SeatGeek is based out of General Assembly, the new startup space in Flatiron that Fashism, another Kutcher investment, calls home. Ashton dropped by the space in January to meet with some of the companies he's been in talks with, and was impressed with SeatGeek's UI. 

Seatgeek also announced a partnership today with one of the web's biggest sporting sites, Bleacher Report,  where their tech will power scores and schedule pages for both pro and college sports. Links from there will direct users to SeatGeek, where they can buy tickets. 

Kutcher is a powerful investor in part because of his social media clout. Mentions through Kutcher's Twitter are a great way for young companies to attract new, more mainstream users. 

SeatGeek's Ben Kessler says the investment will be used to grow the team; data nerds, start sending those resumes. 

bpopper [at] observer.com | @benpopper

We'd say Foursquare was Most Improved, replacing a boring image of phones with a splashy branded banner and the taglines "check-in, find your friends, unlock your city" in large type.

We'd give taste recommendation engine Hunch Most Tasteful for pivoting from a stock photo of a keyboard to a simple web of icons, and resisting the impulse to shout at users in all caps.

Carbonmade, which lets users create online portfolios, gets Cutest for its floating island of clouds and unicorns.

Check out the other redesigns of New York startups SeatGeek, GroupMe and the now Facebook-owned drop.io.

ajeffries [at] observer.com | @adrjeffries

These days, a big percentage of tickets are snapped up by online resellers who move their merchandise on on secondary markets like Razorgator and TicketsNow.

"We found there just wasn't any transparency to this market," says Russell D'Souza, co-founder of the NYC startup SeatGeek. "We wanted to help people search across all these different sites to find the best price."

Founded in May 2009 by Dartmouth classmates D'Souza and Jack Groetzinger, SeatGeek has since raised more than $2 million in funding from Founder Collective and NYC Seed. A SeatGeek partnership with The Wall Street Journal is also rumored to be in the works.

"For this to have real value to people, it had to go beyond just showing you the best prices," says D'Souza. SeatGeek took their cues from  airline ticket sites like Farecast, creating an algorithm that predicts how the price of seats will change over time and what spot in a stadium has the best view to help users decide when and where they should purchase a ticket.

The site makes money by collecting a 8 percent to 14 percent fee on each ticket sold to one of their customers. "We send these sites highly qualified leads, and they are willing to pay for that traffic," says D'Souza

SeatGeek may have the best seats in the house, but its still facing a common problem among NYC startups. "We're hungry for talented developers, and those are hard to find here," says D'Souza. Any programmers willing to work for box seats to the World Series?

Check out SeatGeek's forecast for the most expensive tickets in New York City this November >