#ticketing-practices

#ticketing-practices

For millions of soccer fans, buying World Cup tickets has been an ordeal. My friends and I had signed up for updates from soccer's governing body, FIFA, and their emails about how to buy tickets felt a bit like receiving the fine print of an insurance policy in monthly digests. First there was a presale—but it was sponsored by Visa and only for people with Visa cards, and it was a lottery.

Sport has become a powerful tool for global brand engagement, enabling companies to build deeper connections with audiences in an increasingly fragmented media landscape. Real-time data and immersive fan experiences allow brands to create personalized interactions that resonate across diverse markets and demographics.

On ride-hailing app InDrive, riders and drivers have to do something many Uber users have never done: negotiate the price of a ride. Instead of accepting the trip price set by the app, passengers can submit their ride request along with a proposed payment amount. Drivers can then view the proposal and accept it or send a counteroffer.

Travelers are always on the lookout for easy ways to save money, and a new report reveals there is one particular day of the week that is better for booking flights than others. That day happens to be Fridays, according to new data from Expedia that was shared with Travel + Leisure. That is because the end of the week sees less business and corporate travel, the booking site noted.

Modern gaming platforms no longer win purely on content libraries, bonuses, or marketing spend. Competitive advantage is increasingly determined by the quality of the underlying technology stack, particularly payment infrastructure. This article examines how payment systems have evolved into a decisive moat for gaming operators, driven by massive investment, API-led architecture, advanced security engineering, cloud scalability, and the measurable financial cost of legacy platforms. Each section below explores a distinct technical pillar shaping competitive outcomes across the modern gaming ecosystem.

Using A.I. for detecting ticket fraud follows the recent trend of A.I. making its way into snow sports. Recently, competition organizations like X Games and the International Ski and Snowboard Federation (FIS) have experimented with using A.I. to assist with judging contests. Brands are also using A.I. to assist with creating graphics for their skis and snowboards. And it does not look like the A.I. train is slowing down any time soon.

Retail point-of-sale systems today offer a wide range of options for peripherals and hardware. Their technical specifications play a major role in selection, and big retailers often choose multiple vendors to reduce a single point of failure. This gives them an advantage to negotiate price or support as well. Technically, these peripherals also require updating with new models and may have new feature sets. This necessitates the redevelopment of point-of-sale applications, increasing development costs.

In London's iGaming sector, sportsbook platform features are usually discussed in practical terms rather than marketing ones. Operators dealing with UK-facing customers tend to frame software decisions around licensing, reporting and internal control, because regulatory constraints shape what is realistically possible day to day. A sportsbook, at this level, is less a product and more an operating business that happens to take bets.

Efficient business practices boost bottom lines, and finding the right balance begins with using the right productivity software tools. For entrepreneurs and small-business owners, time spent searching or navigating different tools could be better spent growing your company. Having the right productivity software in place isn't just convenient, it's essential for operational efficiency. The challenge many entrepreneurs face is balancing software costs with functionality.

They said it would never happen, but of course it was always going to - ads are coming to ChatGPT. Shirley Marschall takes a look at this little bit of history repeating... Guys, honestly, there won't be ads... Jeff Bezos: "Advertising is the price you pay for having an unremarkable product or service." Elon Musk: "I hate advertising." Sergey Brin and Larry Page: "We expect that advertising-funded search engines will be inherently biased towards advertisers and away from the needs of consumers."

The technology underpinning retail operations is under scrutiny in 2026 as fashion executives look to streamline systems with the aim to unlock efficiency, cut costs and meet consumer expectations for speed and personalisation in the shopping journey. At the retail event Lightspeed Edge on 12 January, Lightspeed - the unified point-of-sale (POS) and payments platform for SMEs such as Apricot Lane Boutique and Neal's Yard Remedies - convened industry leaders to explore the strategic imperative for integrated technology ecosystems over siloed systems.

In the fintech vertical, where growth depends on trust, the decision to monetise through in-app advertising is a bold bet, one that could backfire if a bad ad experience undermines user confidence. But Toss, South Korea's leading fintech super app with over 25 million users, turned that risk into a major revenue win by implementing filters based on user-level relevance and using behavioural signals and first-party data to block disruptive or inappropriate ad categories.

As the new year gets underway, early signals suggest another period of rapid change for advertising and ad tech, shaped by advances in AI, tighter regulation, and continued scrutiny of platform power. IAB Tech Lab set the tone with the release of its Agentic Roadmap, outlining how AI-driven buying and selling could scale across digital advertising without destabilising existing market structures.