Champagne, my dear!

Over the last year I've heard more and more about how the production of champagne can't keep up with the demand. Rich people from Russia, China, India, etc have all discovered champagne, want to be seen drinking it and are thus throwing lots of money at France to get their fair share of that liquid gold. But the production resources are pretty limited and they are not growing!

But, hey, wait... That sounds like a window of opportunity opening, doesn't it?!

Suppose you could get your hands on some really nice champagne for storage. Mind you we are not talking a bottle or two here, but I would guess at least a 100 to a 1000.
Hopefully the price will skyrocket in a few years, with profits of several 100%. But who knows?
There is also the risk of the stock going bad, as explained here.

Price per bottle for an agable champagne is around SEK 500 (USD 60) - see this swedish page.
But this is probably the cheapest you can get away with. Going for the really good stuff will probably be a lot more expensive per bottle, more like USD 100 - 1000.

So the cheap deal means a startup cost of SEK 50 000 - 500 000 (USD 6 000 - 60 000)...
And the real deal is probably right out.
I mean, doing just a few boring bottles is not really gonna make you a millionaire, is it?
However, you could start a company, bring in some investors, someone with the knowledge, ... Same old, same old for starting a business. But since I like a business that can start out small this isn't for me. So I'm out!

Hmm... Or maybe I'll just postpone this one until I got some more cash lying around.

PS. By the way, did you know that the little aluminum plate placed on top of the cork is a valuable collectors' item?

Spotify - release me!

About a week ago I got an invite from Spotify! Oh joy, oh happiness! It was like an early Christmas gift. And it was everything I dreamed of... Eh, well. I guess there are some flaws like missing certain artists and stuff, but we gotta see the big picture here - this, my friends, is the future.

Wishlist:
- add songs from your harddrive to your playlists
- get Led Zeppelin and Beatles in there - come on!
- add some kind of social collaborative filtering recommendations in there
- more invites, plz!

Actually, I had a similar idea some time ago. All media should be online and centralised: music, images, movies, books, etc... It just seemed like too big a project for one small guy to carry out. So, thanks Spotify! We are on our way to the future!

Deepbluray.com - a new launched project

The other night I had a vision. Another project of mine, LagradRom.se, has targeted only Sweden. It targets a very thin segment of liquor enthusiasts, those who like ages rum. Sweden is not a big country which leads to not-so-many visitors. In fact, I get a lot of visitors from other countries. But since most of them probably aren't very fluent in swedish they simply leave after the first page downloaded.

Anyway, I thought I'd try and create some kind of global site to see if there would be a difference in the number of visitors. I mean, there are a lot of people out there... With this project I could also realise some of the ideas I have had piled up:

1. target a global market - not just Sweden
2. experiment with meta keywords (misspellings, missed letters, etc) - probably have to code some kind of expander
3. go for "hot" products like music, books or movies - avoid troublesome products like liqour...
4. go for digital products - something that simply requires a harddrive and a download for distribution
5. automatic discovery and collection of resources - no more manual labour for me!
   
6. try out Joomla - no more of my own homegrown CMS
   

Well, the project has been launched with its own domain and all, www.deepbluray.com :

1. Yes.
2. Did that. A small hack to expand a list of search terms into all possible combinations based on the keyboard layout and some other tricky stuff..!
   
3. Blu-ray. I've wanted to create some kind of database of available blu-ray movies for a long time. Here I go.
4. Blu-ray is a digital product. I could turn this site into an eshop if all works out.. :)
5. Well, not there yet. I simply need more hours per night...
6. Yes. It uses Joomla. I know. It's PHP. I'm a Java guy. But it's so easy to use I haven't had to see ay PHP code yet! Thank God!

As of now, I'm just waiting for Google to index my few movie-pages...
Come on Google - just do it!

Storage solutions for the masses

I got home from a party last night, read a few blogposts and somehow stumbled upon someone predicting that simple, seemingly infinite storage for a modest amount of money would be a winning idea.


So I just had to look up some numbers and make a quick and dirty budget for such a project.

Basic reqs:

• cloud based
• unlimited storage
• simple install and usage
• involve JGroups in some way (so I can try it out in a "real" project...)
  

Amazon S3 provides a cloud service for large object storage.
Amazon SimpleDB provides a DB where customer data could be held.

Unfortunately, my quick budget showed that breaking even was probably the best scenario that could be achieved. This was due to Amazon's costs and the customer's price couldn't be set too high.

Google's pricing is very similar - check it out!

Hmm. Guess I'll just do it anyway. Someday. When I got nothing else more interesting to do. Just so I can try out that JGroups-thingy...