You can probably imagine that The Dark Knight Rises is going to be a hot movie ticket this weekend, and The Dark Knight Rises in IMAX 3D an even hotter ticket. But as many a movie-goer in this city knows, despite advertisements to the contrary, there's only one, true mammoth IMAX-sized screen worth paying the extra few bucks to get into: The Lincoln Plaza AMC, on 66th and Broadway. Its Dark Knight screenings are already sold out for opening weekend. That doesn't mean you can't get in.

But it'll cost you. Via The Price Hike, one Craigslister with tickets for this weekend explains:

I have four tickets to the only real IMAX IN THE CITY. The IMAX at Lincoln Center is sold out until Tuesday as it's the real deal within the five boroughs. These are for the 6:15pm show on the opening Friday night. I want $85 ticket or $$350 for all four.

Correct he is: The shows are sold out until Tuesday, that part's true. But the real deal? No. The "real deal" is paying face value for these tickets, and waiting until you can actually see the film. Or not dignifying this guy with his offer, which Price Hike blogger (and Bloomberg food critic!) Ryan Sutton notes as a 228% markup. If you so happen to take this guy up on his offer, and have also read this post, please interview him: His name, his profession, and why he must profit at the hands of desperate fanboys or people who just weren't around to buy the tickets when they went on sale, and if he believes in the concept of karma, and how he feels about the rage those like this writer feel when they see things like this, a feeling which, this writer truly believes, he can not be alone in having.

fkamer@observer.com | @weareyourfek

Truth be told, there's still a way to get into the shows: The Gloriously Sleazy Secondary Market of Craigslist.

Via The Awl:

And how shameless are the sellers/desperate are the bidders?

One guy, who has two tickets to the Computer World night:

Email me if you're interested. No reasonable offer will be accepted :)

:) indeed! One person is offering $300. Another is offering $200. Some are more specifically desperate requests than others ("i'm a diehard & need to go see the Kraftwerk Autobahn show.") and some are just oddly charming Kraftwerk-laden jokes. Like this one, entitled "Wanted: 2 Tickets to Kraftwerk's Man-machine for 2 Pseudo-humans":

We would be willing to pay $120 for two tickets to Man Machine on Saturday, April 14.

Us:
We are the robots. She's a model and she's looking good, and I am not your sex object. We like synthetic electronic sounds. She gives you her affection and I give you my time. (and $120)
We are trying to get a connection on the telephone line.

You:
So close, but far away.

Secondary markets like this usually tighten up in the lead-up to the event, and then loosen right before. So those who are truly among the desperate for Kraftwerk tickets who got locked out are probably going to have to wait a bit before they get an answer on this.

But now you know: Kraftwerk, still a big thing.

Here is a really enjoyable cover of "Computer Love" that has nothing to do with Coldplay:

fkamer@observer.com | @weareyourfek

Companies like Sharepost and SecondMarket, Gate's most well known New York competitor, rely on privately managed auctions, brokerages and trading specialists to set prices and transact the share of tech companies like Facebook.

Gate is attempting to build an end-to-end electronic trading platform that will provide customers with neutral research and a more liquid market. 

"We fundamentally believe that in the end, this will provide better price discovery, and thus better opportunity for everyone," Gate CEO Vince Molinari told The Observer. "We're taking it out of the backroom where brokers get phone calls and giving the buyers and sellers a platform to negotiate without a middleman, so the power goes to the participants."

Of course, price discovery may not be in the interest of some of the high flying tech companies like Facebook, Zynga and LinkedIn. Facebook's shares trade on secondary markets like Sharepost far above the valuation given by the recent Goldman Sachs investment. 

"Absolutely for companies like Facebook and Twitter, the outliers, this private model may work fine" says Molinari. "But I think there is a paradigm shift in the way private companies are looking to raise capital. Smaller, less well know firms will benefit from our more liquid, more transparent marketplace." 

Gate recently sent a proposal to the SEC pushing for changes to the current rules that allow no more than 500 shareholders in a private company. 

Several more acquisitions will be announced by Gate in the coming months, according to a source close to the company, as the market for private shares of technology companies continues to heat up. 

bpopper [at] observer.com | @benpopper

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 >