We are excited to share our new video. We feel it shows the culture and type of company we have become over the years. We want to thank all of our clients for the support and encouragement. Thanks to the guys at Marble Street Studio, they did a fantastic job!

We enjoyed another year with the International Santa Fe Folk Art Market. Every year the market continues to grow, we are pleased to be able to grow alongside this fabulous event. Here are a few pictures we snapped.

HoldMyTicket is proud to be working with the Premier Development Soccer League! Check out this press release regarding Albuquerque Sol FC's home field and ribbon cutting ceremony:

Albuquerque Sol F.C. News Release
www.abqsolfc.com Thursday January 30th, 2014 ALBUQUERQUE, NM

The new PDL Western Conference team, Albuquerque Sol F.C., will be celebrating the announcement of their home stadium for their inaugural year in the Premier Development League on Friday January 31st at 2:30pm MST. Mayor Berry will be cutting the ribbon to kick off the first season of PDL soccer at 2:30pm MST on Ben Rios Field at the campus of St Pius X High School. He will be joined by Gary Oppedahl, the new Economic Development Director for the city of Albuquerque as well as several other distinguished guests.

It has been an extremely exciting time for soccer in the state of New Mexico with the launch of Albuquerque Sol F.C. The club has peaked interest in players from all over the southwestern United States as well as some foreign players. The Sol held their first open tryouts at the beginning of January and attracted 115 young men to try out for the team.

St Pius X High School is located at 5301 St Josephs Dr NW on the west side of Albuquerque.

For further information email General Manager Larry "Lencho" Espinoza at [email protected].

We recently updated HoldMyTicket.com to support web user accounts. This means anyone visiting HoldMyTicket.com can sign in using their Facebook or Twitter accounts. Creating a web user account happens simultaneously as the user signs in, and only takes a few seconds. Web users get access to speedy checkouts, order histories, our Affiliates Program, customized content and more. Here's how web user accounts work: Web users begin by going to holdmyticket.com, and clicking the 'Login' button in the upper right part of the screen. They'll be prompted to login using Facebook or Twitter.

Once the user has logged in, they'll see their name and avatar photo in the top right, where the 'Login' button used to be. Users can click here to see the users' menu. The first step, after logging in, should be to go to the Account Settings page. This is where users can verify email addresses and save their information and preferences. Verifying email addresses is necessary if the user wants to access their past orders, change names on orders, or resend email confirmations.

Logging in as a web user has many advantages:

Default Location Logged in users can save their default location. HoldMyTicket.com will automatically display events near this location. Order History Users can easily see a list of all the orders they've made on HoldMyTicket.com. They can then click on an order to get order details.

Order Details Users can see all the details related to an order they've made. Confirmation numbers, event details, ticket details, delivery method and more info is available on the order details page. Additionally, users can easily change the name on their order, or resend the email confirmation related to the order.

Speedy Checkout Users can save their name, phone number and billing address under their Account Settings. This info saves time during the checkout process because it is automatically loaded into the checkout form. All the user needs to do is select their tickets and fill out their credit card info to checkout!

Affiliate Program Web Users are eligible to participate in Affiliate Program. When users refer a new client to HoldMyTicket, they will receive 10% of HoldMyTicket's fees collected for each ticket they sell during their first year as a new client. Public API Key Web users will automatically be assigned a public API key. Found on their Account Settings page, this key can be used to access event info, order info and more via HoldMyTicket's API (Application Programming Interface). More info about how this can be used can be found here: http://holdmyticket.com/api/

We are proud to announce our latest app, Shift CRM, an integrated tool for managing your customer relations! Access Shift from either your Spark or Swarm accounts to use these fancy tools:

Features

• Leaderboards
• Buyer history
• Purchases
• Ticket scans
• Correspondence
• Order details
• Create notes
• Email confirmations
• Validate tickets
• And more! Here's what it looks like...

Activity

The Activity page in Shift CRM shows recent transactions in Swarm Box Office, as far back as 30 days. See at a glance which box office employee handled the transaction, be it a scan or a sale.

###Leaderboards The Leaderboards page displays a list of your top-ranked customers. Their rank is based on total activity, including purchases, ticket scans, money spent and more. You can view details on any of your buyers. BUYER INFO The buyer history page shows their basic info, rank, and a beautiful timeline showing their transaction history.

Order Details

The order details page gives you an in-depth view into the details of a purchase. See order dates, sales source, payment type and a graphical list of tickets purchased. You can also access a bunch of tools from the 'actions' menu. Easily print tickets or reciepts, make notes, send emails, scan tickets, process refunds and more!

A new version of SWARM, our mobile box office, is available in Apple's App Store! If you already have SWARM, we highly recommend you upgrade your device to the latest version 1.2. The new version runs faster, performs reliably offline, and is easier to use. Improvements include:

• Offline Scan Tracking: If your internet network happens to go down while you're scanning, the app will continue to scan tickets, storing them on the device until you get back online. New in version 1.2 is the ability to view offline scans.
• Scan Log: Every ticket scanned is now listed by scan time. This makes it easier to see the status of your last scan and gives you a scan-history at a glance.
• Better Network Stats: Not only will the app tell you if you are online or not, it now displays the network name as well.
• Latest iOS Support: SWARM 1.2 is compatible with the latest iOS operating systems, so feel free to keep your device updated with the most recent iOS version.

For more info check out SWARM's website Check it out in the App Store

We headed out to Los Angeles California this week to attend Pollstar Live and to exhibit our ticketing software to the event industry at Event Live Expo. We'd like to thank all of the event organizers for providing such a great opportunity to get to know our peers, clients and competitors. We have started some amazing new partnerships!

Check out our journey on our Instagram page

We've done a quick renovation of the shipping rates on our printed tickets. We made the changes in response to new rates issued by the U.S. Postal Service, but we've also adjusted the breakdown of how ticket orders get shipped out - and this will result in serious savings for a great deal of orders.

Here are the new rates:

100 tickets or less: $3.75
100 to 200 tickets: $4.50
200 to 500 tickets: $6.55
500 to 3000 tickets: **$13.10

Express rates (guaranteed overnight for most locations):

500 tickets or less: $18.95
500 to 3000 tickets: $39.95

For orders larger than 3000 tickets, just contact your customer support representative.

Photo Credit mikecogh via photopin cc

We are pleased to announce a few highly-requested features we've added to the HoldMyTicket platform. The new features we are announcing are:

• Box Office Status,
• Seating Chart Manager Redesigned
• Color Coding Seats
• Convert Holds into Sales

Box Office Status

We've separated the BoxOffice status from the overall status of the event. This will allow you to schedule an announce date, or place the event on hold, while keeping it visible in our BoxOffice browser page or SWARM mobile box-office app. There is no longer a need for switching between Box Office and On-Hold or Announce statuses just to place some holds on your seating chart, or to create your pre-sale tickets before actually going on sale with the event. If your event is published, it will automatically be visible in Boxoffice and SWARM, too.

Seating Chart Manager Redesigned

Editing seats with the improved UI is easier than ever. We gave the editor a fullscreen view rather than restricting it to a small viewing area. You are also able to view all seats for your seating chart by clicking the checkbox in the top right:

Show All Seats

Color coding for seating hold categories

That's right! You can now see your seats colored according to the hold category they belong to. Just click the new paint bucket icon on the left navigation to see your colors light up!

Last, but not least: Convert your "held" seats into sold seats with a click

You can now convert held seats to a sold seat, just make sure your held seat belongs to a category that has CAN SELL? checked. This will enable the conversion of a held seat to a sold seat. If you wish to not allow held seats to be sold, be sure they belong to a category that does not have CAN SELL? checked.

Note: This feature is not enabled for all Boxoffice users by default. If you wish to use this feature, please contact a HoldMyTicket customer service agent. To convert your held seat, just click it from the seating chart view in Boxoffice, like you would any other available seat.

A warning will tell you that you are about to convert the held seat to a sale. That's it for today's rollout! We're hope you enjoy these new features. As always, please let us know if you have any questions or other thoughts to send our way.

Did you know that HoldMyTicket ticket-buyers can subscribe to all of a venue's events in their iCal calendars? If you're a ticket-buyer and interested in subscribing to your favorite venue's upcoming shows, you can click on the calendar icon at the top of the venue's HMT-Powered website:

Your iCal app will immediately load with the subscription url ready to add to the calendar.

After clicking Subscribe and setting the calendar's options in the next window, the events will be added to your calendar, ready for your review!

If you're a venue-owner or promoter and want this option for a site - or if you want your own HMT-Powered site, send us an e-mail, and we'll get you set up right away!

Good news, iOS wranglers: your HoldMyTicket event tickets and passes will be fully available in Apple's new Passbook app for iOS 6. If you haven't heard the buzz with today's release of iOS 6, Passbook comes along with the new operating system and is Apple's response to the growing trend of paperless ticketing. It offers a single app for storing, retrieving and reviewing all kinds of different electronic tickets, passes, coupons, and many other things - essentially anything scannable. This means that your HMT tickets will be easily available and ready to scan in seconds flat when you reach the gate at one of our events - just bring up the ticket in Passbook and offer the barcode or QR code to scan, and you'll be in.

Passbook will even send a reminder to your home and lock screens as the event approaches. Of course, Apple was not content to simply make an organizational tool - Passbook also allows the issuers of these tickets and passes to give the ticket holders real-time updates, such as a gate change for your departing flight or an updated balance on a gift-card. The HoldMyTicket team feels Passbook is a fantastic innovation that will make your active, exciting life that much easier, and we're hoping to see our Ticket Ninja poking his head out from your stack of passes someday!

Albuquerque's HoldMyTicket is becoming a growing player in the local ticketing world and beyond.

At last weekend's mixed martial arts bout at Tingley Coliseum, Jackson's MMA general manager Ricky Kottenstette tried the HoldMyTicket system to sell about 6,000 tickets.

"It worked great," Kottenstette said. "It's the future of ticketing."

Using HoldMyTicket software and the company's iPhone check-in system, Kottenstette could see who bought tickets, whether they had arrived and more — at a lower price than major competitors charge.

In the past year. HoldMyTicket has doubled in size to eight employees. Last year the company grossed $2.8 million in sales, and it's on track to roughly double that this year, said CEO Wes Edling, all from its office in the Sunshine Building in downtown Albuquerque.

The company has become a leader in using new technology, such as iPhone apps and integrated software that can sync calendars, ticket agents, social media, demographic reports and more to connect ticket sellers to concert fans.

Coast to coast, the company sells tickets for 550 venues and events, and three to four venues sign contracts every day.

HMT started after Joe Anderson, the owner of the Launchpad and Sunshine Theater venues, asked Edling and Jeremy McCollum if they could come up with a better ticketing system.

"I told him yea, but it would cost $40,000. It's complex," said McCollum, HoldMyTicket's president and COO. "But we saw that there could be a need for it."

McCollum is also a musician with the band Supergiant. As his band played at clubs across the country, he noticed they all had similar problems with ticketing. Their websites were out of date, lines at shows were unnecessarily long and tickets were only available at the door at small venues.

So McCollum and Edling started meeting every day at the Downtown Flying Star Cafe "for the free Wi-Fi," McCollum said, and started writing software, originally for the Launchpad.

The two would go to their day jobs at the Weekly Alibi, where they supported its website, then head back to Flying Star, sometimes until they were kicked out, working step by step on HMT.

In the early 2008, from a back booth near the kitchen, they sold their first ticket.

One early coup, Edling said, was figuring out how to sell for reserved seating charts.

"It's a really complicated thing to pull off." he said. "You have 1,000 seats, but 1,000 want one seat, and there can be 10 shows, and season passes, and the list goes on."

Because of that, the first setup when a venue signs a contract is detailed.

HoldMyTicket needs to know where every seat is, how much every seat will cost, where the priority seats are, which seats will be held and where the ticket booths are.

What made HMT really take off, though, was the new generation of iPhone-compatible code readers and QR code scanners.

"It worked great at Tingley last weekend," Kottenstette said, "I could show [the fire marshal] his exact numbers and get back to work, rather than having to spend 20 minutes doing a crowd count."

The check-in system also makes it easy to spot a stolen ticket (via ID) or a fake ticket (because it won't scan).

Edling and McCollum want to compete with the bigger ticketing companies.

"The problem is it takes more money to get the infrastructure," McCollum said. "The more money we make, the more money we try and invest in the company."

Industry behemoth Ticketmaster has, by some estimates, 83 percent of the overal ticketing market, according to the Washington Post, and sells tickets for venues across the globe, including the Hard Rock Casino Albuquerque PResents The Pavilion.

"Competing with that is tough." Edling said, "We're trying to find the venues that don't need Ticketmaster."