The Out of Town Treatment

Hey folks, I’ve been travelling most of the week, so I wasn’t able to blog. To make up for the break, I’ll regale you with some tidbits from the road:

I flew JetBlue from Oakland to New York City for just $200. That meant that I spent more on taxi fares that I did on a transcontinental flight! No wonder the plane was packed. Someday, JetBlue and Southwest will bury the rest of the airlines.

Because I flew out of Oakland, I used Palo Alto Limo. PAL is a terrific example of how Google is changing the world. They spend $40 per month on Google keyword advertising. That $40 generates, they estimate, an additional $13,500 per month in revenues. That’s right, a 34,000% ROI. That’s the power of context. This is just another example of how every business, online or not, has been affected by the Internet.

While I was in New York, I spent some time with an old friend from HBS, Viktor Mizo. While Viktor has done boring things like work for Motorola on Six-Sigma projects, his real love is dance music. His current house party, Tronic Treatment, packs the Sullivan room in Manhattan every Monday night, from midnight to 5 in the morning. Dance music is a huge industry; top DJs can pull down $60,000 a night, and one DJ in Japan plays to crowds of 50,000+ in baseball stadiums. And yet, most of us have never even heard of them. It just goes to show you have powerful (and profitable) a niche can be!