LIFT08

LIFT08 is happening in 2 weeks (6-7-8 Feb, 2008, Geneva, Switzerland). The program looks great but I won’t be able to attend this year.

Workshops and Venture Night
There’s a very complete first day with a lot of interesting workshops. If you’re going do check Pedro Custodio’s Online Community Clinic. Late afternoon that day its presentation time for entrepreneurs. 6 ventures will be chosen from all the propositions (including portuguese startup tarpipe) and will be asked to present at Venture Night. The Venture Night panel will certainly bring a lot of good discussions.

The speakers
The speakers list is promising. Eric Favre, inventor of Nespresso, Andy Reisinger who won the peace nobel price with the IPPC, Kevin Marks of Google, Gen Kanai of Firefox Japan and Jasmina Tesanovic who talks about blogging in wartime), Bruce Sterling, Stephanie Booth, Henriette Weber Andersen and a lot more. Check the program to get all the action.

People, Contacts & stuff
A conference like LIFT happens as much inside the rooms as outside them. LIFT’s website is a 500-people social network where you can discover a lot about other participants. Do register. Meeting people, sharing ideas and projects, discussing subjects or just having fondue are some of the amazing things you can get from going to LIFT.

If you’re still not convinced check this list of 12 reasons to go to LIFT and then register yourself.

(writing this post made me think about all the good stuff I’ll be missing - I guess I’ll have to wait for next year)

January 29, 2008 | Tags: events, lift08 | 2 Comments

Adegga Just Launched Open Registrations

Adegga is now open for anyone to create an account.

During the last couple of months the team has fixed a lot of bugs and developed great new features with the help of our beta users.

There’s a lot more coming soon. We have been working hard on some features to help everyone discover, choose and enjoy wine without complexity. Check Adegga’s blog to keep updated with new developments.

January 20, 2008 | Tags: adegga | 5 Comments

Mobile Web Development Resources

While working on some interesting new stuff for adegga I found some good resources on web development for the mobile web. In case you’re interested here are the links I have been using:

Everything you always wanted to know about the mobile web… but were afraid to ask: a great summary on developing for mobiles made by Brian Fling.

(first slide of mobile web presentation)

The dotMobi Mobile Web Developers Guide is a couple months old but it’s one of the best guides I’ve seen on development for the mobile. It was also written by Brian Fling.
WordPress Mobile Edition plugin was written by Alex King and it’s a good open source project to get some ideas from.
Some thoughts on mobile web development is another link full of good resources.
Mobile Web Design - The Series is quite old (in Web years) but is good a set of articles written by Cameron Moll.
From the same author there a much more recent (2007) book called Mobile Web Design. Although I haven’t read it myself I’ve looked at the sample chapter and it does seem very nice.

January 17, 2008 | Tags: mobile | 1 Comment

Adegga Launches Wine Blogger Accounts

Wine Bloggers are a great source of wine information and have been changing the way people get informed about wine and most importantly the way people relate to wine.

At Adegga we have a couple of ideas to help promote wine blogs. Recently, we have been testing Wine Blogger Accounts and now we can finally announce them.

Here’s an example of how a wine blogger profile looks like:

We have also added a list of Wine Bloggers on Adegga ordered by how many people have added them to their watchlists making it easier for other people to discover new wine bloggers.

We have a lot more features to help wine bloggers. If you’d like to have one of this accounts please leave a comment bellow or contact me.

January 16, 2008 | Tags: adegga, wine-blogs | Leave a Comment

MacBook Air

Apple’s new MacBook Air is an amazing product:

Trackpad Gestures
5 hours battery power
Weight: 1.36 kg
Wi-Fi 802.11n (Up to 248 Mbit/s)
Bluetooth
13.3-inch widescreen
2GB (667MHz) DDR2 SDRAM

You can compare the Air with any notebook on sale and it might even loose in some hardware/performance items. However, the fact that Apple is able to build an amazing integrated product (OS, Hardware, Experience, Design, Usability) is what makes the Air a brilliant machine.

Love is in the details.
MacBook Air details
You have to love the envelope idea. It’s so visually explicit. Amazingly simple ad.

January 15, 2008 | Tags: apple, textmate | 1 Comment

Textmate: the missing editor

I used to code everything in vi but now I only use it for server editing. Lately, I have been using TextMate and find it to be the best text editor I have ever used. It saves me time and makes me more productive every time I use it. Here’s a couple of things that make my everyday life easier:

Auto-Pairing of Brackets and Other Characters: type 1 { get 2 {}. It’s that easy.
Completion of Words from Current Document: TextMate will complete the current word based on matches in the current document. If there are multiple matches, you can cycle through these.
Expand Trigger Words: write “table” and press ESCAPE and you’ll get the whole code for a simple html table.
File Tabs when Working With Projects: self-explanatory.
Foldable Code Blocks: hide all those pesky functions that you don’t actually need to be browsing over.
Subversion: I use the shellfor SVN via the but you can use it via TextMate directly.

And much more.

It’s definitely worth 38 €. Besides all this, there’s always some a delightfully useful surprise from time to time. A really good piece of software. Congratulations to Alan Odgaard for making all of us happier developers.

January 13, 2008 | Tags: productivity | 3 Comments

Starbucks Lisboa

Espero bem que a notícia que saiu na TimeOut esteja errada. Abrir um Starbucks num centro comercial seria uma desilusão a vários níveis. A abertura de um coffee shop internacional em Portugal é uma oportunidade de analisar o que evoluiu no negócio de cafés e, apesar da concorrência, aprender como algumas coisas podem ser melhoradas.
Starbucks Latte
Pode-se gostar ou não gostar do café. Pode ser caro quando comparado com os galões e bicas do dia-a-dia. Mas em conforto qualquer Starbucks é melhor do que a maioria das pastelarias/cafés que existem em Lisboa. Coisas simples como o WiFi, alguns sofás e boa música são commodities em qualquer Starbucks e uma miragem em Lisboa. O pois, café é um excelente exemplo de conforto e o Magnolia Caffé pelo menos tenta. Mas precisamos de mais, muitos mais.

Não sei como vai ser o atendimento no Starbucks em Lisboa, no entanto, se mantiverem as regras internacionais vamos finalmente ser atendidos com algum profissionalismo. Existem em Lisboa alguns locais que se esforçam por ser simpáticos mas a maioria faz-nos sentir como se nos estivessem a fazer um favor.

A marca Cup&Cino conseguiu há uns meses criar (e depois destruir) um conjunto de espaços onde existia muito conforto. Nem tudo era bom e a comida era péssima mas era um local sempre à mão (havia várias espalhados por Lisboa). Os Starbucks estão normalmente localizados em locais de passagem e junto à rua e, por isso, não percebo a ideia de abrir num centro comercial.

A abertura de um Starbucks em Portugal é um sinal da globalização. Mas nem sempre isso é mau. Nós, os portugueses, temos hábitos muito fortes e não sei até que ponto um Starbucks terá sucesso. No entanto, gostava que não fosse apenas mais um café e que conseguissem mostrar pela positiva como se pode dar uma boa experiência a um cliente.

Por agora esperamos até haver mais notícias.

January 13, 2008 | Tags: Lisboa, portugal, starbucks | 16 Comments

Golan Merlot 2004

Recently my father offered me a bottle of Golan Merlot 2004. The wine is produced in Israel by Golan Heights Winery and has a label written in Hebrew. This is all new to me so I decided to look for more information about this bottle and Israeli wine.

A kosher wine
Some winemakers produce kosher wines. To be kosher a wine must be produced using kosher principles. For example only Jews are allowed to work on the production of the wines and no animal products can be used (more principles here).

Regions
There are five wine regions in Israel: Galil (Galilee), Judean Hills, Shimshon (Samson), Sharon, Binyamina and Golan Heights. The Golan Merlot 2004 is made in Galilee.

Online Israeli Wine
I have been following Richard Shaffer’s Israeli Wine Direct for a while. It’s a great wine blog. I particularly like his Wine Marketing category. There’s also HaKerem: The Israeli Wine Blog which is only 2 months old but seems to be very interesting.

There are a lot of wineries in Israel but unfortunately no winery blogs to follow.

I have added some of these resources to Adegga.com and will be following more closely what’s happening in the world of Israeli wine.

January 4, 2008 | Tags: golan, golanheightswinery, israel, wine | 1 Comment

about

My name is André Ribeirinho, I'm an entrepreneur who lives in Portugal
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Adegga is a social wine discovery service. The idea is to take the complexity out of wine and allow people to discover wines based other people's choices.

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