Wired reports on the rise of electronic ticket purveyor, Flash Seats.

Cleveland Cavaliers of the NBA is the tech upstart’s first big client, but the company is working to reach other markets with its service.

“The paper ticket market is fundamentally inefficient and arcane,” said Cavaliers chief marketing officer Chad Estis. “I don’t think there’s a role for that in the future.”

While some major league baseball teams have introduced electronic ticketing, the Cavaliers have taken it a step further, providing a completely paperless transaction.

One of the major benefits to this distribution method is the team’s abilitiy to capture the secondary market for tickets, which has been going to scalpers. Flash Seats gives Cavaliers fans a secure, anonymous, online marketplace where they can buy and sell seats safely and conveniently.

Wall Street Journal (paid sub. req.) reports that frustrated Coca-Cola Co. bottlers are “letting upstart drinks that the Atlanta beverage giant doesn’t market hitch a ride on their trucks.”

Honest Tea has struck deals with Coke bottlers in California, Colorado and Pennsylvania to distribute Honest Tea. Several distributors for Anheuser-Busch Cos. and other large beer companies also have begun carrying its Heavenly Honey Green, Pomegranate White Tea with Acai and Peach Oo-La-Long flavors.

Honest Tea’s expansion is just one of a growing number of unusual alliances between beverage companies and distributors. Grappling with sluggish sales of their core brands and eager to expand, some distributors are making deals with new companies that market small, faster-growing beverages.

Coke and its bottlers are separate companies, although Coke owns sizable stakes in its largest bottlers, such as CCE and Coke Consolidated. Bottlers have long sold Dr. Pepper, owned by Cadbury, but the investment in microbev brands is a new development.

[FULL DISCLOSURE] BFG Communications works on Coca-Cola’s Odwalla brand.

It’s that time of year again. Time for film industry titans to don their furs and “take meetngs” in Park City, once a sleepy mining town in Utah’s Wasatch Mountains. While the miners moved on decades ago, studio execs are intent on discovering their own kind of gem. Fox Searchlight did it last year with “Little Miss Sunshine,” so there is reason to be hopeful.

According to The Wall Street Journal (paid sub. req.):

A year ago, “Little Miss Sunshine” blew audiences away and wound up one of the costliest Sundance acquisitions ever, with Fox Searchlight paying somewhere north of $10 million for the road-trip romp. Sundance veterans sneered a bit, figuring the movie might prove another “Happy, Texas,” which Miramax bought for $10 million on the strength of great Sundance buzz in 1999. The movie rolled over and died at the box office.

But “Little Miss Sunshine,” did not disappoint. The indie film hauled in nearly $60 million at theaters, making it one of the most-profitable Sundance buys ever. The film caught on critically too, showing up on reviewers’ top-10 lists and becoming a serious candidate for a best-picture slot at Tuesday’s Academy Awards nominations.

Bill Marriott, CEO of the global hospitality company that his parents started in 1927, wants to communicate with his customers. To that end, he started a blog.

A year ago, I didn’t even know what a blog was — until my Communications team began telling me about all the blog traffic on travel and tourism. Now I know this is where the action is if you want to talk to your customers directly — and hear back from them. Soon we’ll add an audio version of the blog. That’s how I’m most comfortable: telling stories and listening.

According to the Washington Post, the 74-year old is not a computer enthusiast. He takes notes on legal pads during meetings. While visiting some 250 hotels around the world each year he jots down his thoughts on note cards, then slips them in his jacket pocket.

Though chief executives in other industries have blogs, some have been criticized as being just more corporate PR. But Kathleen Matthews, Marriott’s spokeswoman, insists: “This is going to be Bill Marriott’s blog. It’s not going to be the corporate blog. He’s going to decide what he wants to say.”

The NFL’s first regular season game outside of North America will take place in London next season.  According to an Associated Press report, the game may take place at Wembley Stadium, which is due to reopen later this year. The Miami Dolphins and the New York Giants have been named as possible participants in the game.

NFL commissioner Roger Goodell said:

“They are two of the teams that have expressed an interest and we’ll narrow it down to which two teams will generate the most enthusiasm for the fans in London and the broader U.K.”

Goodell went on to say the overseas games are getting a positive reaction from fans despite the fact that some teams will lose a home game.

“There are fans here that we think will like the idea and respond to it because it puts your city on a global stage and the city will be showed as a world class city itself,” he said.

USA Today is running a sensational story on the impact of Eater, a blog dedicated to covering New York’s restaurant industry.

Ben Leventhal and Lockhart Steele are a pair of bloggers fighting a guerrilla war against the city’s publicists. Nearly every day, the two provide restaurant information on their popular website, Eater.com, posting tidbits that publicists aren’t ready to release and traditional journalists haven’t managed to print.

The ascendancy of Eater.com is yet another example of the transformation in how news is disseminated in a blog-driven world. With sites like Eater.com, Chowhound.com and Thestrongbuzz.com, no longer do restaurant-obsessed New Yorkers have to wait for a weekly food and dining section in a newspaper or magazine to get the lowdown.

“I don’t see Eater as a lone crusader,” Steele, 32, said. “I see it as more of a larger trend toward the democratization of dining information.”

Leventhal, 28, also works as editorial director of Curbed.com. Steele, 32, is managing editor of Gawker Media.

According to The New York Times there’s a new trend in Manhattan nightlife. Some might call it a coy game of hide-and-seek.

If you haven’t cracked the code of the newest night spots in Manhattan, there might be a reason: like the Anchor, they are discreet to the point of invisible, quiet to the point of skittish, intimate to the point of anonymous.

These cozy bars and clubby restaurants signal a retreat from the night-life largess of the meatpacking district and West Chelsea. Instead of V.I.P. seating, they rely on techniques, some from the speak-easy era, like obscure locations, secret (and oft-changed) reservation numbers and “soft openings” that cater to insiders, to create the perception of exclusivity. While these are well-worn sleights of hand, a flurry of subtle arrivals suggests that small and quiet is back in vogue.

Harris Interactive has been polling Americans who follow more than one sport since 1985. From the beginning NFL Football has been, and continues to be, the nation’s favorite sport. Its popularity is now five percentage points higher (from 24% to 29%) than it was twenty one years ago.

The top ten most favored sports are: NFL Football, baseball, college football, auto racing, men’s pro basketball, men’s college basketball, men’s golf, hockey, men’s soccer, and men’s tennis.

Compared to 1985’s results, baseball has dropped nine percentage points (from 23% to 14%), horse racing and men’s tennis have both dropped three percentage points and college football and auto racing have each increased by three percentage points.

According to Dallas Morning News, customers of Dallas-based pizza chain, Pizza Patrón–which has 59 stores and caters heavily to Latinos–are able to purchase pizzas with Mexican pesos.

Restaurant experts and economists said they knew of no other food chain with locations so far from the Mexican border offering such a service.

“We’re trying to reach out to our core customer,” Antonio Swad, president of Pizza Patrón Inc., said Friday.

“We know they come back [from Mexico] and have pesos left over. We want to be a convenient place for them to spend their pesos.”

About 60 percent of Pizza Patrón customers and 45 percent of the franchisees are Latino.

Home field advantage can be a key factor in a game–especially in the playoffs. The San Diego Chargers are hoping their home field advantage in this Sunday’s game against the New England Patriots will pay off. They’re even restricting ticket sales in an effort to pack the stadium with Chargers fans.

The Boston Globe reports:

“The San Diego Chargers have restricted sales to the Divisional Playoff game to residents of Southern California and the surrounding area only,” Ticketmaster warned. “Residency will be based on your credit card billing address. Orders by residents outside of southern California will be canceled without notice.” 

Lynda Frank, a Patriots fan from Tewksbury, thought the sales restriction is unfair, if not outright illegal. 

“Who do they think they are?” she asked. “Our reputation must have somehow preceded us and made us part of the fear factor associated with our team at playoff time.”

Whether the effort to fill the Qualcomm Stadium with Chargers fans will make the difference in the game remains to be seen. The Patriots are 7-1 this season on the road.