Anybody that knows me, knows that I’m a huge supporter of Mozilla, especially Thunderbird. However, after 18 months of wishful thinking, I had to make a change this week; out with Mozilla (Thunderbird) and in with iGoogle and Gmail. I stuck with Thunderbird for a long time because of its unbelievable ease of use, consistency, and open source upgrades all driven by its non-profit culture. I also hoped that they would merge Firefox with Thunderbird and create the all in one application suite they’ve always talked about. Got so pumped up last year when they finally released the Lightning add-on for Thunderbird. However, waiting became too inefficient and switching to iGoogle/Gmail this week has been nothing short of a spiritual experience. Of course, I still use Firefox, but with the new Google setup, I don’t ever need to close the browser.

Here’s how my web worker life has transitioned:

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I’m up in NY for a long weekend to see some friends and stopped by a buddies place in Clinton, NJ last night. He took me to this little hole in the wall pizza joint called Pizza Como and I had to write about it because it’s the best pizza I’ve ever had. I grew up in the South where you always hear that the pizza doesn’t compare to up north, and no one ever believes it until they come up here. I’ve learned replicating that perfectly crispy chewy crust and use of simple fresh ingredients is a fine art that only the pizzerias of the tri-state area have mastered. Sure there’s a lot of commercial joints that don’t do it right up north, but when you find a hole in the wall spot like Pizza Como that has family history in Sicilia, Italia, you know its good. 5 stars ($)

Here’s a little bit of Grape Thinking for you — it was just announced last week that University of Rochester medical researchers have showed for the first time that Resveratrol, the powerful antioxidant found in grape skins, helps destroy pancreatic cancer cells - Read more here. There is a lot of controversy over this topic and the researchers are calling it a very ’seductive’ area of study right now.

We love this because it’s one of the main influences in our brand name — we’re all about a healthy lifestyle and we think that wine is a vital component to healthy living. Read the rest of this entry »

This place rocks – South African vibe, outdoor patio, indoor chillin with lounge in the back — wireless access. Fans flowing in unison and friendly staff serve awesome teas and coffee from around the world. They also serve a few wines by the glass from South Africa to take the edge off. Great soul and r&b music always playing, with a touch of African folk. Overall awesome place – if ever in Charleston this is the place to come to chill and work - ***** (5 stars)

At GT, we’ve mostly focused on writing reviews about wine, and now feel it is time to start writing about all of our lifestyle passions, especially with our business offering brining in clients from various industries such as movies and music, restaurants, technology, and wine. Ruarri’s in London and has brought in a new friend Meghan, who’s in Paris, and they will both be continuing to write awesome wine reviews. Jake is doing tech guides and reviews, and with me being the virtual worker of the bunch, it only makes sense for me to write about all the places that I spend my time — coffee shops, wine bars, and restaurants.

Most brands these days are a clever name and good looking label that an advertising department can run a campaign around and a distributor can push down the pipe. Nobody really thinks about the idea of building a brand by changing the way you actually market and sell the wine. If you could approach these tactics differently and appeal to the consumer and trade in a way that makes their lives easier, this new vehicle would become the brand in itself more so than the pretty label and tasty juice. Stormhoek, Twisted Oak, Pinot Blogger, and Sacre Bleu have pioneered direct marketing for a wine brand and have found some success doing it this way. However, the next generation of wine brands will learn how to break down the barriers of the industry and start actually selling the product in a unique way.

Here are a few steps that we plan to follow: Read the rest of this entry »

It was announced today that the Champagne region of France is expanding to meet world demand and we’re pretty excited about it. Once thought of as a celebratory drink for only special occasions, Champagne and sparkling wine are quickly becoming the wine of choice for many around the world. Among new wine drinkers and millennials, it seems that we actually prefer champagne even as a complement to our food. It’s the natural effervescence that adds to flavor depth and antioxidant health benefits, that combine to make Champagne and sparkling wine the all around global drink. It’ll be great to see different types and flavors appear on the shelves at decent price points, while still maintaining the natural quality and mystique. We’ve always believed that wine is the one taste substance that everyone around the world shares, and maybe this news is a small sign that we’re starting to celebrate more together.

For more reading see: Champagne - A New Year Tradition

We’ve been following Twine for a good bit now, and are very excited to see it finally open in Beta. Twine is a tool that allows individuals, and more importantly, teams, to send items such as emails, notes, presentations, documents, webpages, pictures, and any other material involved in your personal and professional life to a twine or personal page. Their cutting edge semantic inferencing engine will then organize the data for you, helping you to gain a clearer perspective on what you and your team are working on, and also bring in creative recommendations from other individuals and teams with statistically and linguistically correlated twines.

We are especially interested in this because as a startup team, Twine’s system will prove invaluable in increasing productivity and creativity by having an outside party/unbiased mediator (their semantic inferencing engine) analyze our information and help align our thoughts and ideas. As a team, there is a commonality and vision that brings us together and binds us, but unfortunately without a purely unbiased outsider, the differences of each persons’ perceptions will leak into the project and slow it down due to self-interest. However, if you are sending your data to a team page/twine and their inferencing engine is what it is cracked up to be, then it will undoubtedly show us the most important linguistic and semantic components of our project, allowing us to creatively and productively move forward at a faster and more competitive pace. Read the rest of this entry »

After reading both Tom Wark’s post last week about the coming implosion of the US wine wholesalers and the news released yesterday of Amazon entering the US wine market, I think we can all feel the change coming. We haven’t talked about it much in our writings over the past year+, but our main advisor/investor in our Tastevine wine project is on the board of directors of the recently merged R-NDC (Republic National Distributing Company). From our experience, change is ready.

We have learned so much having an inside viewpoint on the true nature of the industry, from the struggles, to the perceptions, to most importantly the arrogance that all parties use to mask their fear of change. Everyone knows where the industry is going and really wants to come together to bring about change, but no one is ready to compromise. As the direct movement continues to gain momentum and breakdown barriers, wholesalers continue to feel backed into a corner, forcing them to use their brut force and FUD tactics to make everyone else feel the stress that they do. Wark’s line is priceless tho –”Now, they whine like a little girl who just soiled their Sunday dress and run off crying to daddy asking him to put down his tools and stop doing his job, so he can clean the mess the little girl made all by herself.”– lol. Read the rest of this entry »

To those of you that have kept up with us, we appreciate your readership and support. Everything has been invaluable for a couple young guys trying to start something up. As a marketing company, we’ve been able to grab a few clients and expand our online marketing ability. It’s all about developing a knack for what’s interesting or cool or fresh. It’s been a fun experience not only growing, but keeping ourselves fed… and a little buzzd too.

However, we all have the big visions and the projects we’re working on and we’re still trying to figure out exactly what to do with Tastevine — we were caught up in the wine 2.0 euphoria of ‘07 and put out a wine community and recommendation engine that had some value. However, every time people saw us as the Facebook of wine, we knew that something was off. We realized that in the effort of creating something that would make wine fun, sexy and fluid, we actually found ourselves not even using what we created!

Why is this? Probably because the only type of people that were attracted to a wine community are winos themselves. Not people like us that don’t know anything about wine. People that are young want a sexy brand that brings in new wines from around the world that actually taste GOOD — young palettes like ours are picky and we need something subtle, sweet, but yet still sophisticated. After we find a brand with these type of wines, we’d love to use them to develop our taste and get involved in an online system that helps us find new recommendations.

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