St. Supéry Makes Money Using Twitter…

… can Twitter make money off St. Supéry?

As a divine club member (membership to which I would highly recommend) I received a shipment of two bottles of 2001 Dollarhide Cabernet Sauvignon. Erin and I opened one up that evening, as we are both impatient people . Immediately after tasting Erin gave the elusive two thumbs up (loosely translated = BUY MORE). At some point, I twittered my excitement about the Dollarhide…

Now the fun part, I got a call from a rep at St. Supéry this past Saturday. The rep led with “I received an email mentioning that you loved the ‘01 Dollarhide and would like to purchase some more bottles.” I had been meaning to re-up my order anyways so this was a welcome and convenient call. A case is on its way and I can’t wait. Did I feel “stalked”? No. Would I have felt that way if I was not already a member? Probably. Further, it is always possible that my intentions to purchase more could have slipped through the cracks if the rep had not called me directly. At the very least, St. Supéry increased their chances of a sale by reaching out.

Here’s the question, from St. Supéry’s point of view is this a repeatable pattern? If so, how much can they make from it (i.e. what is it worth to them)? Further, can this be replicated across industries in some way, shape or form?

From Twitter’s point of view, do they want to go the customer service route? If so, how much can they charge for it? What tooling would be necessary to build on top of Twitter’s base functionality to make this easily repeatable for other companies?

I know. Lot’s of questions here, but no answers. These questions are not mine to answer — simply things that came to mind after the experience.

Nonetheless, someone at Supéry knows about Twitter, knows how to use twitter search, knows enough about RSS use it effectively and helps make great wine.

Couldn’t resist including a photo of Mike Cannon-Brookes “sleeping” on the lawn of St. Supéry winery last year before JavaOne…

The Coherence Incubator – 2008 in Review

The Coherence Incubator

The Coherence Incubator exceeded all expectations for 2008 and continues to grow. The first big milestone was reached on October 15th when we officially launched the site with the first four projects:

• Coherence Common
• The Command Pattern
• The Messaging Pattern
• The Push Replication Pattern

Thus the journey began. Brian Oliver (the driving force behind its creation) announced it at the London Coherence User Group. Gojko Adzic wrote a very succinct blog post after attending the event — which subsequently got picked up by Highscalability.com. Cameron blogged about it. Brian then flew over from London to present the Coherence Incubator at the inaugural New York Coherence Special Interest Group event.

On November 10th we released new versions of all four of the original projects.

On November 24th we released version 1.0.0 of The Functor Pattern.

Nicholas Gregory and Stephen Price published an article entitled “Extend the Data Grid With Hub-less Messaging” on TheServerSide (discussion here) on December 23rd.

For more information on what’s going on and what’s in store for the future come join us at either the next London Coherence SIG on January 22nd or the next New York Coherence SIG on January 29th.

All in all, it has been a fantastic year for the incubator with over 1000s downloads over just 2.5 months, 4 new projects in the pipeline and many many more being proposed. We are looking forward to 2009 being a huge year in extending the horizons for what Data Grids (e.g. Oracle Coherence) can be used for across all verticals, problem domains and environments.

Dad

P1000127, originally uploaded by rmisek.

“just remember that somewhere your dad is the shining light on a northbound train” — a friend

The end of the "Blog Roll"

After seeing Dion’s post on the Google AJAX Feed API, specifically the PartnerBar, I decided to start a little “Coherence Blog Network” as seen at the bottom of the page here (still playing with the formatting). This works nicely as long as you quickly identify all of the typos in the PartnerBar Programming Guide (thanks for the assist Dion).

The only downside so far is that if the list of blogs change (as the most certainly will – i.e. grow) we have to update the JS for all of the blogs that are participating in the “network.” Which leads to a feature request – find a way to have clustered consensus of the information that makes up the “network” across the blogs in the “network” itself.

Getting back to the title of this post, “blog rolls” have always been horribly hard to maintain. With a small amount of work it would seem easy to tie the PartnerBar concepts into GoogleReader (perhaps narrowed by label, trend, starred, etc?). Therefore having a dynamic and easily maintainable “blog roll.”

R.I.P. Byron — The Professor

1996-2008

You were faithful, playful, honorable, energetic and just a damn good friend.

I only wish I could have seen you one more time… safe travels.

"e@" -> Web 3.0

Text conversation with Brian yesterday:

Brian (4:45): e@
Me (4:46): Huh?
Brian (4:47): e@
Me (4:47): Huh?

Then nothing…

This morning over coffee I was asking him what the txt was all about – seems it was just his phone screwing up and sending random “e@” txts to random people. I commented that at the end of the txt conversation I ended up feeling stupid for not knowing what “e@” was short for (assuming it was some sort of l33t-speak), so of course I googled it and found nothing relevant.

Jon happened to be with present for the conversation and commented “That must be Web 3.0!”

Jon might as well be British given his proficiency at dry humor.

Update: Brian moved his blog here

Freaked out by Twitterrific

One of my co-workers came over and said “so you’re researching the Wii?”, which caught me a bit off guard since I hadn’t spoken to him about it. It ends up that he saw it in my Adium status. I had just used Twitterrific to update my Twitter account. A quick Google confirmed my suspicions that Twitterrific defaults to updating my Adium status automatically with my latest tweet. Cool – yes. Good – not so much when at work .

Cisco VPN Client on the Mac – Strangest Issue Ever

If you are running Mac OSX, the Cisco VPN and have Parallels installed and your VPN connection only stays up for 5 seconds at a time and you are seeing these errors:

Secure VPN Connection terminated locally by the Client.
Reason 422: Lost contact with the security gateway. Check your network connection

Check out this thread.

Basically, you need to disable disable Parallels’ networking:

1. Apple > System Preferences > Network
2. Double click “Parallels NAT”
3. Change “Configure IPv4: Using DHCP” to “Off”
4. Click the “Show:” pulldown to find “Paralells Host-Guest”
5. Change “Configure IPv4: Using DHCP” to “Off”

At first read I didn’t even consider trying it as it seemed completely outlandish, after getting more frustrated I decided to give it a go. Worked immediately. Obviously, I created a new “Location” with these settings.

Also, if you can’t connect at all and see these errors:

Output size mismatch. Actual: 0, Expected: 237.

Check out this thread. Make sure to either reboot or restart the cvpnd process.

Quote of the Day: "No new growth"

My dad has his first post-chemo/radiation MRI on Tuesday and met with his radiologist yesterday. Good news all around with great phrases like “no new growth” and “diminished.” Yesterday was a good day, I hope to have many more of them.

Quote of the Day: "The mission is remission."

Short story: dad, brain tumor, cancerous, surgery, rehab, chemo, radiation…

Today he calls up and and says “the mission is remission,” not going to argue there.