If Wine Is Your Investment, This is Your Wine’s Annual Report
Wine can make a good investment if you’ve got wads of cash. To get into the arena where wine becomes an investment you need to be well on your financial way.
However, it’s not uncommon for people to occasionally buy a nice vintage bottle of wine as a one off. The intention is usually to drink it. But the motivation is often sentimental or nostalgic.
Regardless of the reason at some point wine needs drinking. Unless you’re a teetotaller or Scrooge McDuck it’s likely you’ll drink that one off purchase.
Let’s say you splashed out $3,300 on a bottle of Penfolds Bin 14 1955 Grange Hermitage. And the time rolled around to drink it. You open it up, pour it into the decanter, and realise very quickly it’s corked.
Imagine spending $3,300 on a dud bottle of wine. You can’t get a refund either. It’s buyer beware. However if you’d been able to drink it a year earlier it might have been fine. But you’ll never know because you couldn’t sample the bottle without removing the cork. And you were keeping it for that special occasion.
However you can now pour wine from a bottle without removing the cork. It’s thanks to an amazing invention called the Coravin system.
Sounds like a Dynamo trick doesn’t it? Pouring wine without removing the cork…well it’s no trick. The technology behind the device is simple yet ground-breaking.
You attach the device to the top of the bottle. A thin needle penetrates the cork to access the wine. The bottle is then pressurised with Argon which helps the wine flow through the needle and into your glass.
Importantly the use of Argon allows the wine to continue to mature as it would normally as it never comes into contact with oxygen. And the Argon has no impact on the wine whatsoever.
This means you can sample your wine anytime to ensure it’s still drinkable and potentially still worth something. Think of it like an annual report for your investment. A little sip each year just to make sure it’s performing as it should be.
You might be lucky enough to have a ’79 Romanée Conti Grand Cru Double Magnum lying in the cellar. If that’s the case the Coravin is right up your alley. But you might just want to take it one glass at a time…when the current fetching price per glass is about $3,154.
How the Cloud Might Help Treat Cancer
One of the things that’s going to help usher in a new era of healthcare and medicine is software. It will come in a few different forms though. One of those is through online platforms that gather, interpret and predict illness and disease in people.
What these platforms rely on is data, lots of it. The more data the better. And here’s why.
If 100% of the Australian population has their DNA collected at birth we’d have a database of 23.1 million DNA types. When you gather that amount of data you can analyse trends and patterns.
This allows doctors to do their job better as they can be more accurate and personalised with treatment of patients.
A huge database of genetic information would be priceless. Doctors would be able to treat illness and disease before it became serious.
Think about it like this. The BRCA gene is the infamous gene that increases the risk of breast and prostate cancer. It’s a medical fact variations of this gene significantly increase the chance of getting one of these types of cancer.
The other important part of this use of online medical databases is data sharing. Doctors around the world would be able to share information about treatment and treatment response of patients. It all goes a long way towards proactive medical treatment.
There are a few companies that have switched on to the fact that medical software will be big business.
One of those is AthenaHeath [NASDAQ: ATHN]. Athena provides electronic records, online patient management and analytics for medical professionals. Another is Syapse, a ‘cloud’ based platform designed to help diagnose and treat patients. Like Athena they collate and analyse data and information to help personalise the treatment of patients.
The medical profession is undergoing a huge technological shift. Stem cells, RNAi technology, personalised and regenerative medicine are all aspects of this new era. Now with companies like Athena and Syapse, the cloud is also helping to provide better healthcare to people in a much more personalised way.
Why L.A is Basically the Same as Greenpeace
If you live in a typical Australian household you’ll be well aware of the increasing cost of energy. And if you’ve been reasonably proactive about it you will have implemented some basic cost saving measures.
Power boards for multiple electrical devices, kill switches for entire sections of the house and possibly (and hopefully) replacing lights with LED’s.
You see the average household is smart. You know that if you make a number of simple changes around the house it’ll add up over the year to make some handy savings.
When it comes the State Government they typically don’t adopt the same approach when it comes to energy saving. First they release a study paper. Maybe consult with ‘industry bodies’. Turn the project into a 5 year plan and if their lucky (and still in power) go over budget and do it all wrong anyway.
If you apply the Keep It Simple Stupid (KISS) approach to an energy saving initiative like lighting the city streets we’d all be basking in the clear light of LED’s.
Thankfully one Australian city is at least having a crack. The LED Lighting Project in the City of Sydney is the ‘first of its kind in Australia’. It’s replacing about 6,500 street and park lights with LED’s over…the next 3 years. The City of Sydney website says,
‘The $7 million project is expected to save the City nearly $800,000 a year in electricity bills and maintenance costs due to the longer lifespan of LEDs.’
That’s not bad. There are 22,000 public lights installed in the City of Sydney. That makes it about 29.5% of street lights they’re replacing.
Look at the City of Los Angeles (L.A) if you want to see what real progression looks like. Compared to Sydney, L.A is as good as Greenpeace.
L.A has managed to roll out LED’s into 141,089 street lights. They estimate they’ll save $7,161,765 in electricity per year plus another $2.5 million per year in maintenance.
Greenies will be happy too as the annual reduction in CO2 is 47,563 metric tonnes.
These kinds of initiatives are good for the planet. There’s no doubt that action taken sooner is better action. Why is it going to take Sydney three years to roll out their project? I don’t know. Why isn’t every city in the world following L.A? I don’t know that either.
Adoption of technology is always going to be slow, especially when it comes to adoption by government. But in the meantime, in your household, you can make swift changes. Think about it next time your electricity bill comes in.
Sam Volkering+
Technology Analyst, Revolutionary Tech Investor
From the Archives…
Is This the Spark to Send Australian Property Crashing?
26-07-2013 – Kris Sayce
Why it’s Deflation…Not Inflation, that’s Heading Our Way
25-07-2013 – Vern Gowdie
Why You Must Avoid This Big Investing Mistake…
24-07-2013 – Kris Sayce
The Dark Side of Technology: Part 2
23-07-2013 – Sam Volkering
The Dark Side of Technology: Part 1
22-07-2013 – Sam Volkering