A group of us went up to a local winery the weekend before last to help harvest grapes. As I was picking Baco Noir grapes, I was thinking about all the steps needed to turn the grapes into a good wine, then all the steps needed to actually turn the wine into revenue for the business. Let's see, a relatively unknown grape, produced by a winery off the beaten path, with limited resources during harvest time -- is this situation that different from many of the 6,000 plus wineries all across this country? Probably not.

So, how could technology help with some of these steps? If the winery had a mailing list of customers and interested persons (obviously built up over time), that could be used to get people into the vineyard and winery to provide additional manpower during harvest. I'm guessing that there would be a lot of interest in being part of the winemaking process. Combine that with an effective website, blog and an online ordering function, and the winery can explain how/why their wines are good, generate interest, and provide a way to get the wine. Would that solve all the winery's issues? No, but it could fill some holes in the current business model.

Overall an enjoyable day, and further confirmation that what we do here is important.

We just finished our annual PCI Data Security Standards asssessment and have made sure that we are still in compliance for accepting and storing credit card data. Luckily, having done over 70 computer control audits in what feels like another lifetime, this process was relatively easy, although the 200 questions did take some time to answer and verify with our policies and procedures.

While previously there was an exemption for small companies, now every merchant that accepts credit cards must complete an annual assessment in order to be compliant with this requirement (www.pcisecuritystandards.org for more info). If you use an e-commerce service like ours (WineWeb), then the process is simpler with about 30 questions in the assessment. However, if your company has it's own shopping cart software running on a web server and you store credit card data electronically, then you're into the long questionnaire, which requires things like an "Encryption Key Custodian Acknowledgement" and an "Incident Response Plan". You've got those, right?

Many wineries are focusing on the environmental impact of producing their wines, and while that's good, it's only part of the overall green effort. Wines & Vines published an article on a study prepared by a student in Nova Scotia that shows that a consumer going to the wine shop to buy a wine can add half to the overall environmental impact of that product. This raises a lot of questions in my mind, like what's the impact of making a special trip to buy one bottle versus a case, versus stopping by the wine shop on your way home from work, versus having wine shipped directly to you. It would be great to see an eco-conscious winery show the environmental savings (if there is any) from having their wine shipped directly to the consumer. Could "Go green, have your wine shipped" be a slogan in the near future?

It' s been three days since Google released their web browser, Chrome. I attempted to do all my work yesterday using Chrome to see how it would perform and to see if it had all the features that I use in a typical day. I usually have numerous browser windows open as I setup new websites and test out new functionality on the website, so it was working hard all day.

Overall, I was pleased. I liked the minimalist interface and the address bar that is used for bookmarks, recent pages and search queries. I thought it was as fast as Firefox 3, both of which blow past Internet Explorer. Our point-of-sale application was faster running under Chrome than Firefox, probably due to Google's new Javascript routines, as the POS contains a lot of Javascript and AJAX. Chrome can make a web application run as a desktop application similar to Firefox's Prism product, which provides a very minimalist interface and more speed. I did have to load Firefox once because of a quirk with a form field, and I had to load IE once, only to see if IE was doing anything weird in rendering a new website design.

There's a lot of cool stuff under the hood that translate into improved security and performance. So, if you're still using IE, you now have two better browser choices in Chrome and Firefox. Happy downloading.

Recently we learned of a wine-related website that had been hacked at a particularily bad time (not that there is a good time to be hacked). While we sympathize with them on the effort required to get their site back up, we were a bit concerned as their site was running the ColdFusion software like ours. After some research, we're able to rest a bit easier.

The hack was a cross-site scripting attack, where someone adds malicious database code to a URL or a web form field. If the web program that processes the data expects an ID field in which to access the database, doesn't validate that it's just an ID field, and passes the entire field to the database access routine, then bad things can happen. Luckily our websites have several layers of protection to not allow this to happen to us.

We've noticed lately an increase in the frequency and sophistication of attempted attacks to our websites, but have considered them an annoyance to our schedule, as we typically alert the hacker's ISP of the attempted hack. Good programming practices and keeping up-to-date on server software is always a good defense.

I was pondering our point-of-sale application and thinking about the upcoming Family Winemaker's tasting event. A winery could take a laptop with a broadband Internet card and could use our POS application to take orders in real-time. No more paper order forms with illegible handwriting. They could even attach a magnetic card reader to a USB port and swipe credit cards -- all quite cool.

Now, for those wineries worried about table space and wine spilling on your laptop, here's an even more high-tech idea -- use your iPhone as a point-of-sale terminal. Being web-based, the WineWeb point-of-sale application can run on an iPhone.

My appologies if this sounds like a sales pitch, but imagine the possibilities. The concept that point-of-sale equals tasting room is gone. Now a winery can sell wine, event reservations and wine clubs whereever they happen to be. Cool stuff to ponder.

OK, I admit this may be a bit of a stretch, but since this blog is about technology and wine, here goes.

News was released today that scientists have discovered more about the origins and functions of the Antikythera Mechanism, an ancient mechanical "computer" that dates to the 1st century B.C. Since its discovery by divers around 1900, much has been speculated about this advanced technology. Now, in addition to tracking astronomical events in the solar system, the researchers found that one of the dials was dedicated to tracking the 4 year cycle of the ancient Olympiad games. The month names on the 19 year calendar have now been determined to be Corinithian, which provides evidence as to its origin. Interesting stuff -- more details at the research project website.

Since wine has been a part of Greek culture for over 4,000 years, the chances are good that the ship carrying the Antikythera Mechanism was also carrying wine. While the sailors may have relied on the Mechanism for navigation, they very likely didn't require a "computer" to sell their wine in other locations. My how times have changed. Now, in our "advanced technology culture" we don't require a computer to travel from one state to another, but we need one to figure out how and where we can get wine from a winery to a person in another state, given the ever-changing laws restricting the free trade of wine.

So the question of the day: Has civilization progressed in this area in the past 2,000 years?

It's official -- yesterday we announced our point-of-sale service for wineries. And no, we're not selling specialized hardware that only works with our solution. The WineWeb POS is a web-based application that can run in a browser on any computer or as a desktop application on Windows or on a Mac. Think of it, a laptop computer is all a winery needs to process tasting room sales and integrate with their online sales and customer data. A credit card reader, receipt printer and cash drawer can be added to speed transaction processing. There's a lot of functionality in this system -- you can read the press release and view our services description and pricing.

The way that sales tax is calculated to customers in Washington state will change on July 1. I just read a blog post at ShipCompliant that called it a streamlined style. While the tax reporting may be streamlined, the rate calculation is anything but. It's a destination-based tax, where the tax rate is based on the location of the customer. OK so far, as several states do that. The complexity comes into play as the tax rates are not based on county or city boundaries, but must be determined based on ZIP Code plus 4. All e-commerce systems and other order processing systems must be revised to either require entry of ZIP+4 for Washington customers or determine the ZIP+4 based on the customer's address. We've prepared for this change by enhancing our sales tax calculation routines and loading over 30,000 records that correspond ZIP+4 ranges to sales tax location codes.

We're working with some new technology that allows us to take a web application and make it into a desktop application. There are a few tools out there for this, with Adobe AIR getting the most press. As we began developing our point-of-sale system for wineries, the idea of having more control over the application on the desktop was appealing. We began developing it in Flex, which uses Flash for the user interface, but we soon became overwhelmed by the amount of additional technologies and approaches that we'd need to learn.

About that time, we found Prism from Mozilla. They're the company that produces the Firefox browser. It's a similar concept, allowing you to take a web application and package it into a desktop application that can run under Windows, Mac OS and Linux. The cool thing is that you can still run the application from a browser, but for specific applications like a POS, you get some extra benefits. First off, it's faster since you don't have the overhead of a full-featured browser. You can also customize the user interface, give the application a desktop icon, and provide better access to devices connected to the PC.

This isn't for every web application, but it reverses the development approach. Now instead of developing a desktop application that can access the Internet, you develop an Internet application that can access the desktop.