I just returned from a visit to New York City this week and figured I would post some thoughts on my trip.  I have been to NYC before, but I was a kid and we only drove through the city, we didn’t actually walk the streets and experience the city.  This was a business trip for my day-job at RoundTable Toys attending the annual Toy Fair convention.  Much of the time we were up there, we were at the trade show which left us only short windows of opportunities to experience the city life.

We flew from Raleigh, NC to NYC on Saturday, and what shocked me the most about our trip up there is that we actually had more snow in North Carolina than we did when we landed in New York.  After finding our hotel (Park Central), we realized that we were only 7 blocks away from Times Square.

We went straight to the Apple store (the cube) which is located across from Central Park.  This place was a madhouse, and without question the busiest place that we visited in New York.  I was actually quite surprised that almost all of the computers that I saw people carrying around the city and at the Toy Fair show were MACS!!!  I guess that its only fitting that a place known as The Big Apple actually prefer Apple computers.

We then checked out FAO Schwartz, Trump Tower & then headed back to meet for dinner at a cool Italian restaurant a few blocks from the hotel called Pazza Notte.  Coming from southern upbringing, I was a bit shocked that an Italian restaurant didn’t actually have Italian dressing for their salads!!!  I also could not read a thing on the menu at this place, but luckily the owners of RoundTable Toys had been there before and we figured out how to order a meatlover’s style pizza.  The pizza was cooked in a smokehouse style oven & was truly delicious.

On Sunday, our Toy Fair experience began…  I didn’t really know what to expect at the trade show, but it was definitely much larger than I could have envisioned.  The show was held at the Javits Center, which was literally 3 football fields wide with 3 levels and hundreds & hundreds of aisles of toy companies and product lines.  Over the course of 3 days we must have walked more than 20 miles just inside the show.  Highlights of the show included a replica Delorean time machine from Back To The Future, extreme pogo stick jumpers, Dan Dunn’s speed painting exhibition & hanging with the Myachi guys at their booth.  We also checked out conferences on social marketing & innovative new sales channels such as the Sears marketplace (which is setup very similar to Amazon’s Seller Central).

On Sunday evening, we ate at a small Mexican restaurant a few blocks from our hotel called Cancun…  This was a poor choice as they were only serving from a limited Valentines Day menu.  I don’t think I have ever eaten at a Mexican restaurant ANYWHERE that didn’t have a freakin Taco or Burrito on the menu.  After an absurdly long wait time for our food, I ended up with a Filet Mignon, which was very tasty, but not quite the authentic Mexican experience that I was expecting.  It was at this time that I started realizing that NOTHING in NYC is normal!!!

On Monday evening we had tickets to see The Phantom Of The Opera.  A co-worker and myself decided to split away from the main group and get something quick to eat and meet everyone else on Broadway later that night.  I realized that there was a Hooters literally across the street from our hotel, so that was the eating destination for the night.  I figured that of all places, I would know this menu by heart!!!  We sat at the same table that legendary Dolphin’s QB Dan Marino sat when he visited the place.  They even had a sign above us that said “DAN MARINO’S SEAT”, my buddy Rand would be jealous at this as he has had a man-crush on Marino for years!!!  All Hooters in North Carolina have a wide range of wing sauces, so it was quite a shock to see that Hooters in NYC (OF ALL PLACES) only had like 4 wing sauce choices!!!  As I said before, NOTHING in NYC is normal!!!  The wings were great, our waitress was great and actually it was one of the quickest meals we had at any place in the city.  I left with a replica Hooters girl shirt for my wife, which I’m looking forward to seeing her in very soon : )

After our Hooters experience, it was onto the show.  Let it be known, I am not an opera fan by any stretch of the imagination.  The production for Phantom though, was AMAZING…  From the costumes, the lights, smoke & sound system to the HUGE sets that I’m still not sure how they got on and off the stage so quickly, it was like seeing a movie play out live before your eyes.  The only thing I didn’t really care for though was the singing…  I didn’t realize that nearly EVERY line in the entire show was sung,  I assumed that there would be musical parts in some of it and regular acting/speaking parts in other parts.  Some of the musical parts were really cool, but when multiple actors and actresses where singing different lines at each other at the same time, much of it came off sounding like a wall of unorganized NOISE.  Anyway, it was an experience that I won’t soon forget, for better or worse…

Our last day at Toy Fair was on Tuesday and we didn’t spend a full day there, as we had finished our goals for the show by then.  Although the weather had treated us well during our stay in NYC so far, it started snowing like crazy during the last day.  We had to take a cab back to the hotel during the midst of what a southern raised person like myself would consider a blizzard.  I’ve been on a lot of thrill rides in my life as I am a roller coaster freak, but I would have to say that a cab ride across NYC, in the middle of a blizzard, with icy roads, with a foreign cab driver who couldn’t understand us & we couldn’t understand him would have to rank as one of the top 10 thrill rides that I have ever been on.  I have no idea how we weaved in and out of some of the spots in traffic that our cab went.

On our final night in the city we had reservations to eat at Il Vagabondo on the upper east side.  This is a well known place in NYC where many celebrities frequently visit as was shown by the numerous pictures lining the walls in the place.  Although this restaurant’s menu is primarily authentic Italian, they actually had a menu that I could read and know what I was trying to order.  This was definitely one of the highlights of the whole trip as the food was excellent and the service was a level above anything we had experienced in NYC.  I felt like Tony Soprano was going to waltz in the door at any moment, if that gives you any idea of what this place caters to.  They even had a bocce court in the back room that we played a few games on.  After dinner we walked a couple of blocks down to a local piano bar named Mimi’s.  This was yet another memorable experience as they had an older guy who changed costumes based on song requested and gave comedic performances of each song.

Our plane was scheduled to leave early the next morning, so by the time I got back to my hotel room and got my bags together,  I didn’t even risk going to bed.  I spent the last couple hours outside the hotel getting my last taste of the city life and taking in the sights, sounds & smells of The Big Apple.

The whole experience of NYC was very cool and very eye-opening.  The big city experience is something that everyone should get a chance to check out at least once in your life.  You realize that there is a whole different world out there outside of Eastern North Carolina (or whatever smaller city that you may be from).  With that said, I was more than ready to bring my tail back home to the south.  As the plane came toward the runway at RDU, I was thinking just land this baby and I’m home.  Raleigh has only looked better once before in my life when my wife and I drove straight through without stopping for 17 hours from her parents house in Wisconsin a couple years ago.

Is there anything positive that has come out of the struggling economy that our country has faced throughout 2009 and into 2010? I truly believe that there is…

Although it is sad to see businesses fail, the recession helps to weed out merchants (both online as well as brick & mortar) who probably shouldn’t have been in business to begin with. It also helps weed out merchants who are trying to establish themselves by undercutting prices until there are no margins whatsoever in certain product lines. The failure of some of these merchants is in no way a bad thing, especially for the more established merchants who can stay alive until the economy starts to improve. This not only applies to merchants, but websites as a whole in general, regardless of the content of the site.

As others fail, there will always be someone who can step in and do it better. If your website is unique, or if you offer a unique way of presenting content that is better than other websites in your niche, you will become a success as long as you keep it online long enough and are consistently growing traffic to your site. Success does not usually happen overnight, and in some cases may take years to become established in your chosen niche.

I truly think that we are starting to see the economy begin to bounce back. Sales revenue from some of the more established websites that our company owns have picked up tremendously in the last month and we hope that this continues to be the case. We are looking forward to what 2010 offers to our company. We re-established our company’s operations in 2009 as a merchant first and an internet based services provider second and are now starting to see the fruits of our labor.

EastWave strives to take our established entities and only make them better going forward. We plan to sell off even more of our less profitable ventures to focus specifically on our core entities. We see a beautiful break on the horizon and we are gearing up to be ready for the ride.

I have told my customers for years to diversify their chosen providers of domain names, web hosting services, development services & other internet related services.  This simple concept can be applied to many more facets of your business though.  In this post I would like to offer some advice on this concept as well as give real world examples of what can happen when much of your online presence is tied to one service provider.

• From the years of 2000 to 2004, I worked as the main web developer for a web hosting company.  It was during this time that I learned the value of good domain names.  The first domain names that I registered were done through the company I worked for, and at time I did not know very much about purchasing domain names as investments.  My relationship with this company ended due to a dispute over the direction of the company as well as other reasons, and it would be correct to say that it ended in a very heated & negative way.  I had major issues in the next month after leaving the company when I tried to transfer the domain names that I owned and had rights to.  The owner of the company would not approve the registrar requests to transfer the domains and I was stuck.  Luckily, I still had a friend within the company who approved the transfers of the domains, unbeknownst to the owner.

• Just recently, I was involved in a similar situation in regards to transferring domain names for the main company I work for now as my dayjob.  This company was using an all-in-one ecommerce system provided by a company that shall remain nameless, so lets just refer to them as Company Z.  One of the owners of the company had worked for Company Z for many years in a relationship that was mutually beneficial to both parties, and one of the perks of the job was free domain registrations.  After building a new system for this company, we planned to move our website on a certain date and then problems with moving the domain off Company Z’s system began.  We experienced blatant lies about dns changes that were never made, derogatory heated emails attacking the character of our entire company and other childish actions.  We then realized that we were getting nowhere with Company Z.  We finally had to go over their heads and go direct to the actual registrar of the domain names & prove that we owned the domain name in question in order to get anything at all changed.  A process that should have taken less than 5 minutes ended up taking up nearly a week to get straightened out.

• An example of multiple revenue streams in action comes from my own business in the last year.  During the years of 2007-2009, one of my main revenue sources was affiliate marketing.  My company owned a network of affiliate stores which would showcase products from various merchants and then send the customer to the merchant’s website to complete a purchase, giving our company a percentage of the sale.  We did very well in this venture until the middle of 2009 when the state of North Carolina passed an affiliate nexus tax which seriously decreased the amount of revenue that our company could make from affiliate sales.  Internet companies usually do not have to charge sales tax on purchases if they do not have an actual location in that particular state.  The affiliate nexus tax was worded so that affiliates of a company are considered to be a sales force in that particular state and the merchant would have to charge sales tax.  Amazon was one of the first merchants to oppose this ruling and decided to cancel all affiliates in states that passed the affiliate nexus tax instead of paying sales tax on those sales, and many other larger merchants followed.  My affiliate revenue started dwindling down immediately following this law being passed.  Luckily, my company was already running our own network of stores selling our own products so we converted some of the better affiliate based sites into actual merchant sites selling products from our own inventory.  Had our company’s only source of revenue been based on affiliate marketing only, our company probably wouldn’t still be online today.