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Edmonton’s tech industry has been at the vanguard of a shift toward a diversified economy that embraces innovation- and knowledge-based business. Now it’s positioned to be a launching pad for what could soon be the world’s first publicly traded Bitcoin ATM company.
This is the goal of Bitcoin Well, an Edmonton-based cryptocurrency company set to open a new 35,000-square-foot headquarters in the city’s downtown core.
“We’ve had tremendous success finding innovative talent here in Edmonton,” says Adam O’Brien, founder and CEO of Bitcoin Well, which established the first bitcoin ATMs in both Alberta and Saskatchewan in 2014. “As long as we as a city continue to make it achievable and beneficial, this ‘tech boom’ won’t be considered a boom.”
O’Brien founded Bitcoin Well in 2013 to make it easier and more convenient to buy and sell bitcoin, a cryptocurrency that serves as an alternative to conventional cash.
He initially worked out of coffee shops, brokering bitcoin transactions in-person twice a week. But he saw significant growth potential in Bitcoin ATMs. “It’s a place where you can go and buy bitcoin directly,” he says.
Although the technology behind Bitcoin ATMs is complicated, the process of using them is simple. Once a customer creates a verified bitcoin ‘wallet’ on their smartphone, they can scan it into a Bitcoin ATM and buy their desired amount of coins using conventional cash. “You have coins in eight seconds or less,” says O’Brien.
Bitcoin Well now has over 120 Bitcoin ATM locations across Canada, with plans to expand its network across Canada and provide over-the-counter support.
The company is working on ghostATM, a hardware-agnostic bitcoin software that can be installed on conventional ATMs previously used for cash transactions. Ghostlab, the arm of Bitcoin Well that’s developing ghostATM, is growing rapidly and is currently hiring top talent for several positions.
Bitcoin Well also offers a series of additional services, including helping people buy and sell bitcoin in person and paying their bills using bitcoin.
Though Bitcoin Well hasn’t released a date for an initial public offering, O’Brien says the company is poised to be publicly traded, and he isn’t shy about stating his goals.
“I think people should have the same conveniences that we see with digital banking, but with Bitcoin,” he says.
“My job now is to make bitcoin as easy to use as possible.”
For more information, visit bitcoinwell.com and ghostlab.ca
This story was created by Content Works, Postmedia’s commercial content division, on behalf of Bitcoin Well.


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08 Nov 2019
Household spending in Japan increased at the all-time fastest rate in September, ahead of the October sales tax hike.
Japan’s household spending rose 9.5% in September compared to the year before, the fastest rate of increase since comparable data became available back in 2001, and more robust than the average forecast for a 7.8% rise, as per government data on Friday.
September marked the tenth consecutive month of gains, Reuters reports, the longest run in 18 years.
Spending rose 7.2% in March 2014, a month before the last sales tax hike, but the increased levy resulted in a slowdown in consumer spending and a steep economic slump.
In comparison to the previous month, spending grew 5.5% in September, compared to the average estimate for a 3.8% rise.
Yoshiki Shinke, chief economist at Dai-ichi Life Research Institute commented: “We expect consumer spending will turn severe in October-December after pre-tax hike gains and the economy is also expected to contract.”
Shinke is of the opinion that consumer spending and Japan’s economy will rally in Q1 next year, following an unexpected pullback in the present quarter, but concerns regarding the outlook are still prevalent.
He added: “Consumer sentiment has stayed weak despite the government steps to mitigate the pain from the tax hike. Although deterioration in exports seems to be easing, we need to be cautious about their outlook, so there are risks to the economy.”
Japan implemented a twice-delayed sales tax increase on October 1 from 8% to 10%. The move was seen as crucial in repairing Japan’s tattered finances, but it could tip the economy into recession by hampering consumer sentiment.
Furthermore, the subdued recovery in wages is sparking concerns about the outlook for private spending and the economy as strong domestic consumption has up to now partially countered weak global demand.
Although separate data revealed real wages adjusted for inflation increased for the first time in nine months in September, the outlook is clouded by the sales tax rise and the global slowdown.
Read the latest news update: Chancellor unveils new rules for ‘decade of renewal’

domain: news


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If you were to ask anyone in Sri Lanka for the name of a biscuit brand, you’d be lucky to hear a name other than Munchee, the flagship brand of food manufacturer Ceylon Biscuits (CBL). After all, it’s Sri Lanka’s premier biscuit maker; Munchee has a 53% market share, with the remainder shared by more than 50 companies, while CBL’s chocolate brand Ritzbury occupies more than 60% of its market.
’Not taking success for granted’
Shea Wickramasingha, Group Managing Director of CBL, says the company’s impressive market share comes from avoiding complacency, and not taking CBL’s success for granted.
“The reason we see these kinds of numbers and achievement is that our company is constantly investing in technology and constantly innovating,” she says. “The group normally puts out at least 10 new products a year. It’s a continuous cycle of staying relevant in the market.”
This innovation has not gone without recognition. CBL has won countless industry awards for its quality, exporting standards, productivity, CSR and agricultural standards, to name just a few of the categories in which it has thrived. The company continues to receive these awards; last year, President Emeritus Mineka Wickramasingha received the Deshamanya (‘Pride of the Nation’) award, one of the highest national honours of Sri Lanka.
The shared surname is not a coincidence; Mineka is Shea’s father. CBL has been a family-run business ever since it was founded by Mineka’s father, Simon Arthur Wickramasingha, in 1939. In recent years, the company has been undergoing a restructure, so it operates like a corporate entity. Despite this, CBL retains the spirit of a family business.
Creating a sustainable corporate environment
“The board focuses on more strategic development areas,” says Shea, “but in saying that, I believe one of the main differences between our company and some others is that we are still very close to our core business. Our business is not only about P&L and balance sheets. It’s about growing a sustainable relevant business, one that is focused on customers needs in a changing landscape.”
CBL grants its senior management team responsibility and accountability. The strength of understanding the core business coupled with strong leadership and passionate team members, has created a corporate environment where we see innovation thrive not only in product but within the entire company. This creates a huge positive energy that propels the company to perform year after year.
“CBL company restructuring has been about greater overall sustainability,” Shea says. “The role I see myself playing involves transforming the company into a global one with strong sustainable roots. In the past few years, we’ve moved into new growth areas. We’ve strengthened the Sri Lankan supply chain. We already work with about 10,000 farmers and we are trying to increase our ability to add value to the agriculture supply chain, which will grow the community and be an integral part of our business. We are looking at holistic sustainability.”
“We are looking at holistic sustainability.”
CBL’s contributions to its community
This only covers the surface of CBL’s contributions to its community; one of its artisanal biscuit manufacturing facilities employs differently abled people, providing work for people with conditions such as Down syndrome. CBL has also worked to improve its supply chain, reducing the use of chemical fertiliser in the crops it uses while simultaneously promoting organic agriculture.
Another initiative aims at maintaining healthy bee populations in rural villages, which not only supports poorer communities but contributes to the stability of the ecosystem by giving a guaranteed buy back for all the honey collected. The company’s numerous activities encompass education, arts, sport, disaster relief and community programs around supporting farmers, entrepreneurs, the elderly and the young.
There is no doubt that, as it expands into countries like Bangladesh and Myanmar, CBL will always provide this impressive level of community support. After all, it’s a guiding principle for both the company and Shea. “With our CSR and strategic supply chain initiative, we touch many people’s lives. It’s not just our 5,000 employees. The work we’ve done in the community is tremendously satisfying.”


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Shoptalk day 2 recap: beyond the channel
Get the inside scoop on the highlights, buzz and key discussions of our second day at the Shoptalk retail conference.
If Sunday’s Shoptalk was about falling in love with stores again, Monday was about marriage—between art and science, theater and technology, data and the personal touch--as the Venetian in Las Vegas played host to tales of an emerging retail renaissance.
How welcome is this? Twenty minutes into a keynote presentation by Helena Foulkes, CEO of Hudson’s Bay Company, one listener excitedly remarked, “She hasn’t said the word digital once.”
Foulkes came to HBC after 20 years at CVS for the chance to “rewrite the story of the department store,” she said. The formula includes theater, excitement, and personalized service, and the crown jewel is the newly remodeled Saks Fifth Avenue in midtown Manhattan. The store features an expanded spa, expansive handbag boutique, upscale brand boutiques, and an outlet of L’Avenue restaurant--the first one outside Paris. The centerpiece is a Rem Koolhaas-designed escalator. A hole was cut through the middle of the building to accommodate it, opening and brightening the space as bonus.
Roger Rawlins, CEO of DSW, shared how that company is reinventing its stores in order to build an emotional connection with the customer. The aim is to sell not just the shoe, but everything around the shoe, from orthotics and repairs to pedicures, naturally. In keeping with the agility theme running through so many of the presentations, DSW has an incubator of sorts where it is testing out new concepts on a small scale, and it found success with in-store nail salons, which Rawlins said are bringing in more wallets and younger customers. DSW plans to expand them to more stores.
Nilam Ganenthiran, Chief Business Officer at Instacart, which describes itself as a tech and logistics platform for grocery stores, shared how he sees the grocery stores following that same trend. According to Ganenthiran, just three percent of grocery purchases are made online. He predicts that in a few years one in five transactions will happen online.
“The grocery store of the past is designed for people to walk in, get what they need and get out. It was not designed for entertainment, as a meeting place or a place for online fulfillment,” he said.
Grocers, he says, are reorganizing their stores into ecommerce and non-ecommerce areas, which they are trying to make as beautiful as possible.
Make no mistake though—retailers are investing just as heavily in technology as they are in bricks and mortar infrastructure.
At Saks, associates are empowered to approach clienteling with an entrepreneurial mindset. Each has a profile page on the store website, which they update daily, curating their favorite items and looks. They are equipped with a number of digital tools to manage client activity and encouraged to build their personal brand on Instagram -- selling there as well. The goal is to position themselves, and Saks, as a style maker.
Even Instacart is helping improve stores, bringing its data science and engineering skills to help grocers with experiments to shave minutes and seconds out of in-store shopping. “We do a lot of experiments really fast. We scrap what doesn’t work and double down on what does,” Ganenthiran said.
Frans Muller, President & CEO of Ahold Delhaize showed off the giant touch screens it has in some of its stores. Customers can use them for everything from finding wine and cheese pairings to finding nutrition information on products.
And, a session on personalization drew a huge crowd, with scores of attendees leaning against the walls, sitting cross-legged on the floor and spilling out into the hallway.
Qubit Co-Founder and CTO Emre Baran opened the session by defining what personalization is—and isn’t. “It’s not just inserting a person’s name on an email template. It’s figuring out who’s going to want what, when, and why,” he said.
Jana Eggers, CEO of Nara Logistics, put it a bit differently. Citing data that shows searches the including the term “best for me” are on the rise. She explained that personalization is about helping customers sift through the assortment to find what’s best for them. “It can’t just be about pushing what we want to sell. It has to resonate,” she said.
Christian Selchau-Hansen, CEO, Formation.ai, offered a hands-on demo. He asked everyone to open their Starbucks app to review their offers and compare them to their neighbor’s offers. All offers are different, and completely relevant to each individual.
Personalization is a step change, he said, offering merchants a way to reach customers at the individual level with an understanding that goes way beyond classical demographics. “You can create millions of individualized offers for a fraction of the cost of a segmented approach,” he said.
The session on image and facial recognition wasn’t quite so oversubscribed, but the tech was more futuristic.
Lihi Pinto, Co-founder and CMO of Syte, described how she fell in love with a red dress in a picture and couldn’t find it online using keywords. That led her to found Syte, a visual search engine for retail. Using the Syte app, you upload a picture of an item you like and it returns results of similar looking items.
Ebay VP and Chief Architect Sanjeev Katariya describe how the auction site is using image recognition. The first use case is bringing text and images together to help better search through eBay’s 1.2 billion global listings. And, you can also upload a picture of something you like and find similar items on eBay.
James Crawford, Founder and CEO of Orbital insights described how his company is combining satellite imagery of streets and parking lots, car counts, and cell phone counts to do analysis of economic activity in a geographic area with a stunning level of granularity—it can go down to a block by block view in NYC. The aim is to help retailers identify where customers come from to get to your store, and what the impact of local conditions such as increased traffic and housing construction might have on a retail store.
For example, if traffic is up two percent on your street, cars in the parking lot are up three percent at your competitor’s location nearby, and down one percent at your location, there’s a good chance there might be a problem inside your store.
Peter Trepp, CEO of FaceFirst talked about how face recognition can be used to help retailers recognize when their best customers come into the store. Humans, he said, have the capability to remember and match 1000-1200 faces. Artificial intelligence can now compare a face to 75 million templates and find a match in less than one second with 98 percent accuracy
In a private session, Kris Zanuldin, Head of Connected Commerce at Amazon Pay, talked about voice interfaces as an entrée into the world of ambient computing, where digital assistants powered by AI can do all kinds of things for us. An Alexa enabled microwave, for example, not only can be activated by your voice while your hands are otherwise occupied; it also does all the work to figure out time and power level for whatever you’re cooking. No more need for the ‘quick minute’ button.
It’s a mistake to view voice as just another channel Zanuldin said, because a voice experience could encompass any number of “channels” without the customer even knowing it. For example, you could set up a date night using Alexa, ordering movie tickets, making a dinner reservation and finding a parking space. If you did that online or on your mobile phone, that would mean using three different websites or apps.
Channels are disappearing, or at least the silos around them are falling. The word omnichannel, seemingly on everyone’s lips just a few years ago, was barely heard today. That may be the best evidence of the marriage that has taken place between online and offline worlds—no Vegas wedding chapel required.
Retailers are now bringing together the best of online and offline with confidence, flair and a renewed focus on the customer. Perhaps Instacart’s Ganethiran summed it up best. When asked what happens to the store when more customers go online, he said, “There is no online customer or in-store customer. There is just a customer.”


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The Boise State football program unveiled brand new black uniforms on Monday afternoon that will be worn in conjunction with a stadium-wide blackout against Air Force on Sept. 20.
The Broncos have worn all-black uniforms five times dating back to their initial release in 2012 — as well as mix-and-match combinations with the helmet, jersey and/or pants — but they were shelved when the program received new threads ahead of the 2017 season.
The new black uniforms match the design of Boise State’s current set, which also includes blue home, white road and orange alternate jerseys with slanted stripes on the sleeves and the team wordmark down the pant leg.
The stripes and lettering on the new black uniforms are reflective dark gray while the numbers are white and outlined in blue. The collar is also blue with the phrase “Blue Collar” printed inside. The matte black helmet, meanwhile, features a chrome blue face mask and a hydro-dipped chrome blue bronco on the helmet.
The uniform is absent the color orange aside from the Mountain West patch on the right shoulder and the eye of the Broncos’ logo at the base of the collar. Hopefully the helmet matches, but it’s difficult to see that detail in the promotional pictures below.
Kickoff for Boise State’s game against Air Force on Sept. 20 is set for 9 p.m. ET on ESPN2.
Photos via @BroncoSportsFB on Twitter


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Michigan-based Halo Burger has teamed with Mott Community College to create a billboard design for the brand’s longest-standing billboard. A $1,000 scholarship will be award to the student’s whose design is chosen, according to a press release.
Students have been provided with branding guidelines but are encouraged to bring their own creative twist to the design. They can visit Halo Burger’s downtown location for a branding photoshoot or use vintage photos provided.
Halo Burger is celebrating its 100th year as a Flint, Michigan staple.
“We were brainstorming ideas to get more involved with the Flint community and we got the idea to do a billboard design scholarship with a local college,” Domenique Annoni, Halo Burger’s marketing manager, said in the press release. “When we found out MCC was also celebrating 100 years, we reached out to see if the design department would be interested in holding the contest. The idea behind the scholarship fund is to give back to our local community and get a fresh perspective from the younger generation. We were given a personal tour of the Visual Arts and Design Center and were astounded by the program. We understand how hard it can be to get your name out there as an emerging artist and look forward to showcasing the work.”
Halo Burger and Mott Community College will showcase the top contestants designs to their social media followers and will give followers the opportunity to be a part of the voting process.
Halo Burger was founded in 1923.


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Research,News & Views
The World Economic Forum highlights the new report: Reimagining Digital Identity: A Strategic Imperative.
Bringing you highlights from identity events around the world.
Africa-related biometrics and digital identity news.
The program reaches 48 countries across Africa.
Why the Huduma Namba ruling matters for the future of digital ID, and not just in Kenya.
UNCTAD session on digital identity and digital rights related to government programmes.
A profile of BanQu, one of Fast Company's 2019 World Changing Ideas award-winners.
Journalist Rebecca Ratcliffe, based in Dumka, investigates errors in Aadhaar.
The Government of Thailand introduces a new national digital ID verification system.
Privacy International exposes the menstruation apps sharing users’ intimate medical data with Facebook.


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Sustainability is about more than just materials. While making a pair of shoes out of plastic bottles is good PR, it’s the behind-the-scenes supply chain changes across a company’s inventory that really move the needle on reducing its carbon impact.
For example, Industry of All Nations, a DTC fashion brand founded in 2011 by brothers Juan Diego, Fernando and Patricio Gerscovich, has established a business model around the concept of “seed-to-sew,” a fashion take on “farm-to-table.” The brand’s entire supply chain is centralized in a single location. Fibers for their shirts are grown, spun, woven and dyed at one site, which varies depending on what type of garment is being made, so as to cut down on the number of emissions from shipping those products to different facilities.
“Shipping is a huge resource drain,” said Drew Preedeedilok, brand manager of Industry of All Nations. Transportation overtook power plants as the No. 1 producer of harmful emissions last year for the first time.
“A conventional mill is sourcing the absolute cheapest fiber they can,” he said. “Then they send it to a facility where it can be dyed with petroleum dyes and spun with poly for as cheap as possible, then it gets shipped to a whole other place where labor is cheap so the fabric can be knit, then it goes to where the consumer is located. It’s a whole race to the bottom. You’re shipping tens of thousands of miles something that could have all been handled in one place.”
Industry of All Nations, which opened its first New York store over the weekend, adding to its two existing locations in California, has attempted to make every facet of its business sustainable, even things not evident to the customer. (The clear packaging its shirts come in are actually transparent biodegradable plant film, not plastic, for example.)
But the brand does not shy away from highlighting its sustainability for marketing purposes, which Preedeedilok said mostly happens during face-to-face interactions in-store between customers and associates. The importance of those conversations is one reason why a company with only 15 employees and low-seven-figure revenue has committed to three stores, including the latest in notoriously pricey Elizabeth Street in Nolita. For them, marketing sustainability comes less from devising the perfect PR campaign and more about making it a truly integrable part of the brand.
Other brands are waking up to the importance of making the entire supply chain more sustainable.
H&M, for example, hosts an annual Global Change Award that awards funds to people who are coming up with these sorts of innovative, back-end ideas, which H&M can then incorporate into their own model.
“We have people submit their early-stage ideas, and our jury decides on five [winners], and they get grant money and a yearlong membership to see their ideas turned into a large-scale project,” said Emily Scarlett, head of communications at H&M USA. “One of our very first winners was making things out of recycled orange peels, things you never thought would be viable. We had someone harnessing gas from manure and turning that into textile. For us, our climate goals are across the entire supply chain, from fabric materials to how things are shipped to how they’re manufactured.”
Smaller brands like Rothy’s have had success similar to Industry of All Nations by keeping relatively tight control over the supply chain. Doing things this way allows them to combat common problems in the fashion industry like overproduction, which can cause large amounts of clothing to go to waste.
“We own and operate our own factory, ensuring flexibility with order size and timeline,” said Kerry Cooper, COO and president of Rothy’s. “We break our inventory into categories of product we are confident will sell and product we want to test so that we have a multi-speed supply chain. With the confident product, we can carry a deeper inventory and we shouldn’t run out of stock. With new product, we can post a new color or style on our website in the morning, gauge demand by early afternoon and have a finished pair of shoes in our distribution just four days later. If a certain color doesn’t resonate, we’re not stuck with truckloads of a shoe that won’t sell.”
A December 2018 report from retail software company ShareCloth revealed that nearly 30% of fashion goods produced go unsold. Furthermore, more than 50% of fast fashion sold is thrown out less than a year later, with 12.8 million tons of clothing annually dumped into landfills.
Numerous reports have attested to the value that consumers place on sustainability. But the noticeable uptick of fashion brands saying they are sustainable has also coincided with a slow-down in the amount of actual work those brands are doing. Notably, these brands are indeed using sustainability as a way to appeal to audiences, but they are backing up that marketing with actual sustainable practices and goals, even where the customer isn’t necessarily looking.
Maurizio Donadi, founder of Atelier & Repairs, lamented this fact in an interview with Glossy last week.
“[Sustainability has] become a marketing strategy and a financial strategy for a lot of brands,” Donadi said. “It’s a very abused term right now. Any communication about sustainability is muddled about what it means and how to achieve it, and some people take advantage of that vagueness.”
Preedeedilok put it a similar way.
“Every fashion brand says they’re sustainable now. But if sustainability becomes a trend, trends end. Something this important cannot become passé if we want a world where our kids can have kids.”


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BERLIN — Escada has sold three of its Primera division labels — Apriori, Cavita and Laurèl — to the Munich-based holding company Mutares AG.
Under the agreement, which was completed Monday, Mutares will take over 90 percent of each Primera subsidiary for the fashion brands Laurèl, Aprior and Cavita. The remaining 10 percent interest will stay with the Escada Group for now, the German fashion house said. Details of the deals were not made public.
Hermès is launching a Laundromat pop-up shop in NYC - dubbed Hermèsmatic - where customers can bring their old scarves to be dip-dyed by an expert. Get all the details on WWD.com. #wwdnews (📷: @donstahl)


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Employees using consumer technology devices to manage their workloads are exerting an increasing influence on corporate IT departments. Earlier this year, Gartner claimed that the consumerisation of IT had progressed from a macrotrend within technology to become a broader business force.
It is now such an overwhelming phenomenon that the once-dominant IT department, which used to have the monopoly of control over access devices, is slowly being asked to bend to the will of end users. A recent Forrester survey found that 30% of information workers in the UK, France and Germany were undertaking at least one IT activity for work without the support of IT, such as downloading and regularly using applications on a work computer or paying for a smartphone used for work.
Employees are able to pick from a vast range of consumer technologies to be more productive at work. That newer, cheaper and faster devices are being thrown out into the market every year has only compounded their adoption in the enterprise.
"Game-changing technology will always be available to employees first - IT will always be playing catch-up," said Ted Schadler, analyst at Forrester, adding that IT will have to work with human resources departments to educate employees about the risks of the technology they use.
According to a more recent Gartner report, the trend toward supporting corporate applications on employee-owned notebooks and smartphones is already underway in many organizations and will become commonplace within four years. The main factor in choosing a device will be individuals who prefer to use private consumer smartphones or notebooks for business, rather than using old-style limited enterprise devices.
The analyst claims IT is set to enter the next phase of the consumerization trend, in which the attention of users and IT organizations shifts from devices, infrastructure and applications to information and interaction with peers.
"Many CIOs have lost control in guiding how technology is used in the enterprise because the world of consumer technology has out-innovated enterprise class technologies," said Ray Wang, principal analyst and CEO of Constellation Research. "For example, when corporate email goes down, frustrated employees get around IT via Gmail, YouSend It or Skype. When business units seek new functionality in areas such as strategic HCM and email marketing, they flock to SaaS apps and IT discovers purchases after the fact.
After a Masters in Computer Science, I decided that I preferred writing about IT rather than programming. My 20-year writing career has taken me to Hong Kong and London where I've edited and written for IT, business and electronics publications. In 2002 I co-founded Futurity Media with Stewart Baines where I continue to write about a range of topics such as unified communications, cloud computing and enterprise applications.


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In the backdrop of a slowdown in China, French women’s apparel company Etam Developpement SCA witnessed a slight dip in sales revenue in the fourth quarter of 2013.
The company, which is a designer and retailer of ready-to-wear women clothing, lingerie and accessories, reported net sales of 328.4 million euro in the fourth quarter ended December 31, 2013, down by 0.8 per cent from the same period a year ago amid a dip in sales from China and negative currency fluctuation impact.
On a like-for-like and at constant exchange rate basis, the company reported a 1.9 per cent rise in sales in Q4 2013 from the year ago quarter.
Driven by robust sales from its home market, the company posted a 5.2 per cent rise in revenue from Europe at 219.2 million euro in the fourth quarter of 2013 from the same period a year ago. On a like-for-like and at constant exchange rate basis, the company reported a 4.7 per cent rise in sales from European markets in Q4 2013 from the year ago quarter.
With fashionable brands such as Etam targeted at younger women, the company remains an outperformer in the French clothing and textiles market.
Sales from France witnessed a 5.2 per cent rise at 194.2 million euro in Q4 2013 from the year ago period, on a real basis.
The depreciation of the euro against the yuan and weakening consumer demand in China amid a deepening economic slowdown, weighed heavily on the company’s business in China as sales dropped by 11 per cent to 109.2 million euro in Q4 2013 from the year ago period.


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A television ad that supports same-sex marriage will begin running on stations across the state Wednesday. It’s the first marriage equality ad to be broadcast since Ohioans enacted a gay marriage ban ten years ago.
I heard on the news today that even more stores in Columbus have decided to open early on Thanksgiving Day. I can understand the retailers desire to get a jump on the holiday shopping season but it makes me sad to see commercialism taking over the day. I’ll admit I have been known to venture [...]


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Neopets, a popular virtual pet game, has announced the cancellation of its NFT game plans and abandoned efforts in the metaverse.
A few months ago, Neopets Metaverse CEO Dominic Law said he supported the idea of “play-and-earn” Web3 gaming. In an interview with Forbes, Law said the Neopets franchise possessed “all the right ingredients” for an NFT game.
Neopets Metaverse, a Web3 game based on the classic 1999 simulator game, was in its early development stage. It sold over 9,000 Solana NFTs across different collections and received financial support from backers such as Polygon Ventures and Avalanche’s ecosystem fund.
However, upon reviewing the NFT and metaverse plans, the Neopets team recognized that the game did not align with Neopets’ mission.
“For the first time in over a decade, [the team is] equipped to make meaningful changes in pursuit of a Neopian renaissance,” Neopets said in a blog post.
Law now leads Neopets, engineering a management buyout deal that secured additional funding and essential resources for the brand. The brand’s new plan includes shifting its focus towards developing a non-crypto mobile game called World of Neopets, a simulation game in which players live the “ideal Neopian life from the perspective of a Neopet.”
World of Neopets will offer features such as home decoration, mini-games, a Neopet collection and iconic Neopian lands in 3D. The developers have assured that World of Neopets will not be a rebranded version of Neopets Metaverse.
They also shared plans to develop a solution for the Adobe Flash problem in response to the end of Adobe Flash in December 2020, which left many Flash-based games abandoned.
The team aims to address the issue by exploring Ruffle, a Flash player emulator, as it plans to speed up the restoration of functionality to their games.
A new website will also launch on July 20, serving as a “one-stop shop” for all Neopets-related updates, games, articles and more.
The Neopets team believes that this era for Neopets has become possible due to the separation from JumpStart Games, as the previous management struggled to find success for Neopets before shutting down on June 30 of this year.
When the Neopets developers announced collaborations with multiple blockchain companies to create over twenty thousand NFTs in 2021, the player community responded negatively.
Neopets released NFTs featuring adoptable pets called “digital memorabilia.” These NFTs included unique backgrounds, personalities, assets and clothing. However, this concept was similar to owning a decorated Neopet image, which users could already do by creating a free account on the website.
“The @Neopets community overwhelmingly rejects the new NFT cashgrab project. We’re hard pressed finding someone outside of the NFT community that wants this,” Neopets fansite Jellyneo said on Twitter.
Moreover, in 2018, Neopets made an earlier attempt at an NFT game called Neopets Cryptoquest. The game allowed players to buy virtual card packs that offered redeemable prizes. It was abandoned within a year.
Sega and Ubisoft are also among the gaming companies that have withdrawn from their NFT-related plans. Sega cited concerns about content devaluation, while Ubisoft backed down from its initial plan due to criticism and low interest.
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China has released its first group standards for plant-based meat, taking the first step in regulating the fledgling industry.
The standards, published by the Chinese Institute of Food Science and Technology in late December, were drafted by experts from institutes like the China Agricultural University and involved companies such as Unilever, Cargill, and Nestle.
The plant-based meat industry is drawing both startups and established food manufacturers in China, which accounts for 27% of the world's meat consumption by volume.
Rising rates of obesity and chronic diseases linked to unhealthy lifestyles and diets, coupled with repeated bouts of avian and swine flu in recent years, have sparked demand among health-conscious consumers for alternative food choices.
More than 70% of Chinese consumers believe that artificial meat can replace processed meat products, according to a survey by market researcher Ipsos. Almost nine in 10 consumers in the survey say they are changing or are willing to change their meat consumption habits.
Food companies have been stepping up their investments to meet the growing demand.
Nestle announced in May 2020 totaling it will build its first production line in Asia for plant-based products in Tianjin.
Beyond Meat, the U.S. plant-based burger and sausage maker, said in September 2020 that it was building two factories near Shanghai. Its products are sold in China through Starbucks, KFC, Pizza, and Taco Bell.
The standards define plant-based meat products as those whose source of protein and fat comes from plant-based raw materials such as beans, cereals, algae, and fungi. The standards require plant-based meat products clearly state the use of plant-based raw materials.
Specifically, plant-based meat products could use "plant xx", "plant-based xx", "plant protein xx" "xx made of plants" and other ways to name the products. Words such as "vegetarian" could be used to help consumers make a distinction from animal-based meat. Examples include "plant-based beef" or "plant sausages."
The standards also set parameters for the nutritional content. Every 100 grams of non-breaded plant-based livestock and poultry meat products, breaded plant-based livestock and poultry meat products, and plant-based aquatic products should contain no less than 10 grams, 8 grams, and 8 grams of protein, respectively.
Guo Shuntang, a professor at the School of Food Science and Nutrition Engineering at China Agricultural University, a main drafter of the standards, said in an interview with Chinese media that having a set of rules was necessary to ensure the healthy growth of the industry.
"What we are most worried about is that this industry is not standardized, and there would be speculative investment for profit instead of a focus on quality and technology," said Guo. "In that case, consumers would gradually move away, which could ruin the industry."
He added that group standards would gradually develop into industry standards and national standards to regulate corporate behavior better.
The Chinese standards are similar to those in the U.S. The Plant-Based Foods Association (PBFA), the trade association representing more than 160 plant-based food companies, in 2019 released the first voluntary standards for the labeling of plant-based meat alternatives, which allow for references to the type of animal-meat (i.e. "meat, "chicken," "hamburger," etc.) and the form of the product (i.e. "nuggets," "burger," etc.) along with a qualifier that clearly indicates that the food is plant-based or vegetarian.
The E.U. currently bans terms such as "yogurt-style" or "cheese-style" for non-dairy imitation replacements in labeling plant-based products. Japan last year established a public-private partnership to develop regulations for insect-based and plant-based foods.


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Reliance Big Entertainment was reported to strike a big deal with Steven Spielberg, now a press release from Capcom has revelaed that Brad Pitt’s production company Plan B Entertainment, under its Creative Partnership with Reliance BIG Entertainment, and Capcom®, a leading worldwide developer and publisher of video games, have come to terms on the film rights relating to Dark Void™, a new property from Capcom. The theatrical version of the Dark Void game is being developed as a sci-fi action franchise and potential starring vehicle for Pitt.
Here’s an excerpt about the game plot from Wikipedia “The game’s story will center around a cargo pilot named William Agustus Grey who crashes in the Bermuda Triangle. From there, he is teleported to a parallel universe where he encounters other humans, called Survivors. Together, Will and the survivors must battle an alien race known as the Watchers to return to Earth. The Watchers came from afar, making humans do their bidding, whilst being treated as gods. Eventually people known as Adepts emerged and banished the Watchers to the realm in which our pilot is trapped. With the help of Nikola Tesla, they retrofit Watcher technology to fight the Watchers.”
There are currently 8 gameplay videos uploaded on YouTube you can take a look at them at this channel PlayScopeTrailers


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This time TechBoom try to give a brief review of the latest security system from Symantec, Norton Internet Security 2013. What are the advantages? Consider the following reviews.
The main features
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Japanese game producer, Sega, has released one of the legendary game, Sonic the Hedgehog, for the Android platform.
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According to an official invitation received by Gamespot, Electronic Arts and DICE plans to celebrate [...]
One of the advantages of this device is able to work without a hitch with Apple Time Machine
The company Western Digital announced a new version of an external hard drive My Book Studio.
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Lenovo’s new hotshot in laptops for SMBs, M490s, offers several security features and maintenance through LSSB (Lenovo Solutions for Small Business).
Among them is a Software Monitor that works to improve security by ensuring the safety of the [...]
The good news for you smartphone users had Windows Phone OS. Angry Birds can now be downloaded for free.
Quoted from Ubergizmo, Thursday (2/5), Angry Birds has changed the status of being free is the original version, that is Angry Birds first.
Human skull intentionally shaped like alien heads were found in a 1000 year-old tomb in Mexico, according to the researchers reported as quoted by LiveScience.
Practice changing the shape of the skull has become common practice in Central America. But [...]
Google Drive Users get 5GB for free rations from Google.
Google announced on Tuesday (11/27), will integrate Google Drive into Gmail. The move will create a Google e-mail service users can send files of up to 10 GB.
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Sony has just announced a new game console, the PlayStation 4, the PlayStation event in the U.S. (2/21). What are the new features of the PS4? The following brief review.
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Transitioning to a more sustainable world hinges significantly on consumers making informed choices based on credible green claims. However, the prevalence of greenwashing, where products falsely project environmental responsibility without substantiated evidence, creates a bewildering maze of deceptive claims for consumers.
In the current landscape of emerging green claims, consumer trust in environmental claims is eroded due to the unreliability of such assertions. Research has shown that 94% of Europeans express personal importance for environmental protection, with 68% acknowledging that their consumption habits negatively impact the environment. To underscore the complexity of this issue, there are a staggering 230 sustainability labels and 100 green energy labels in the EU. Analysing these figures reveals that 53% of these green claims provide misleading information, 40% lack evidential support, and half remain unverified. To address this, consumers require reliable and verifiable information.
EU’S response: the green claims directive
Considering the alarming trend of green claims facing scrutiny and the recent adoption of the Circular Economy Action Plan (CEAP), the EU has put forth a new law addressing green assertions. The goal is to restore transparency and reliability in environmental claims, ultimately benefiting both consumers and businesses. Consumers will have access to more reliable information, enabling them to choose environmentally friendly products. Businesses, in turn, will be rewarded for genuine efforts to enhance the environmental sustainability of their products.
The directive on green claims aims to address four key aspects:
- Firstly, it seeks to make green claims reliable, comparable, and verifiable throughout the EU.
- Secondly, it aims to shield consumers from greenwashing.
- Thirdly, it contributes to building a circular and green EU economy by empowering consumers to make informed purchasing decisions.
- Lastly, it works towards establishing a level playing field in terms of the environmental performance of products.
The aspect seeking to make green claims more reliable, comparable, and verifiable throughout the EU includes establishing clear criteria for companies to substantiate their environmental claims and labels. This is in line with another EU initiative, the ecodesign for sustainable products. This initiative introduces a framework to define eco-design requirements for specific product groups, aiming to notably enhance their circularity, energy performance, and other environmental sustainability aspects. Among these requirements is the inclusion of environmental foot-printing for products.
PEF-Methodology: standardising environmental impact assessment
The European Commission has put forward the Product Environmental Footprint methods as a standardised approach for gauging environmental performance. Companies aiming to label their products as environmentally friendly within the EU confront a multitude of methodological choices and initiatives.
The PEF method is a standardised EU approach grounded in Life Cycle Assessments, quantifying a product’s environmental impact by assessing its entire lifecycle — from raw material extraction to end-of-life. Utilising 16 environmental impact categories, the PEF method serves as the foundation for substantiating green claims about products in a rigorous, science-based manner.
For more information: idrn.eu


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Wine Lister spent a week in Bordeaux tasting the 2018 vintage in April, and has dedicated the last two months to covering en primeur releases for its Pro Subscribers. After what has been an unpredictable and puzzling Bordeaux en primeur campaign, we have conducted more than 20 interviews with our Pro Subscribers and Founding Members to find out how it went for them.
Below you will find our conclusions on the Bordeaux 2018 en primeur campaign, which combine our own intimate knowledge of the campaign and its peculiarities with invaluable insights from the trade.
The campaign lasted 62 days compared to 59 last year (from the date of the first major release to the last standard-channel releases). One clear improvement, thanks to a concerted effort by courtiers, was the spacing out of releases more evenly over the period. However, this did not address the more acute concern around the overall length of the campaign, with the wine trade expected to concentrate on the new Bordeaux vintage for two whole months of the year.
A more major frustration was pricing. Over 80% of Wine Lister Pro Subscribers / Founding Members surveyed said prices were too high. On average, prices were up 13% on 2017 and 2% on 2016 release prices. This only made sense where 2016s had gone up in the market since release – not often enough the case. As a result, 2018s came onto the market on average 1% above the current market price of 2016, despite the latter – one of the vintages of the century – being physically available.
Needless to say, many wines stalled upon release due to over-ambitious pricing. When we asked the trade which wines sold the worst, more than once the reply was, “too many to mention”.
However, one of the more unfathomable motifs of the campaign was that in several instances, this highly ambitious pricing was accepted by the market, and the wines sold through. These were wines with good momentum behind them and a particularly loyal following, but most of all they were wines with a specific story that superseded any thought of value relative to prior vintages.
Examples of this phenomenon are Domaine de Chevalier and Palmer. Both were released into the market above every recent back vintage, and yet both met with demand thanks to the stories behind each wine. Domaine de Chevalier’s owner, Olivier Bernard, started sowing the seed several months before the campaign saying his 2018 was the best wine he’d ever made, a statement reiterated by the rest of his family and gradually absorbed through the fine wine chain. Unable to use conventional sprays, Palmer lost two-thirds of its crop to mildew, and made a striking, unusual wine that Managing Director Thomas Duroux said would “go down in history”.
“The market is very smart and only follows brands that it’s imperative to buy en primeur,” states Laurent Bonnet, Export Director of négociant L.D. Vins.
It was a campaign that favoured top names, not value wines. Wines below €50 were largely unsuccessful (with a few exceptions such as Laroque, Capbern, and Potensac – the three most affordable Bordeaux 2018 Wine Lister MUST BUYs).
David Suire, Managing Director of Château Laroque – a Bordeaux 2018 WL MUST BUY
After pricing, the most cited frustration was reduced volumes. On average, leading properties released around 20% less wine than last year. “The number one cause of reduced volumes is lower production in 2018 compared to previous years,” said Mathieu Chadronnier, Managing Director of négociant CVBG, who, like other participants in the campaign would have liked to have more volume to sell of certain wines. “It is a frustration, but there’s nothing we can do about it,” he concluded.
Certainly several properties produced less wine due to mildew and a very dry summer. Others made a commercial decision to keep back more wine – a continuation of the gradual trend for Bordeaux châteaux to release less wine en primeur, whether to create an impression of rarity, and / or to partake in the future upside by selling the bottled wine later once it has – they hope – increased in value.
Bonnet underlines the irony of having less and less stock of the wines that sell well, and too much of those that don’t: “The ‘not enough of in-demand wines / too many wines to hold as stock’ equation is difficult for négociants to resolve,” says Bonnet, cautioning that, “the financial stakes are high.”
Good news stories
While Asian buyers were reported to be less present than in previous years, other geographies remained strong – the US, continental Europe, and especially the UK.
The 10 greatest success stories of the campaign included six Wine Lister MUST BUYs: Calon Ségur, Canon, Carmes Haut-Brion, Rauzan-Ségla, Léoville Las Cases, Mouton Rothschild, and Lynch-Bages.
Revenues were up on 2017 across the board, in many cases very significantly. The majority of respondents reported en primeur revenues the same as or above 2015 levels, with only a couple of exceptions. However, very few managed to equal 2016 revenues.
On the one hand, it seems obvious that the 2018 Bordeaux en primeur campaign could have been more of a roaring success with more astute pricing and in some cases a bit more volume to go around. On the other, many of our Pro Subscribers and Founding Members have been pleasantly surprised by the outcome, and will conclude their campaigns with better revenues than they expected.
This leaves many convinced of the merits of en primeur, if frustrated that it’s not reaching its full potential. “We could have done £35m,” said Max Lalondrelle, Fine Wine Buying Director of UK merchant Berry Bros. & Rudd, which in fact made c.£22m in revenues on the 2018 Bordeaux en primeur campaign.
Meanwhile other members of the trade have ceased their Bordeaux en primeur activity altogether over recent years, and some are questioning its future viability. For the time being, the sun has set on this year’s campaign, but it will rise again next year on the utterly unique global marketing and distribution tool that is en primeur.
Read more about our new MUST BUY tool in our recent blog here.
The Bordeaux 2018 en primeur campaign is over. While the quality of wines available is, for the most part, unquestionably good, release prices have been on the high side to say the least, making the benefit of buying en primeur less obvious than in previous years.
Wine Lister’s brand-new website feature, WL MUST BUY, was launched this week*, especially for Bordeaux 2018 wines, to give valuable guidance as to which wines really are worth snapping up now.
Our ground-breaking MUST BUY recommendations are data-driven, with an intelligence-based, human overlay. The algorithm takes into account a wine’s quality and value within its vintage and appellation, as well as the latest industry intelligence from key players in the global fine wine trade. The Wine Lister team have scoured these results to identify must-buy wines based on our own tastings of Bordeaux 2018s, and insider market knowledge.
Given the dominance of reds in the top Bordeaux 2018 Quality scores, it is no surprise that all of these WL MUST BUYs are red.
Saint-Emilion ranks as our most recommended appellation, with six WL MUST BUYs, including the indomitable Canon, and value successes Le Prieuré, Quinault l’Enclos, and Laroque. These three achieve WL MUST BUY status by first passing the quality filter of Wine Lister’s MUST BUY algorithm (they exceed their collective Quality score average by 192 points in 2018). Their respective prices relative to similar quality 2018s from Saint-Emilion push them through the algorithm’s second step – the value filter. Finally, they have been identified by the fine wine trade and/or the Wine Lister team as wines to watch: Quinault l’Enclos is made by the elite winemaking team of Cheval Blanc, and their best yet, while Laroque has been taken to new heights by winemaker David Suire (who cut his teeth at Larcis-Ducasse).
Pauillac houses four of the “top end” Bordeaux 2018 MUST BUYs – Mouton (released at £426 per bottle in bond), both powerhouse super-seconds, Pichon Baron and Pichon Comtesse, and Buzz Brand Lynch Bages.
Sharing three picks apiece are further left bank appellations Saint-Julien, Saint-Estèphe, and Pessac-Léognan. Capbern, Meyney, and Latour-Martillac are testament to the value proposition available in Saint-Estèphe and Pessac-Léognan respectively. Saint-Julien MUST BUYs are represented by two fourth-growth staples, Branaire-Ducru and Beychevelle, and the second wine of Léoville Las Cases, Le Petit Lion.
Margaux earns two MUST BUYs – Rauzan-Ségla, and biodynamic Durfort Vivens (who made a huge step up in quality this year, and whose 2018 yield was less than a quarter of its usual volume). Pomerol equals this number with Lafleur and Hosanna.
Other wines featured in Wine Lister’s Bordeaux 2018 MUST BUYs list are: Beau-Séjour Bécot, Calon Ségur, Domaine de Chevalier Rouge, La Gaffelière, Les Carmes Haut-Brion, and Potensac.
*Wine Lister launched its MUST BUY tool on Monday at a Telegraph event entitled “Wine for Pleasure or Profit?”, where founder & CEO Ella Lister spoke about going “Back to Bordeaux” for both. You can see slides from the presentation relevant to Bordeaux 2018 MUST BUYs here: Telegraph Back to Bordeaux
In Bordeaux, 2018 was a winemakers’ vintage. That much is clear from conversations the Wine Lister team had throughout en primeur tasting week, explained further in Bordeaux 2018 en primeur part I : the vintage. Though quality across the board was good in 2018, the greats stand out all the more for being the result of key technical decisions, rather than just terroir.
Below we look at the top 25 Bordeaux 2018 red Quality scores, based on the recently-released ratings of Wine Lister partner critics Bettane+Desseauve, Julia Harding for Jancis Robinson, Antonio Galloni for Vinous, and Jeannie Cho Lee. The average Quality score of these top 25 is 975, 25 points higher than the equivalent top red panel in 2017.
Right bank super-appellation, Pomerol earns the highest number of places in the top 25 red Quality scores (6), and includes the first- and second-best wines of the vintage, Petrus and Lafleur. They earn Quality scores of 992 and 991 respectively, and the former is awarded 97-100 points by Wine Lister partner critic, Antonio Galloni, who comments, “From the very first taste, the 2018 Petrus is simply magical”.
Proving the potential for high quality across both banks in Bordeaux 2018, the next highest appellations are Pauillac and Saint-Émilion with 5 wines appearing in the top 25 apiece. Pauillac wins out overall, with an average score of 976 (vs. 974 in Saint-Émilion). Cheval Blanc (990) and Canon (963) show impressive Quality improvements on 2017, moving 22 and 31 places up the rankings respectively.
Pauillac’s top quality wines are made up, perhaps unsurprisingly, of the three Pauillacais first growths, Lafite (986), Latour (985), and Mouton (983), and super-seconds Pichon Baron and Pichon Comtesse. This last is holds the appellation’s most-improved ranking, moving up 21 places from its 2017 position. Julia Harding of JancisRobinson.com writes of Pichon Comtesse 2018, “A gentle and surprisingly subtle beauty”.
Elsewhere on the left bank, Saint-Julien and Saint-Estèphe earn three wines each in the top 25 for Quality. The best of these, Léoville Las Cases, earns a Quality score of 987. The three Saint-Estèphe wines follow consecutively, with front-runner and rising star Calon-Ségur moving up 37 places from its 2017 ranking – the largest improvement of all the top 25 Quality scorers in 2018.
Margaux and Pessac-Léognan appear just thrice between them in the top 25 for Quality, with Margaux (980), tiny-production Palmer (973), and Haut-Brion (981).
Other wines featuring in the top 25 Bordeaux 2018 Quality scores are: Figeac, Vieux Château Certan, Montrose, Ausone, Le Pin, Cos d’Estournel, Ducru-Beaucaillou, Léoville-Poyferré, Angélus, Trotanoy, and La Conseillante.
The campaign in 2018 “won’t be a record breaker,” thinks Mathieu Chadronnier, MD of négociant CVBG, “but everything is there for it to work well.” There are also some potential pitfalls. In this article we consider the role that volume, pricing, and timing will play in the success of the 2018 en primeur campaign – already well underway.
In 2018, yields were often slightly below 2017 levels. Last year, frost damage provided a cover for releasing less volume into the market. Will mildew serve the same purpose in 2018? There were some extreme mildew casualties across the two banks, mainly for organic and biodynamic properties such as Palmer, which produced just 11 hl/ha. In Pomerol, L’Evangile made 20 hl/ha, less than half what it would have produced under conventional agriculture. In Pauillac, Pontet-Canet made just 10 hl/ha in 2018 – one third of its usual production, losing 15 hl/ha to mildew and another 5hl/ha due to dried out grapes.
The cellar at biodynamic estate, Château Palmer, emptier than usual due to tiny production in 2018 following severe attacks of mildew.
François-Xavier Borie, owner of Grand-Puy-Lacoste, believes that the real burning issue for en primeur is the volume released onto the market – or not. Some châteaux release nearly all their production, and others as little as 30%, keeping the rest back to create an artificial rarity in hope of selling the rest at a higher price later. Borie believes the right amount to release en primeur is “at least 80 percent,” cautioning that “releasing 30 percent and pretending it’s a real price is dangerous.”
Nicolas Ballarin of courtier Blanchy et de Lestapis agrees: “The problem of Bordeaux’s distribution is not in the price but in the fact that we don’t put enough wine into the market en primeur,” he states. “The real paradox is that knowing there’s none left at the château makes it more valued,” explains Ballarin, adding, “the négoce know they won’t get more.” He concludes that “prices only go up if there’s no more wine at the château.”
And after all, every producer’s objective is for their prices to go up. Many try to force this through their en primeur release price, while others let the market do the work. More than ever in 2018, there is no one-size-fits-all approach to bringing them onto the market.
As we saw in part I of our en primeur blog, 2018 was a vintage where producers’ decisions counted for a lot. In the words of Nicolas Glumineau, Managing Director of Pichon Comtesse, it is “a year with very important personal choices.” He was talking about the winemaking, but could just as easily be referring to the sale of the wine. “There won’t be any blanket tendencies,” says Frédéric Faye, Managing Director of Figeac, underlining that, “each château has to decide for itself and not look at its neighbours.”
The only golden rule that the trade seem to agree on is that the 2018s should not be priced higher than the 2016s were upon release. “It would be a massive mistake for prices to be above those of 2016,” declared George Wilmoth, Head of Sales at UK merchant Justerini & Brooks. In Bordeaux, Edouard Moueix, Managing Director of Etablissements Jean-Pierre Moueix (producer and négociant), agrees, saying 2018 prices, “cannot be higher than 2016, it’s impossible.”
The exception to this rule of course, is where the 2016s have increased significantly since their release. Stephen Browett, Chairman of UK merchant Farr Vintners, reminds us that, “the vast majority of 2016 Bordeaux wines that customers bought en primeur are still available at delivery time at the same price as they paid two years ago, and in some cases less,” but there are exceptions, such as Lafleur, whose 2016 has increased 109% since release. When it released this morning, the château could therefore up its 2016 release price by 12% and still offer a 2018 that remains significantly cheaper than the current market price of the 2016.
An excerpt from Wine Lister’s Bordeaux Study part I, showing the 10 2016 Bordeaux whose prices have increased the most since their release two years ago.
“At the end of the day the châteaux will charge what they can get,” states Mathieu Chadronnier, MD of négociant CVBG. The allocation system in Bordeaux means this is often more than what they should arguably be charging, because négociants don’t want to risk losing share to competitors in future years. However, some did refuse allocations in last year’s campaign, and this could happen again – and maybe on a larger scale – if prices are too ambitious.So far there have only been small instances of this.
The campaign is a precocious one, with Angélus releasing on 16th April, and a few dozen releases since, including well-known names Branaire-Ducru, Langoa-Barton, and Labégorce. However, it doesn’t really seem to have got going. Some of the Wine Lister team is just back from two days in Bordeaux speaking with négociants and courtiers on the Place, and there is a distinct lack of energy so far.
However, after yesterday’s bank holiday in France, and a handful of releases today, things are set to pick up pace in earnest next week. We expect a series of releases from châteaux that have historically judged their en primeur prices well, and this could breathe some life into the campaign. On the other hand, these are the very same châteaux who can actually conceive of increasing their prices, given their market value has risen sufficiently.
Some fear this will set the wrong precedent for their neighbours, which is why it is more important than ever for each property to consider its pricing strategy in the context of its own performance, and not what its neighbours are doing. Châteaux need to “make sure that their en primeur price to the consumer is lower than that of older vintages,” says Browett. In part I of our recent Bordeaux study, we looked at a case study of a hot property in Bordeaux that did just that in last year’s campaign.
A masterclass in en primeur release pricing – the chart above shows Carmes Haut Brion’s 2017 release prices versus previous vintages on its day of release last year. Today the market price of 2017 is £65 (16% above release), and the 2016, £133 (109% above release).
Let’s hope that more and more châteaux follow this formula as the campaign continues to unfold next week. The week after that is Vinexpo in Bordeaux, and most big-name releases will begin in earnest from 20th May.
Watch this space for the release of Wine Lister’s Bordeaux Study, Part II, before then.
In June 2018, the idea that Bordeaux had a very good vintage on its hands was laughable. The first half of the year had seen incessant rain in the region. Mildew was rife and vignerons were fighting it all day long, including at weekends (if they could afford to). At Château Corbin, owner Anabelle Cruse cancelled her trip to Vinexpo Hong Kong to be on site to manage treatments. “We couldn’t afford any mistakes after losing nearly all of the 2017 vintage [to frost],” she said.
But then on 18th June, the weather turned, and barely another drop of rain fell until September. 2018 was a year of extremes for Bordeaux. “It started hellish, and finished in ecstasy,” said Sara Lecompte Cuvelier, Managing Director at Léoville-Poyferré. “It started a nightmare and finished a dream,” echoed Guillaume Pouthier, Director at Carmes Haut-Brion.
Against all odds, some truly extraordinary wines were made. “Technically, it’s the most accomplished wine we have made since I joined,” said Nicolas Glumineau, Managing Director of Pichon Comtesse since 2012. Adrien Bernard declared, “the 2018 [red] is the greatest wine my dad has made” – the Bernard family bought Domaine de Chevalier in 1983. But 2018 was not a great vintage across the board like 1982, 1989, or 2010. It wasn’t a vintage where you could make a great wine with your eyes closed. On the contrary, 2018 is a vintage where human choices really mattered, and at the top level, happily, these choices were usually the right ones.
Happy with their 2018s: Guillaume Pouthier, Pierre-Olivier Clouet, and Nicolas Glumineau
Concentration in the 2018s is at unprecedented levels: grapes were lost to mildew in the spring, and then the summer drought left remaining berries very small, without much juice. Picking dates were key: the temptation to leave the grapes hanging in the Indian summer was strong, but success in 2018 was all about retaining freshness to counter the high levels of alcohol and tannin.
Even those who picked early were still facing unknown territory. Many producers recounted the topsy turvy ratio of marc to juice in the vats (more skins and pips than liquid). As a result, tannin levels were off the scale, with IPTs (Indice de Polyphénols Totaux) at their highest ever recorded for many producers. At Lynch-Bages, Technical Director Nicolas Labenne explained that, “a normal IPT would be 70, a good year is 80, and we’re at 95 in 2018.”
“But it’s the quality of the tannins that’s important,” Pouthier reminded us. This colossal potential needed taming by the winemakers if they were to make gentle giants, and not monsters in 2018. “This was a year where you couldn’t go into the cellar and say, ‘well every year I do it like this so I’ll do the same’,” said Lillian Barton. “You had to be careful with the extraction,” she explained.
During our tastings last week, producers of the best wines explained their use of more gentle, less frequent extraction, and vinification at lower temperatures than normal. At Petrus, winemaker Olivier Berrouet explained that, “In a hot vintage it’s tempting to go further, but we wanted to keep delicacy; we let the wine infuse like tea.” He was not the only one to talk about “infusion”, some châteaux foregoing altogether the use of extraction techniques such as pumping over and punching down. This allowed subtler winemakers to achieve silky, creamy tannins that melt in the mouth, while retaining all the generous flavours from the uniquely concentrated grapes.
The 2018 vintage really is one of a kind. “It’s impossible to compare it to another vintage other than to say 2016 plus plus,” offered Pierre Graffeuille, Managing Director at Léoville Las Cases, because it has “more of everything.” More alcohol, more tannin, more flavour, but also in the best examples (and there are many), more freshness and more silkiness (some of which have been highlighted in Wine Lister’s 2018 tasting favourites). So if you believe that more is more, this is a vintage for you. Just beware that some wines have all the beast and none of the beauty.
In part II of this en primeur round-up we will look at production volumes before considering the upcoming campaign – its context, as well as likely timing and pricing. Watch this space.
Part I of our annual Bordeaux study is available here, and part II will be released to subscribers in May. Follow us on Twitter for the 2018 Bordeaux en primeur release updates, or for real-time analysis enquire here about subscription to Wine Lister Pro.
Last week, members of the Wine Lister team were in Bordeaux tasting hundreds of Bordeaux 2018s en primeur. Our full report of the 2018 vintage (similar to last year’s article on 2017) will be out soon, and in the meantime we examine below some 2018 tasting highlights.
Quality across the wines we tasted is extremely high. We have selected 42 highlights, including 10 underdogs – those wines we felt surpassed our quality expectations.
The Wine Lister team found beautiful wines in all the left bank appellations. Margaux and Pessac-Léognan appeared the most consistent for high quality, earning seven and six highlights respectively. These two appellations are home to five of Wine Lister’s 10 underdogs of 2018 en primeur tastings.
The former includes its first-growth namesake, Château Margaux, which was precise, addictive, and harmonious. Pavillon Rouge de Margaux also made the cut thanks to its intriguing and soft fruit character. Brane-Cantenac is becoming a Wine Lister staple after appearing in both 2016 and 2009 tasting highlights. Its 2018 was pure, fresh, and a perfect balance between power and finesse.
In Pessac-Léognan, Domaine de Chevalier had piercing intensity balanced with a floral softness, while Haut-Bailly impressed with a playful fruit character and velvet texture.
Elsewhere on the left bank, Branas Grand Poujeaux surprised with its classy, energetic, dark fruit. Pauillac produced examples of intense fruit handled with a delicate touch (Grand-Puy-Lacoste and Pichon Comtesse). Saint-Estèphe presented beguiling wines with great freshness and elegance (Cos d’Estournel). Saint-Julien showed depth of flavour and complexity in equal measure (Langoa Barton, Ducru-Beaucaillou).
The right bank was just as impressive, with an equal proportion of highlights for Wine Lister as the left (in each case, 19% of wines tasted made the cut). These include one underdog (and new discovery for Wine Lister) from Lalande de Pomerol, five stand-outs from Pomerol, and four from Saint-Émilion.
In Pomerol, Petrus was alluring, generous, and floral, while Trotanoy had delicate strength and never-ending energy. Saint-Émilion produced favourites of varying styles, including Cheval Blanc – a magical, mesmerising boudoir-style wine, and Canon – dancing, racy, and fresh.
Readers should note that these 42 wines are some of the team’s favourites from last week’s tastings, but that we will be releasing official Wine Lister Buys throughout the campaign as prices become known. WL Buys take into account a wine’s quality (based on our partner critics’ scores, which we look forward to adding as soon as they are released), and value within the vintage and appellation, as well as Wine Lister’s personal opinion based on our own tastings and market insights.
Trade members wishing to gain full access to Wine Lister’s en primeur campaign coverage will need to subscribe to Wine Lister Pro. Register your interest here.


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By Contributor | The Wall Street Journal
NightCulture Inc. (OTCBB:NGHT) announces Stereo Live will host the 2nd Houston Food Truck Fest on Saturday, November 9th. Underwritten by Houston area MINI dealers, this event will bring together 20 of Houston’s finest “Meals On Wheels”.
Live music, karaoke, DJ’s, kid’s activities and mobile clothes boutiques will ensure an afternoon packed with plenty to do, see, eat and drink. Accompanied by increasing media and public interest, Houston’s mobile food scene has seen significant growth in the past year or two. This event offers couples, groups, families and those flying solo the opportunity to explore this exciting culinary world in one place.
Each of the trucks invited to participate will feature at least one $3 sample signature item in addition to their regular menus. An eclectic world of cuisine ranging from traditional Southern fare to adventurous East-West fusion dishes will be on offer. The festival is open to all ages, with those 12 and under admitted at no charge. A full bar will also be available to those 21 and over with ID.
Participating gourmet Food trucks will include Chi’lantro BBQ (featured on “The Food Network” and “The Cooking Channel”), Ladybird Food Truck (Houston CultureMap’s “Best Grilled Cheese”), The Waffle Bus (featured on “The Food Network”, “Eat St.” and one of the Official SXSW 2013 Food Trucks), Taco Nuts (latest venture from celebrated chef LJ Wiley, of the former Upper Kirby restaurant Yelapa Playa Mexicana) and sixteen more!
Intuit software company released a study late last year in which they estimate that the gourmet food truck industry will generate $2.7 billion annually by 2017, or close to 4% of restaurant sales as a whole. The Momentum Mini Houston Food Truck Fest’s goal is to showcase Houston’s mobile chef-driven businesses and demonstrate to the Greater Houston area what the fuss is all about.
-- Saturday November 9th, 12pm -- 5pm -- Stereo Live, 6400 Richmond Ave., Houston TX 77057 -- All ages (12 and under free). Alcohol available to those 21+ with proper ID -- Tickets, starting at $12, are available online at http://www.houstonfoodtruckfest.com -- Contact: Stereo Live (832) 251-9600
More information available at:
http://www.houstonfoodtruckfest.com / http://www.facebook.com/HoustonFoodTruckFest
CONTACT: Mike Long CEO, NightCulture Inc. email@example.com | 832.535.9070


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Chamber eyes return to business advocacy
Aspen’s business community will soon have two lobbying organizations representing its interest in local politics and community debates.Aspen Chamber Resort Association officials announced at an annual membership luncheon Thursday they will form a Public Affairs Committee. It will “provide advocacy on relevant community issues,” according to Stan Clauson, a member of ACRA’s board of directors.Other business leaders announced earlier in the month the formation of the independent Aspen Business Improvement League to weigh in on issues like transportation and parking.The two advocacy efforts are being pursued separately because they fill slightly different needs, according to Stan Hajenga, general manager of the Mountain Chalet and someone affiliated with both groups. He is on ACRA’s board of directors and he is one of the organizers of the business league.Hajenga said ACRA’s ability to be an advocate for the business community is limited because its membership is so diverse. Any position it takes on a controversial issue is likely to alienate part of its constituency.”You don’t want to come out with a [position] that fractures the membership,” he said.The business league is designed to give owners and operators of restaurants, retail shops and lodges – particularly those in the commercial core – a strong voice, Hajenga said. Lodges have direct representation, separate from ACRA, in the Aspen Lodging Association.Restaurants and retailers haven’t had their own advocacy group in recent years.The business league, he said, “is not opposed to anything the chamber is doing.” Instead, the league’ efforts will complement the chamber, not compete with it.Clauson announced to ACRA’s members that the question has come up in recent debates about growth whether Aspen is a community or a resort. It’s both, he said, and balance is needed. But he also indicated that ACRA leaders feel that “Aspen the resort” isn’t well-represented at times in community discussions.Other community activists express the opposite. Les Holst, a historic preservation advocate who started the “I Love Aspen” white-shirt campaign, recently complained that city development approvals are ruining much of Aspen’s charm by changing the mass and scale of buildings.ACRA’s interest in acting as an advocate for its members has swung like a pendulum over the years under the leadership of different directors and board members. In general, when the chamber suffers a big loss, like the public vote on the expansion of the airport runway in the early 1990s, it seems to retreat from advocacy.Its new advocacy role won’t focus exclusively on local affairs, according to president and chief executive officer Debbie Braun. She said ACRA will also look at state government issues that affect Aspen tourism.Scott Condon’s e-mail address is email@example.com.


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A Kaspersky it is famous in terms of applications and systems for protecting users. Now there is information that shows the arrival of a smartphone made with the main objective of being resistant to any cyber attack thanks to the operating system developed by the company.Eugene Kaspersky, head of Kaspersky Lab, provided some more details about this smartphone, and made sure to point out that the main objective pursued by his company with this operating system, the Kaspersky OS, was to create a phone almost impossible to Hacked.
However, Kaspersky does not rule out the appearance of an app store in the future: "We will probably make our own first, and then we will be ready to attract other app stores."
According to what has been explained, the smartphone in question will receive limited functionality (taken from Android and iOS), as well as a set of applications and its own browser: the phone will not perform special activities but can be considered a device to work, capable of doing ( and receive) calls and messages, browse the web and enjoy some basic applications (like calculator or alarm clock).
The launch of the first smartphones with Kaspersky OS is scheduled for 2021 and the manufacture of these devices will undoubtedly be a Chinese manufacturer even though, at the moment, there is no information on the name of this company.
User privacy is a subject that has grown in recent years, as people are paying more attention to security breaches that can lead to the compromise of their personal information. It remains to be seen what the real potential of smartphones of this type is, especially in an increasingly saturated market that offers many alternatives for all price ranges.


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In honor of women across the country who are heroes in their own right, Katjes USA Inc. is launching its new plant-based gummy candy, Sheroes, in the U.S. market.
Sheroes debuted at Natural Products Expo West, an industry event that took place from March 8-10, 2023, in Anaheim, CA, which was timed perfectly for International Women’s Day. Inspired by women who dream big and pave their own way, each Sheroes package contains gummies in a variety of bright colors, shaped like women firefighters, scientists, astronauts, and statements of encouragement like GRL PWR!
“The product celebrates trailblazing women everywhere,” says Eliza Jahn, head of marketing at Katjes USA. “It’s a sweet nod to the Sheroes we all know and admire: from our family members and colleagues, to women in the public eye, and even ourselves. We hope to inspire and empower women in our own playful way. After all, if she can dream it, she can do it!"
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Maldives Association of Travel Agents and Tour Operators (MATATO) has revealed that 1376 bookings are cancelled on average due to COVID-19.
Eight cases of COVID-19 have been confirmed in the Maldives.
In a statement issued on the impacts of COVID-19 on the country's economy, MATATO said a large number of bookings were cancelled during the past 24 hours. An average of 1376 tourist bookings are cancelled per day, which amounts to 41,289 monthly cancellations, they said.
MATATO predicts a decline of 9.5% for the tourism industry based on the current numbers.
The government had earlier revealed that over 25,000 bookings have been cancelled thus far over COVID-19 fears. The current decline will last a duration of approximately seven months, it has been predicted. The damages caused to the industry as a result are expected to exceed US$ 600 million.


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Nike has given its Air Jordan 11 Low I.E. the “Space Jam” treatment for 2019. This is the first time since 2016 that an AJ11 has worn the iconic colorway, and this time around its icy-soled colorways will adorn the lightweight, low-top basketball iteration.
The I.E. now features patent leather on its geometric cut-out mid-panel which wraps around the entire shoe. Smooth black leather is seen on the toe box and tongue, while a mesh fabric has been used to construct the majority of the sneaker’s upper. A padded foam collar rounds off the shoe’s design.
Continuing the “Space Jam” theme is a white midsole and iced-out outsole, while the blue Jumpman emblem is moved from the rear quarter panel on the OG AJ11 to the tongue. The I.E. also lacks the “45” numbering on the back of its heel, which was a move Jordan Brand made on the 2016 “Space Jam,” replacing Michael Jordan’s typical 23 branding.
The Air Jordan 11 Low I.E. “Space Jam” in Black/Dark Concord” will release on July 13 at 3:00 PM EST for $170 USD via Nike SNKRS and select stockists. Take a look at the upcoming sneaker in the gallery above.
In other news, atmos have provided a closer look at its upcoming Nike Air Max 1 “Animal 3.0” pack.


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A jury has awarded $43.6 million to a Little Rock man who claimed he was defrauded by a business owner who, at one point, had owned businesses in Camden, according to court documents.
Kristian Nelson was the defendant in a lawsuit that alleged he defrauded Richard Toll out of millions of dollars and used some of those funds to establish a business in Camden, according to statements Nelson made in a deposition.
The Camden News first reported on the suit in August 2020, when Toll, 89, of Little Rock alleged that Nelson, a businessman associated with Hawgz Blues Cafe, had defrauded him of $4.5 million over a period of several years.
The lawsuit alleged that over a period of three years, starting in September of 2017 and continuing through June of 2020, Nelson acquired loans from Toll, ostensibly to help his businesses. He first loaned Nelson $10,000, according to court documents, which Nelson said he needed in order to cover hot checks written to cover expenses at Hawgz Blues Cafe's Little Rock location, which he said he owned.
Camden Mayor Julian Lott posted in June 2020 on Facebook that Hawgz Blues Cafe, as well as a car dealership business called I Sell 4 U Auto, would be locating in Camden soon; the post was accompanied by two photos showing Lott and Nelson together at the Hawgz Blues Cafe location in North Little Rock.
In a deposition recorded in September of 2020, lawyers questioned Nelson on his activities.
Nelson said in the deposition that he "didn't remember the date" he opened up a Camden property, nor did he remember who owned the property.
"Q. You don't remember who owns the property in Camden where you're operating a car dealership?
"A. It was a piece of paper I know", the deposition reads.
Nelson said during the deposition he was leasing a property at 1585 California in Camden for an auto-parts retail business. Nelson said some of the money loaned to him by Toll was used to to buy the auto parts for sale there. The address 1585 California is listed as the The Elements Apartments.
Nelson stated he could not remember the answer to questions asked of him and exercised his Fifth Amendment right against self-incrimination in response to several questions during the deposition.
The jury found that that Kristian Nelson committed fraud causing damages to Richard Toll. They also held that Hawgz Blues Cafe and I Sell 4 U Auto Sales as responsible since Nelson was acting as an agent of the businesses.
They found that Toll suffered damages of $4,642,706.38 and Nelson, Hawgz Blues Cafe and I Sell 4 U Auto additionally owed $39,000,000 in punitive fees.
Nelson must also pay a rate equal to the Federal Reserve primary credit rate of .50 percent plus 2 percent annum.
Caitlan Butler contributed to this report.


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ICONS OF INDIA 2021: ANANT MAHESHWARI
As President of Microsoft India, Anant Maheshwari is responsible for Microsoft’s overall business and presence in India, leading engagement with policy makers, customers, business partners, and the industry ecosystem. He is responsible for all of Microsoft’s product, service, and support offerings across India. Role of Anant is pivotal as the country focuses on growth themes in the country including Digital India. Anant is committed to ensure that the collective presence of all Microsoft assets in India are helping this digital transformation and support the growth objectives globally and in India.
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February 11, 2013
Another startup business competition in central New York wrapped up on Thursday, but participants will have to wait several more weeks to see who carries off the prize.
Nick Nickitas is CEO of an online grocery service called Rosie founded by Cornell University students. He says it was worth taking the time to come up to Syracuse.
"It's inspiring to work in an area with tons of other entrepreneurs in a part of the city that's really growing and expanding so we really enjoyed every minute of it."
Read more at the Innovation Trail website.


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Tesla is an oddity in the business landscape. The company’s stock is so stratospheric that Elon Musk has surpassed Jeff Bezos as the world’s richest person. Now, we have another mind-blowing metric. At Tesla’s current price-to-earnings ratio, it would take the company almost 1,600 years to make what the stock market says it’s worth.
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When is the Spectrum Internet Internet coming to Canada?
Spectrum internet, a Canadian company that provides broadband internet services to residential and commercial customers, has announced plans to expand to Canada, starting in 2017.
The company’s announcement comes as it works to attract and retain new customers.
The company said it would invest up to $2.5 billion in Canada over five years to expand its footprint and ensure the continued availability of its network, which currently covers more than 70 per cent of the country’s population.
Spectrum said it plans to begin rolling out its new network in 2017 and said that by 2018, it will offer fibre-to-the-premises (FTTP) internet services in all provinces, territories and parts of Quebec.
The expansion would mean a “significant increase in the speed of access” to Canadian broadband customers.
“We’re really excited to be bringing our Spectrum internet service to Canada,” said Greg McBride, chief operating officer of Spectrum Canada.
“We have a strong track record in the U.S., and we look forward to providing our customers with a faster, better and more reliable broadband experience.”
Spectrum said that it will start rolling out the new service in 2018, with an expected service lifespan of 10 years.
Spectrum will also offer a free Wi-Fi service that will enable users to access its service at home.
The Spectrum internet is the same type of service that is used by the TV and mobile companies in the United States.
It offers internet speeds of up to 2 megabits per second.
The spectrum company said that customers will be able to access the service through an array of different internet-enabled devices including smart TVs, tablets and laptops.
Spectrum internet also supports local television, satellite and wireless services.
In 2018, Spectrum said that the service will also support high-speed streaming services.
The network has been the subject of debate in recent years.
The Federal Communications Commission recently voted to impose new rules on the network, but the government did not take action until last year.
McBride said that Spectrum has been actively working to expand and improve its network and to create a customer-friendly experience.
He said that in 2018 it plans “to roll out an improved and enhanced customer experience in the country.”
McBride also said that “all customers” will be eligible for a free wireless internet service, which will include speeds of 1 gigabit per second and will be available for a year.


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Eddy Cue: „We hear you @taylorswift13“
Taylor Swift schrieb gestern den wohl teuersten Tumblr-Post (aller Zeiten?), der Apple dabei hilft, eine zuvor ausgehandelte Vertragsklausel mit ein paar Millionen US-Dollar (an einem Sonntagabend über Twitter!) von seinem PR-Fiasko zu befreien.
Cue says that Swift’s letter, coupled with complaints from indie labels and artists, did indeed prompt the change. He said he discussed the about-face with Apple CEO Tim Cook today. “It’s something we worked on together. Ultimately we both wanted to make the change.”
Cue says Apple will pay rights holders for the entire three months of the trial period. It can’t be at the same rate that Apple is paying them after free users become subscribers, since Apple is paying out a percentage of revenues once subscribers start paying. Instead, he says, Apple will pay rights holders on a per-stream basis, which he won’t disclose.