[te_chris]

The worst part about all this is how much the company that built the site must've charged (I'm guessing somewhere between atmospheric and stratospheric).

[switch007]

Exactly. The olympics are all about maximum profit and spending as little as possible of the money stolen from the public.

From this point of view, none of the olympic shambles (e.g. g4s security) are terribly surprising.

[DanBC]

G4S are a tier 3 sponsor of the Olympics. Thus, they paid £10m to be a sponsor.

G4S were also involved, before they got the contract, in the bid for the Olympics.

Pretty sleazy.

[_delirium]

Tangent: G4S, and their predecessor Securicor, should win some kind of award for cyberpunk-esque corporate branding. A nebulous private security company named as an inscrutable 3-letter code (now), or as the very generic "Security Corporation" (then) are both pretty good. Also, the former slogan, "Securicor Cares".

[damian2000]

Powered by Ticketmaster® - http://www.ticketmaster.co.uk/about_us/

[emson]

Ticketmaster should no better as they are the main ticket operator in the UK. However to make matters worse I believe they have signed all these exclusivity deals with record companies etc, which means there is no serious competition, certainly for the next few years. Therefore they don't care and so innovation will be throttled. I think they should be fined, as they have been consistently the worst part, of an otherwise truely outstanding games. Ticketmaster you should be ashamed!

[pbhjpbhj]

Couldn't the Olympic authorities have set up a ticket system inside the ridiculous number of billions spent - they could then develop and expand the system, opening sourcing it to meet with their supposed noble goals, the improved version could then be used for Rio, ...

[JimmyL]

I can't find the direct link, but I remember seeing an article that said the following happens after every Olympics:

1. There is some level of scandal over ticketing

2. The IOC forms a technical committee to look into it

3. The technical committee says that the Olympics is a relatively unique ticketing situation (all the different buckets of tickets, how they change, when they're released, etc.), and that the best solution would be to invest ~$200M in a custom ticketing solution which the IOC would own, and could then lease to the organizing committees and other international event

4. The IOC executive says that it's a sports organization - and not a logistics company - and reminds itself that sales are the responsibility of the host Committee, so they should deal with it and figure it out, and then kills the idea.