Venues buy into Ballena's seat view visions

Technology
By Eric Lai
East Bay Business Times
February 4, 2005

Ballena Technologies Inc.
Business: Online Seats3D product for selling stadium seating
Headquarters: Alameda
CEO: Richard Sherratt
Founded: 1999
Employees: 14
Address: 1150 Ballena Blvd., Suite 250, Alameda 94501
Phone: 510-521-0720
Web: www.seats3d.com

Tickets to this weekend’s Super Bowl in Jacksonville, Fla., were sold out many months ago, but Richard Sherratt doesn’t think it hurts to fantasize a little.

He’s the CEO of Ballena Technologies Inc., an Alameda technology company whose main product Seats3D, allows Web visitors to get a realistic 180 degree view from any seat in more that 50 stadium and concert halls worldwide.

That includes 77,000-seat Alltel Stadium in Jacksonville. Seats3D has racked up nearly 2 million page view in the past three weeks from visitors wanting to imagine what their view of the field would have been like from the 50-yard line.

Many event venues offer two-dimensional top views for ticket buyers. But Seats3D lets users visualize the actual sight lines from the seat itself, and then e-mail those views to friends and family.

“It gets people excited before a game,” Sherratt said.

The computer modeling technology underlying Seats3D was originally conceived as a sales tool for Web-savvy real estate agents. But revamping the technology into a sports ticket sales tool was a natural for Sherratt, a college jock turned sports agent, who was inspired by a bad experience attending a Detroit Tigers game. “I bought these expensive seats behind home plate for my son and I,” recalled Sherratt, a Cal State Hayward Hall of Fame baseball pitcher. “Our view of the field ended up being blocked by a pillar.”

Debuting in 2001, Seats3D’s first paying client was the California Speedway in Fontana.

“We did look at other systems, but for the investment performance, Ballena was far ahead of everyone else,” said Craig Neeb, chief information officer for the International Speedway Corp.

All 12 of ISC’s NASCAR tracks use Seats3D. Visitors checking out seats for this month’s Daytona 500 have generated 3.2 million Seats3D page views since December.

“We do get tremendous feedback from our fans on how much they like it,” Neeb said.

Seats3D counts 40 percent of NBA teams and 30 percent of NFL and NHL teams as customers. It is being used to market tickets for next week’s SAP Open tennis tournament at the HP Pavilion in San Jose.

Ballena makes money from building the computer-generated models, producing and maintaining them on behalf of the sports team or concert venue. It uses a team of graphic designers and animators equipped with digital cameras to capture a stadium and then rebuild it on screen.

The company weathered the dot-com downturn by being very lean, and by relying on funding from Sherratt’s real estate ventures. That helped the company, which now collects “multimillion-dollar” annual revenue, become profitable two years ago.

Seats3D, already established as a service for single ticket buyers, is adding features aimed at buyers and sellers of season tickets and corporate luxury suites. Ballena has developed a tool for large companies to manage their ticket or luxury suite give-aways to favored clients and employees. It is also building a feature to allow luxury suite attendees to order their meals in advance through the Internet.

Although less detailed than actual photos, Seats3D is still very realistic, down to the seat fabric, paint colors and stair heights. About the only thing it cannot do is render how your view would be if a 6-foot, 5-inch cowboy in a hat sits in front of you. Also, it does not animate players, though Sherratt said doing so would open future sponsorship opportunities.

The company is expanding beyond sports. It now offers seat views for concert-goers. Ballena also is moving into the huge convention market.

One as-yet-underdeveloped idea is to offer 360-degree pictures of convention hall sites so that companies can get an idea of where to set up booths and how large their banners should be.

“We’re having fun doing things our way right now,” Sherratt said. “We’re creating new ideas and getting to be more creative than more structured companies.”

elai@bizjournals.com 925-598-1405