Many of us would already contend that the Galaxy Note II is more of a pocketable computer than a smartphone, so why not take the definition at face value? Samsung certainly is, as it just began selling a Smart Dock that transforms its phablet into a makeshift desktop. A trio of USB ports give the Note II options for a mouse, keyboard and even external storage -- and if the phone's 5.5-inch screen isn't already a large enough canvas, HDMI video (plus stereo audio out) should fill the gap. While there's no question that the Smart Dock's $100 price is relatively steep, it might be worthwhile for those still mourning the loss of Webtop.
This is my fifth time hosting Wine Blogging Wednesday, our monthly virtual tasting event, but my enthusiasm has not diminished with the passage of time. In fact, since bringing back the event from hiatus it looks like the idea might be picking up some steam judging from the entires this month. While many of the [...]
Odds and ends from a life lived through the prism of the wine glass…
The Wine Spectator Affect
When I received my November 15th issue of Wine Spectator on October 11th, featuring a cover shot of Tim Mondavi and an feature article on him and his estate winery Continuum, I captured some online research reference points so I could have a baseline to measure the effect that a flattering Wine Spectator cover story might have on a winery in the digital age.
Using Wine-Searcher,CellarTracker and Google Keywords search data to track various data points, the results, while not directly linked to conclusions, do indicate a small bump in interest as a result of the cover piece.
For example, Wine-Searcher data indicates that the average bottle price, an indicator of supply and demand, rose $2 month over month, from $149 a bottle to $151 a bottle.
In addition, the Wine-Searcher search rank (always a month behind) indicates that Continuum was the 1360th most popular search in September. By Friday, November 11th the Continuum search rank had increased to 471st for the month of October. (See the top 100 searches for October here).
Likewise, interest at CellarTracker increased, as well. The number of bottles in inventory from October 11th to November 11th increased by 177 bottles, likely no small coincidence.
Finally, Google searches increased fivefold from an average of 210 monthly searches to approximately 1000 monthly searches.
What does this all mean? Good question. The truth is, a Wine Spectator cover appears to have moved the needle a bit, and while the easy route is to take a righteous Eeyore approach to mainstream media and its blunted impact in the Aughts, as contrasted to what a Spectator cover feature or glowing words from Parker meant just a decade ago, I believe a more tangible takeaway is to realize that these sorts of cover stories don’t happen in a vacuum and that Wine Spectator cover and feature was likely a result of weeks, months or even years’ worth of effort from a PR professional.
In an attention-deficit, social media-impacted, offline/online hybrid world of information consumption with mobile and tablets proliferating, in order to break through to (and ultimately assist) the consumer, the value of the PR professional, an oft neglected part of the marketing hierarchy, in reaching out and facilitating the telling of a winery’s story seems to be more important than ever.
It’s not about press releases, it’s about people supporting and telling the winery story, repeatedly, as a professional function – that leads to media notice, and that leads to 14 cases of wine being sold and inventoried at CellarTracker in a 30-day period of time. It’s perhaps obvious, but not adhered to.
Wine Labels
To me, a wine bottle is a blank canvas that can either inspire in its creativity or repel in its insipidness. While I have a reasonably conservative approach to the kinds of wine I want to drink relative to technological intervention, I am unabashedly progressive when it comes to the kind of wine labels that appeal to me. In support of my interest with wine packaging, I keep an eye on The Dieline wine blog to see what’s happening in wine label design (another example from The Coolist here) and I also pay attention to the burgeoning field of wine label design contests.
What say you about progressive labels? Like ‘em? Loathe them? I placed a poll to the right.
I will lobby the nominating committee of the Nobel Prize in Economic Sciences on behalf of anybody who can help me understand how it is that in the span of a week I can see multiple research reports (here and here) on a revived sense of fiscal austerity by consumers yet other reports (here and here) indicate that wine above $20 is the fastest growing segment this year.
These two clearly don’t jive with each other, yet I’m witless to understand why wine is “trading up.” Help!
Carphone Warehouse is now taking pre-orders for the Nokia Lumia 820 handset, and there's good news for the cash bereft -- it's free on contract, and the reseller will toss in a £45 wireless charging plate to boot. You can commit £29 per month toO2, Vodafone or Orange to avoid paying up front, or grab an unencumbered handset at £380 for the 4.3-inch Windows Phone 8 device in black, red or white. For that, you'll get a 4G-capable smartphone with an 800 x 480 OLED screen, 1.5GHz dual-core Snapdragon S4 processor, 1GB of RAM and 8-megapixel camera. The free extra offer will expire when shipping starts, so if the WP8 launch has you all charged up, hit the source.
When Amazon Appstore for Android launched last week, one of its primary features -- Test Drive -- was disabled just a few minutes after it opened. With no try-before-you-buy, no refund process, and 1-Click purchasing ready to strike at any moment, this caused some problems. Anyway, don't despair: Test Drive is now enabled.
Before you get your hopes up, Test Drive doesn't work with every app. The IMDb app works fine -- you can even watch movie trailers on it! -- but the Angry Birds games are sadly not enabled. Some games work surprisingly well, though, like Bubble Buster. There's very little latency, and the framerate is really rather good. The Test Drive experience is so true to life that you even get ads; how cool is that?
Looking for further integrate Skitch and Evernote, Skitch v2.0 was released today. For those of you out there who use it often, you'll notice plenty of changes within the updated version. To start, you get a whole new home screen that has been cleaned up to allow for ease of use. In addition to that, you'll also get a whole new subset of tools to make use of:
Pixelate - The new Pixelate feature is a great way to quickly obscure a part of an image that may contain personal or sensitive information. Take a photo or choose one from your gallery, tap the Pixelate tool and drag it across the section of the image that you want to hide. Now you can annotate and share an image without worrying that others will be able to read sensitive information in it.
Highlighter - When you need to emphasize something, the best way is often to use a highlighter. That’s why we created the new highlighting tool. Choose the highlighter, a color and line thickness, then start drawing. The lines appear just like a highlighter on paper, allowing you to clearly see the background objects.
Panning Tool - The left-most option on the toolbar is the Panning Tool. It lets you select, move and resize annotations. After you finish adding a shape, text or arrow, the Panning Tool is automatically selected, so that you can easily adjust the object.
The round out the update, that mentioned Skitch and Evernote relationship has been improved. Now, when you view your Skitch notes, those are actually coming from within Evernote. To coincide with the release, a small Evernote update was released today as well. You'll find both available for download in the Google Play Store.
While we've still yet to see anything truly Earth-shattering, the tandem of Rafael Rivera and Paul Thurrott continues to churn out insight about interesting new features they've discovered in Windows 8 milestone 3. The latest discovery is that Aero in Windows 8 will be able to automatically adapt itself to match your current wallpaper image. It's a bit like what Windows 7 already does with your taskbar icons: if a program alert needs your attention, the icon will glow using the predominant color (e.g. Firefox should glow orange).
And yes, you can already make Windows 7 behave this way if you like. Over at CodePlex, there's a little program called Aura that parks itself in your system tray and automatically adjusts your window borders to compliment your wallpaper images. The effect is quite nice, and you can try it out by minimizing your windows and cycling through your theme's wallpapers (right click on your desktop and choose next desktop background).
In addition to the new Nexus 4 smartphone, which we've already put up against the iPhone 5, Google and Samsung have announced the brand new Nexus 10 big boy tablet now as well. So experience vs. ecosystem, integrated vs. licenses, yadda vs. yadda, we're stacking that up against Apple's just-announced iPad 4 to get a sense of where exactly the different platforms are going, and what they're needing, hardware-wise.
Although I was an avid and longtime reader of Dottie Gaiter and John Brecher’s weekly Wall Street Journal wine column, I never have participated in Open That Bottle Night (OTBN). Started in 2000, the event was created as an excuse to open a special wine that remains for whatever reason languishing in your cellar. I [...]
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