing since StubHub and RazorGator broke ground.

I also met with the marketing director of well known NFL team today. That went really well, as we are now discussing how to pitch our concept to the rest of the organization.

Tomorrow, I’m back in the Northwest, but I’ll be in Vancouver BC at the Canadian Financing Forum. Hopefully that will go as well as last week’s event. 2 more pro teams, each from different leagues, have agreed to meet with us. So, I’ll be on another plane again in 48 hours. It’s been a real exciting time, and I expect it to continue to be a wild ride.

More from the road as it develops!

SuperOyster is pleased to launch our new corporate website. The old site was great, but we’ve had so many things happen to us lately that we figured it was time to update the site with much more content. We even included a live demonstration of our code – there are few features that are crippled, but it is a good demonstration of how our system works.

Let me give you all a run down of some of the other things happening here recently.

We’ve retooled our advisory board with a number of highly influential people. If you think you’d be a good candidate for our advisory board, please let me know. So far, our advisory board consists of:

• Michael Arrington – Editor of the widely read tech blog, TechCrunch. He was also the former COO of RazorGator.

• Jim Goodman – Founder/Creator of Ticketmaster.com and former VP of Product Development and Strategy at Tickets.com. He has some great insight on his blog/website – http://www.jimgoodman.com

• Charles H. Porter – former CTO and former CIO at Accenture. He is also a board member for Seattle University's Entrepreneurship Center.

We’ve also been working hard to promote and fund SuperOyster. We have been invited to present at the TiE Financing Forum on Nov 9th. SuperOyster is also pleased to be invited to the Vancouver Financing Forum (different than the TiE folks) on Nov 14th. Lastly, if you subscribe to CEO Magazine, you’ll be scared by my ugly mug in the startups section. Narcissism aside, it’s kind of cool to see oneself in a magazine. So, they didn’t put the pictures up on their website, but they did post the article. You can find it here.

If you're curious, here's the picture they used for the article.

We have some really neat customer meetings happening in the next couple weeks. I’ll let you all know how those all pan out.

Hello All!

It’s been a long time since we left anything here, but sheesh have we been BUSY! Over the course of the last couple months, we spent a TON of time working on the first version of our platform and I’m happy to say that as of today we launched the very first version of our service!

Woo-Hoo!





Our first customer is The Boathouse of Fort Lauderdale . They’ve been a super partner who really understands the power of the internet. If you want to see our platform in action, go up to http://www.megaslips.com where you’ll find links to 4 waiting lists which are hosted by us.

Join Our Waiting List!

Please choose which size slip you need:

[80' Slips]
[100' Slips]
[130' Slips]
[150' Slips]

Powered By SuperOyster

Funny, as we launched this site, NPR had a news story talking about the scarcity of slips in South Florida. I feel like we picked the exact right market for marinas.

Anyway, we are going thru a lot of changes here at SuperOyster. We’ll be relaunching our main website in a few days so stay tuned for more great info about us!

BTW, anyone want to buy me a beer? I need it. :-)

Peter T. Brown here, Head of Web Development at Super Oyster Inc. This is the first of many posts I'll be making here on our corporate blog and wanted to introduce myself. Hello All!

Over the last week or so there has been great response to our first public release and disclosure of what Super Oyster is all about. I've noticed some interesting things in the ensuing discussions.

First off, there has been the common misconception that the Super Oyster process enables people to cut in line. I want to make it very clear that our patented method for improving queuing processes does not and never will enable anyone to cut in line. Instead, we enhance existing waiting lists by making it possible for people near the front to sell their positions to others -- we never create new positions. Thus, the amount of time it takes you to get to the front of the line is the same regardless of how much buying and selling is happening ahead of you. In the case that no one is willing to sell their spot in line, there will be no opportunities to buy a better position. Remember, you can only buy from others!

Secondly, some folks have speculated that SuperOyster enabled waiting lists will be susceptible to rampant speculation. It is important to note a few things. First, this already happens with high profile lines for high demand items. It was a common for people to join a waiting list to acquire an Xbox to only turn around and sell it for two or three times that cost on eBay. SuperOyster does not enhance nor retard this common practice. Second, in response to this common reality for high demand items, many resource owners take steps to mitigate this risk. Common tricks include charging a fee to be in line (common within the NFL for example). Others have those in line sign a contract that requires a purchase once the person had reached the front.

So, with a Super Oyster enhanced line, there could be some risk to getting in line if done only with the intention of re-selling your position. Since positions in waiting lists are susceptible to market changes -- just like stocks in companies -- there is the chance that the cost to be in line may be more than the cost for which a position may ultimately be sold. Imagine spending $50 a year to maintain a position in line for say, NHL Season Tickets, only to find that the team becomes progressively unpopular and your position at the front can only be sold for $10 after a few years.

It is very important to us to honor the effective, well tested, and equitable aspects of plain old lines. That being said, we think there is a lot of room for improvement in the process and we think we can dramatically improve the experience of both the resource owner and those waiting in line. And, as ever, please keep the comments coming!

Kudos to all of you in the blogosphere who’ve been trying out our Alpha and providing feedback. We greatly appreciate it.

Exposure from this has been global, with discussions occurring in both China and Lithuania, not to mention the US. Our Alpha is simply just the beginning. We have a whole slew of things planned for the future, so keep your eyes on this blog for updates!