Today, Payback Time, a Facebook application promoting movie review site Spill.com, was featured in an article at Wired.com.  Payback Time was developed by the Grape Thinking team, and originally launched this past summer.  It has been growing organically for the past several months, and announced and released a new feature today.  

The Payback Time application gives Facebook users the ability to make reviews of boxoffice movies, either defending their honor, or demanding a refund.  If you earn enough money, you can use it to purchase movie tickets from Fandango.com. 

We’ve certainly enjoyed working on this application, and look forward to watching it grow.  Please check it out, and let us know what you think!

UPDATE: Since this article was published, Payback Time has more than quadrupled their app user base!

On a recent trip to the Benicassim Festival in Spain, I purchased a pair of quick-dry camping pants from Titanium for the trip. Walking to outside the festival grounds and sitting on our back-packs whilst waiting for the campsite to open, we took the opportunity to crack a bottle of Rioja we’d got on RENFE (a quick note on RENFE – if you’re on the site and can’t select English you need to select the drop-down labelled Seleccione su Idioma to make it so, which means you have to speak Spanish to get the site into English, go figure!)

Red Wine is a perfect libation for festivals – primarily because it doesn’t need to be kept cold; it doesn’t lose its fizz and if you’re drinking wine locally produced its dirt cheap and super-good. Within minutes of popping the cork however I’d managed to spill the Rioja on my new pants and was questioning the merits of wine in a situation where a shower is hard to find… when suddenly, with a splash of from my water bottle – the wine was gone. Brilliant! Wine proof pants – what more could a young millennial wine-lover at a music festival wish for? I reckon marketing the pants specifically as wine-proof and selling it at Bonnaroo could be a good gig.

Read the rest of this entry »

I saw this slideshow while browsing through SlideShare and thought that it would be great to share with our readers who are trying to find new ways to connect with the Millennial Generation through social media marketing and viral marketing…

Enjoy!

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?

I was browsing through some old notes, and found this post by Ryan Opaz at Catavino talking about their site stats, and figuring out the reality behind pageviews in the wine industry. The post had spawned a great discussion, and in preparing a response, I decided should just write a post about site stats.

Are you tracking visitors to your website? If the answer is NO, then you have to catch up with the times. If you owned a hardware store, and I could tell you information about:

• who your customers are
• how many customers you have
• how they find you
• how long each of them are in your store
• what they are looking at
• how long someone is in a particular section
• is this their first visit
• what they bought
• at what point did they decide to leave

Would you not practically beg me for this? Read the rest of this entry »