A good buddy of mine recently brought my attention to a cool new company he’s been working with called iKan. He’s helping them develop a scalable business model for their flagship product, a counter top pod that allows you to scan your food items and create grocery lists. It scans your items with a UPC barcode scanner and wirelessly logs them into an online account, from which you can place orders with online grocers or print out a shopping list to take to your local store. Furthermore, it has great voice recognition software that allows you to simply say the name of the item in the event that there’s no barcode. iKan surely has the ability to revolutionize home grocery shopping, and yet, with a well executed user interface, it could offer so much more.

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I’m so excited for our friends at Ecovative Design. They have recently won the € 500,000 grand prize at the PICNIC Green Challenge in Amsterdam a few weeks ago. I’m absolutely ecstatic for Eben and his partners! Skip ahead to 1:56 to see Eben’s presentation.

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Wow, what an excellent conference! A game changer. I have to thank my friends over at Village Green Energy for hooking me up with a free pass. I’ve been so passionate about this movement as long as I can remember… ever since 6th grade when I messed around with electromagenetic fields and plants. Early education for me was all about ecology and environment, and that followed with rigorous economics in college, which I didn’t quite understand about myself until now. Having not gone into banking with my degree and now seeing the state of the economy I was like shit… but David Suzuki put it so clearly… it’s (eco)nomics. I can’t believe I never recognized that. I automatically associated economics with the greedy, short-sighted mentality of Wall Street that focuses solely on the bottom line and exploiting the market for cash and egoic status. Yet you realize the bottom line is not the statement of cash flows or the balance sheet… it’s the fuckin planet. Ecology + Economics = Sustainability. This conference was absolutely buzzing! People were feeling alive and connecting and touching each other like I’ve never seen in my life. We all knew the green revolution is ready and about to change the world in a big way.

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Wine labels will do it. How many times have you bought a wine because of its label? I know I have. Be it creative or just familiar, labels can make or break the wines sales. And I will admit right now that I have bought some ridiculously designed and named wines. There was ‘Bitch’, which had a pink label in black lettering. Don’t get me wrong, it was well priced and a quite enjoyable Grenache from Australia. Why did I buy it? Because my friend and I thought it was funny. A few weeks later I was back in that same wine store and I witnessed the same scene, two friends walk up the counter to purchase their wines and see ‘Bitch’ conveniently located at the register. The one friend turns to the other and starts laughing and they immediately pick it up and add it to their pile. Smart product placing.

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We’ve worked really hard over the past 6 months to establish our first client Tastevine as its own company, and feel very good about our work. We now feel it’s time to take what we’ve learned and become a more well rounded marketing and technology company. Holistic, I guess you could say… servicing the full holistic lifestyle.

Wine is a big part of this, and so is organic food, natural medicine, renewable consumer goods, social apps & games that bring people together. The whole deal.  We feel this represents who we truly are, as it represents the change we want to see in the world. Furthermore, with the clients we’ve been working with outside of the wine industry, it is clear that a holistic marketplace should be the focus of our services. In talking to people about this growth, we’ve received mixed reviews. Some say we should remain a wine company and others see us becoming something more.

Check out these rough mockups for our banner… a picture says a thousand words as they say. Click the images to see an enlarged view. One attempts to show a big evolution outside of wine and the other shows something more subtle.

Which one is in the right direction? What would you suggest?