Courtesy of ScoreBig

After working in ticketing and marketing for the National Basketball Association, Adam Kanner recognized that the league had a problem: too few butts. Butts in the seats, that is.

"The challenge of live entertainment industry is unsold ticket inventory," Kanner explains. "That inventory is perishable, and filling those seats every night is challenging."

Overall, live entertainment -- concerts, sports events, theater -- is an industry with $25 billion in profits, but around 40 percent of seats go empty.

The flipside to that problem: It has gotten tougher to obtain reasonably priced tickets to events. The casual fan was being priced out of events.

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Kevin Scanlon

Adam Lisagor

Los Angeles may be 350 miles south of Silicon Valley, but it's making strides to close the distance between the two in terms of sheer brain power and inventiveness (with a little bit of entertainment thrown in for good measure). Here are five people from our People issue helping to make that happen.

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Kevin Scanlon

One of the fascinating Angelenos featured in L.A. Weekly's People 2012 issue. Check out our entire People 2012 issue here.

If you've been to the website of a buzzy new tech startup in the last few years -- Groupon, Airbnb, Square -- chances are you've seen the work of Adam Lisagor. Not just his short videos, which are passed around the Internet to promote and teach you how to use these products, but also Lisagor himself, the 34-year-old creative director who stars in them. He's the guy in the thick-rimmed glasses and frizzy beard, an uber-accessible Everyman who walks you through a complicated idea with refreshingly deadpan yet thoroughly earnest delivery.

"The purpose of the videos is to make the information exciting," he says. The result is somewhere between a Michel Gondry movie and an OK Go music video: highly visual, rich with metaphor, giddily clever.

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Aydogon Ozcan

Aydogon Ozcan has developed an attachment to a cellphone that could save people's lives.

Startups is a new column about new companies, big ideas and bold discoveries happening in the L.A. area.

Nearly 6 billion people in the world use cellphones -- and about 70 percent of those users live in developing countries.

Those statistics gave UCLA electrical engineering professor Aydogon Ozcan an idea. "The cellphone is the ultimate Swiss Army knife tool -- rarely used to talk but doing many other functions," he says. As cellphones become more cost-effective, he explains, they will be used for more tasks, even functions that for a century have been relegated to laboratories with bulky and expensive equipment.

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Four hundred years ago, stargazing was practically illegal. The Roman Inquisition sentenced Galileo for supporting Copernican astronomy, and most people still believed the Earth was flat.

Fortunately, science has since come a long way, and now, NASA's Jet Propulsion Lab in Pasadena has made space exploration a viable industry in Southern California -- on par with film, television, improv and bikini waxing. Today, we're still welcome to join the Flat Earth Society, but most of us accept the fact that we're not the center of the universe, with the exception of the Scientologists, perhaps.

As a celebration of our achievements in the field of space exploration, the Williamson Gallery at the Art Center College of Design presents "The History of Space Photography" -- one in a series of exhibitions that examines the nexus of art, science, history and literature. On view through May 6, the show features 150 images that chronicle the advancement of extraterrestrial picture-taking, from black-and-white images of the moon to incredibly detailed digital photos of galaxies outside our solar system.

In the words of none other than Leonard Nimoy, aka Star Trek's Mr. Spock: "If millions of people will contemplate the images in 'The History of Space Photography,' perhaps for a moment, politics can take a rest and compassion, social justice, the dignity of humankind can be advanced an inch."

With this in mind, check out our mini-collection of photos from "The History of Space Photography," with insights from the exhibition's guest curator, Jay Belloli.

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See our previous story, "Pinterest Makes Me Feel Like I'm Bad at Being a Woman"

Pinterest -- the latest social media craze sweeping our laptop screens -- can be many things to many people. As a virtual vision board on which you can bookmark little Internet finds that strike your fancy, it's your canvas. Whether you're into cooking, marathon-running or curating a man collection, there's a board for that. It's a little overwhelming, really. Hence, we haven't quite figured it out yet. But we're having fun trying.

Among the seemingly endless recipes, crafting instructions and home decor pins, something on Pinterest is bound to prick you. Here are the eight of most ridiculous head-scratchers we've found on Pinterest so far.

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Nerdist

Nerd Emperor Hardwick announces the lineup

Nerd.

What was once a word used to assert adolescent alpha male dominance over the guy who would eventually become your boss is now a nearly complete empire run by the once-oppressed. Unlike the Habsburg, Incan or Qing, this one has its own channel on YouTube, complete with Weird Al, Neil Patrick Harris and, well, cute shit exploding, among other nerdly things. Oh, and there...will...be...puppets. Henson puppets.

We caught up with Chris Hardwick, high emperor of the multifaceted project Nerdist, and his business consigliere Peter Levin to talk about the channel, plus bowling, nerd-cred, and why getting whacked in the face with a toy lightsaber can ultimately be a good thing for a lot of people.

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Raymond M.

South by Southwest (or just "South by" if you're cool and/or in a fake hurry) is well under way, with the interactive and film portions kicking off last weekend and the biggest draw, the music, just beginning.

Couldn't make it all the way to Texas? Fuck it. For those of us left behind, we bring you the guide to re-creating SXSW here in Los Angeles. It's easier than you think, probably just as fun, and definitely not as much of a hassle.

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The characters Red and Blue drive each other crazy in the web series Dick Figures, pictured in the episode entitled "Zombies & Shotguns"

Red and Blue are stick figures with a Bugs Bunny/Daffy Duck type of relationship. They drive each other crazy, but somehow remain friends. Their adventures are at the center of one of the hottest shows online. In less than a year and a half, Dick Figures has become a YouTube sensation, racking up views as its central characters reference memes and wreak havoc across their town.

Produced by Six Point Harness and airing on YouTube via Mondo Media, Dick Figures is written and directed by Ed Skudder and Zack Keller, two friends with a fondness for Internet humor and dubstep. With season 4 set to premiere April 5, Dick Figures made an appearance Saturday afternoon at Los Angeles Animation Festival, with both Skudder and Keller on hand for the panel. I had the chance to speak with them after the event.

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During the obligatory morning check of my inbox to see which spa was offering a Groupon for a colon cleanse and infrared therapy (what?), I noticed a smug cat atop a stratocumulus cloud giving me the evil eye from underneath the participating spa's details. I scrolled down to see that he was spouting off some nonsense about purchasing Ferraris in the "Groupon Says" portion of the email at the bottom of each featured deal, where the cat typically appears.

What does buying a Ferrari have to do with colon hydrotherapy? And why must this cat have his tongue out, as if to brazenly hiss his point across? It is too early for that kind of sass. This cat is snarky, arbitrary, nonsensical and omnipotent. If Garfield is a depressed cynic, Groupon Cat is a digressive comedian.

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