Quickbase for Kayak

How Paul English, CEO of travel website Kayak.com uses a do-it-yourself database to keep millions of users happy, without employing a single customer-service rep.

The company spends a total of $10,000 a year on QuickBase licenses and related hardware. English says he would have to spend $300,000 a year in salaries and benefits for an estimated 12 extra staffers he would need to run traditional customer-service software. He also saves on other software: Kayak uses QuickBase to manage projects, vendors, and some accounts.

"Small businesses would be foolish to not at least test this kind of solution," says Yankee Group analyst Joshua Holbrook. "You're at a competitive disadvantage if you don't."

Enter Zoomba

I've been wondering how book clubs were going to survive the disruption of the Internet.

If you're a big reader like I am, you used to join book clubs to read about new books coming out on a regular basis and to get the four free books you got for joining. Of course, you had to fill out those reply cards or you got their book of the month on a regular schedule which if you didn't want it was a pain-in-the-neck to return.

Amazon changed everything. Not only could you get books whenever you want delivered to your door, you could find all the information you could ever want about any book whether you ordered it or not, including professional reviews and reviews by other readers. Amazon taught me how mathematics could be a competitive advantage with algorithms that looked at what I read and recommended new books. With its size and scale, Amazon could create the largest inventory and realize the enormous profits that could be made by catering to the long tail.

Netflix catered to the long tail as well. But the reason I joined was "no more late fees ever". I liked too the single price per month no matter how many DVDs I ordered so long as I only had three at a time. Like Amazon, Netflix had information on every movie and an easy way to create a list, a queue which I could add to and reorder any time. Easiest though was the delivery in thin, red envelopes that became the postage-paid return.

Since book clubs can't compete with Amazon, why not model after Netflix? That's what Zoomba does. Create a reading list of booksellers, get one a month for $9.95 - no shipping & handling, no reply cards, no book that you didn't ask for.

That's smart. Now they just need some blogs to get people talking about the new best sellers.