Internet and telephone booking service MovieTickets.com has signed its 100th cinema chain partner, BowTie cinemas, which has 115 screens in 15 locations in Connecticut, New York, Maryland and Colorado. The announcement was made in a press release, which also highlighted the fact that it sales were up 40 per cent on the previous summer. Despite this the US continues to lag European and Asian territories where higher broadband penetration and more advanced mobile phone services means that in some contries that box office ticket sales comes third after on-line and mobile/phone sales. While MovieTickets.com may style itself “the world’s most powerful Internet movie ticketing service” and that “The MovieTickets.com theater chain group, which includes 100 theater chains, is about five times the number of chains of its nearest competitor,” it will always labour in the shadow of AOL’s Moviefone, if for no better reason than that Moviefone was immortalized in the classic Seinfeld episode ‘The Pool Guy’.