Golf indoors!

Golf is moving indoors. The newest gizmo pushes the game several links beyond the driving range that’s in front of a screen projection. It’s called simulator golf, and it lets golfers play an entire game – driving, chipping and putting – all in front of a screen projection.


“Indoor golf facilities such as this are rare,” said Dan Muzzey, owner of Player’s Club Golf on Pico Boulevard in Santa Monica, “not just uncommon, but rare. But it’s one of the fastest growing businesses in Korea.”

So it’s probably no surprise that another such facility opened in Koreatown earlier this month. It’s named Pebble Beach on 6th, and the world’s most famous courses are simulated.

“The current 42 top courses can be played,” said John Park, co-owner of the facility. A player can shoot, say, Augusta National or any other famous course, including those in Asia.

Particularly appealing to some: A customer can play tournaments via the Internet. A golfer at Pebble Beach on 6th, for example, can play with a friend in Seoul, South Korea.

In fact, Muzzey organized a Rider Cup tournament at Player’s Club against golfers in the United Kingdom.

Muzzey bought two simulators for $65,000 each and leases a third.

“The barrier to entry is expense,” said Muzzey, who opened Player’s Club in early 2008. He has 2,500 square feet at the moment, but is finalizing plans to build a 28,000-square-foot facility that will feature more simulators and other country club amenities, such as a gym, saunas and card rooms.

Pebble Beach on 6th has seven simulators.

“It’s practically the same as being on the greens with the ball’s travel distance or trajectory,” said Bob Jang, who was playing at Pebble Beach on 6th recently. “It came as a shock to me that I could play a round like this indoors on any course of my choosing.”

How to use DataJoe

This program is really awesome! But the usage is very simple.

1. Loading file what you want. And then choose the group before sending e-mail.

2. If you recieved the reply, it shows and arranges automatically.

3. It also privide printed form. This perfectly matches with our printed newspaper.

4. If you want to find the lists, you can do it on LABJ website. You can buy all the lists or the part you want.

How to make a list

I have thought that the most interesting things are ‘The company lists’. The LA Business Journal releases the lists every week. LABJ published the lists of the other 90 kinds so the company received the survey once a year. The lists classified about 16 categories - Finance, Professional Services(Law Firm and Accounting Firms), Business Services(Employee Benefits Consultants, Franchisers), Hospitality&Travel, Entertainment, Real Estate.

I really want to know how to make them. Deciding the ranking is very difficult as well as high risk for the medias. If they made a something mistake in the lists, the public trust of the media suffered a heavy blow. So Korean medias didn’t make the lists alone. Sometimes they announced the lists but they were made by special agency.

I learned how to make the lists last two weeks. First off I was surprised enormous database and cautious advance preparations. The lists were based on the survey. It started about six week ago. Because the survey was related on business performance, it needed a lot of time for the accuracy. The second reason is that the person in charge of the survey changed about 25%.

They used ‘DataJoe’ for survey. It is an amazing tool. It enable to do everything on the web. It sent the survey e-mail to the companies, the receiver filled up. No survey paper and no DHL.

If it ended to fill up, it got into shape all data automatically. After one click, we could see the arranged data. It contained the function of Excel so we could arrange ‘revenue’ or ‘net profit’.

Especially it provided the format of publishing. It is no need to copy&paste for printing newspaper. If we had to pill up or copy&paste for printing, sometimes terrible mistakes like mistype occurred during this process.

For this specialty, about 70 companies(include 16 business journals) use DataJoe. Of course it is not free, they paid about 20% of the lists’ revenue.

The most important thing is verifying. There is possibility to expand their revenue or the operating profit. Because the title, the industry’s No.1, is the temptation hard to resist.

So LABJ made an effort to verify. For example, in case of bank they compared typed number with the FDIC’s number. But sometimes there is no public information. At a time like this, they used to verify through the competitors. Most of them had a lot of information of their competitor.

I will try to make the lists of Korean company. But I’m not sure in here or in my country.