William Reardon’s Blog

In late April, a small cadre of LA tech folks traveled to Beijing, to be on-hand for the start of real-time Olympic ticket sales.

On prior trips, terminal 3 of Beijing International was still under construction. Now complete, we got a chance to see it first day. It’s a night & day difference; impressive by any standard, especially in size. (It’s now the world’s largest.)

Game day was May 5th, and we headed into the Gehua-Ticketmaster office bright & early.

If you travel to China, one of the cultural differences you’ll likely first encounter is the temperature of your drink. Ask for a glass of water in the US & it’ll be cold, likely even with with ice. Ask for the same in China, and it’ll be warm, likely hot enough for a glass of tea. (After a prior trip, I mentioned it to a Chinese-American coworker & she remarked her Grandmother had always yelled at her for drinking cold drinks, telling her it would shock her system & make her sick.)

Now anyone in tech can tell you it’s not really electricity that powers technology, but caffeine. In particular cold soda. So one of the locals in the office was kind enough to get us a few bags of ice. Somehow, however, a “few bags” translated into a small army of men showing up with about 18 bags.

Fully caffeinated, the team was ready.

We suspected demand would be high. This was confirmed when another local employee of the office showed up. He’d passed by his local Bank of China (BOCs are acting as outlets for Olympics ticket sales) on his way in. Folks had been lining up since midnight & numbered into the hundreds. It’s not the best quality, but tried to snap a few photos with his camera phone.

How’d we do?

Well, folks got tickets. Scratch that. Folks got a lot of tickets — we sold over 320,000 that first day alone. As GLaDOS would say, huge success.

And, of course, what’s huge success without a few drinks?

A few days after the start of the onsale, I had a chance to travel down to one of the banks & pick up some tickets myself.

Beautiful, aren’t they?

This entry was posted on Saturday, May 10th, 2008 at 8:06 am and is filed under nerd-ness. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can skip to the end and leave a response. Pinging is currently not allowed.