Billed as a 'virtual taste search engine', Aromicon lists thousands of wines categorised by every imaginable detail. Wines can be browsed by region, grape variety or food pairing, as well as searched by keyword. There's also the option to browse according to taste, featuring a huge range of subtleties to satisfy the requirements of the most practiced palette—everything from 'kiwi' and 'butter', to peculiarities like 'animal' and 'blood' (luckily you can opt to exclude those).

Although the site is in German, it's almost navigable by its icons alone—hence the name. And in a visually innovative twist, a short animation graphically displays a wine's unique blend of flavours, showing berries, chocolate, pipes, etc swirling around in a glass. The concept is a spin-off from the Burg Giebichenstein University of Art and Design, and features a vintage revenue model: the site essentially functions as a fully-featured affiliate sales portal linking to several German wine merchants. One to serve up for wine-lovers who don't speak German, or to partner with if you're in the wine business?

Website: www.aromicon.com
Contact: kontakt@aromicon.com

Spotted by: Franziska Luh

We've seen the Wikipedia model applied to car design, a video dictionary and an online publishing platform. The latest? Foodista, an online cooking encyclopedia whose recipes can be edited by anyone.

Launched late last year, Seattle-based Foodista is a collaborative project to build the world's largest, highest-quality cooking encyclopedia. The site says it is the first to organize and cross-link the basic elements of cooking: foods, or the basic ingredients; recipes, or combinations of ingredients; cooking techniques; and kitchen tools. Rather than include hundreds of recipes for the same basic result, however—the way many recipe sites do—Foodista aims instead to perfect a few key recipes through the collaborative editing process. Thousands of high-resolution photos from the Flickr.com Creative Commons currently illustrate the topics on the site—though not the results of specific recipes, as TechCrunch points out—and users can also upload their own photos. Content is fully editable, and a raft of tools aimed at food bloggers include embeddable widgets to forge automated links from Foodista to specific food blogs. Ultimately, Foodista plans to support itself through online advertising.

Will a thousand cooks produce a better recipe, as the site implicitly promises? Or will the collaborative process reduce each of the site's recipes to the most bland, lowest-common-denominator version, as TechCrunch suggests it might? Time will tell. In the meantime, one to watch—or get involved in? (Related: 52 recipe contests to spawn crowdsourced cookbook — Personalized cooking: recipes match cravings — Customized cookbooks stir in online recipes.)

Website: www.foodista.com
Contact: www.foodista.com/contact

Spotted by: Murtaza Ali Patel

Puzzle books are big sellers, but generally not much to look at. Aiming to capture that gap in the market is a series of eyecatching, pocket-sized books. The Pocket Posh line includes about two dozen books, which retail for USD 7.99. Each features 100 puzzles: crosswords, hangman, word searches, logic puzzles and various forms of sodoku.

Floral and geometric designs grace their covers, and the books have rounded corners and elastic band closures that mimic Moleskine notebooks. Developed by The Puzzle Society and published by Andrews McMeel, Pocket Posh is targeting female puzzlers. Proof once again that everything can be upgraded to appeal to design-sensitive consumers. One for other publishers to be inspired by? (Related: Toilet seat covers, upgraded — Chic vomit bags for morning-sick moms.)

Website: www.andrewsmcmeel.com
Contact: www.andrewsmcmeel.com/contact.html

What's better than reading? Having someone read to you. Even better—having the author read to you. When book lovers visit an author's reading, they generally know his or her work. Aiming to introduce readers to authors they aren't yet familiar with, zehnSeiten (German for ten pages) promotes writers through videos that feature them reading ten pages from their latest novel.

Available both online and as an iPhone app, the videos are simple, fixed-camera affairs. No dramatic introductions or filmed scenes, just black and white recordings of authors sitting at a table and reading from their work. By eliminating frills, the focus is on the author and production time and costs are kept to a minimum. Videos range in length from ten to thirty minutes and feature work from a variety of publishers. New recordings are added weekly. zehnSeiten is the brainchild of five friends from Munich—an idea they had over drinks. It's a concept that's easily adaptable to others categories or other countries, at relatively low cost.

Website: www.zehnseiten.de
Contact: info@zehnseiten.de

Spotted by: Franziska Luh

P.S. For those of you who don't speak German, zehnSeiten adds that Tim Parks' and Paul Beatty's videos are in English.

Along with yoga's rise in popularity has come a raft of DVD and online classes offering a potentially less expensive and more convenient alternative to live, scheduled instruction. Such prerecorded offerings often focus on the fittest and most photogenic yogis, however—without the real-world masses—which may be good for education, but can be demoralizing for those who are less than perfectly toned and proficient. Enter YogaVibes, a site that offers recordings of real-world yoga classes, complete with fellow classmates in all shapes and sizes.

North Carolina-based YogaVibes offers a wide variety of online classes of varying lengths and difficulty levels, taught by actual yoga instructors from top studios around the world. Rather than situating those instructors against breathtaking backdrops for glossy, fully staged productions, however, the classes featured are real ones with real students of all ability levels. The site explains: "Our classes are authentic. With few exceptions, we film real students, who come in all shapes, sizes and abilities. We know they’ll inspire your yoga practice, both on and off the mat." A series of free vignettes are available on YogaVibes, as are an assortment of paid classes, which are typically priced at USD 10 for 14-day access. Alternatively, a Class Pass offers five full-length online classes for 30 days for USD 20. YogaVibes gives five percent of its class fees to charities including yogaHOPE, Yoga Bear and Street Yoga.

It seems reasonable that just as consumers value the opinions of twinsumers when making purchase decisions, so they value the inclusion of others at—and even below—their own ability level when learning something new. The lesson to be learned? Co-consumers can remain a critical part of the equation, even in an online setting; remove them, and you may just remove part of your service's value.

Website: www.yogavibes.com
Contact: www.yogavibes.com/pages/contact

Spotted by: Sarah Anne Jackson

It's been less than a year since the launch of Stack, the curated subscription service that samples a variety of independent magazines each month. We covered the UK-based service last December, just after it launched, so were pleased to learn recently that it's already expanding to North America.

Just to recap, the original Stack service offers readers a choice of receiving six, eight or 12 issues delivered each year. Subscribers never know exactly which magazines they'll get in any given month because Stack selects what it sees as the best issue from among a roster of multiple indie magazines, including UK-based Bad Idea and Electric Sheep, and Netherlands-based Foam. Now, with the launch of Stack America this week, the service is available in a version tailored to American consumers as well. The magazines sent out by Stack America will be different from those chosen for the original Stack service, focusing primarily—but not exclusively—on magazines made in the US, Canada and South America. The first delivery will go out in early January, Pricing for delivery of six magazines per year is USD 71.99 for the US, USD 119.99 for Canada, USD 139.99 for Mexico and USD 159.99 for the rest of the world.

Andrew Losowsky, CEO of New England-based Stack America, explains: "There’s a huge wealth of independent magazines made in America, and there are lots of readers who want to get hold of them. But there are problems of marketing and distribution—small magazines find it hard to promote themselves effectively, and with many Americans living out of reach of a good magazine store, it can often be impossible for people to discover and pick up new titles." Like Meatpaper, which will be the first magazine that Stack America sends out.

Similar in many ways to the curated offerings we recently covered from Hipstery and ShoeDazzle, ad-supported Stack may just have hit upon a model that will make independent magazines sustainable. The company's expansion to the US, meanwhile, "paves the way to more franchises in the future," founder Steve Watson says. One to bring to independent readers in *your* neck of the woods...?

Website: www.stackmagazines.com
Contact: info@stackmagazines.com

When we recently reported on Verizon's sponsorship of the New York Mets' interactive big screen, we noticed that the telecom giant is also bringing social media to the small screen, with a Twitter widget for its FiOS fiber optic TV service. The widget, freely available to all FiOS subscribers, is displayed on one half of the TV screen, allowing viewers to continue watching their favourite show while following a related feed or discussing it with their followers on Twitter.

The Twitter widget, available to the approximately 2.5 million households with FiOS TV, has been very successful so far, with some 1 million users in the first few days. It's part of a suite of applications available to FiOS customers through the service's 'Widget Bazaar', which also includes a Facebook app—proving popular for picture sharing—and Blip.tv, which hosts user-produced video content. Following in the footsteps of Apple's trendsetting App Store, Verizon has announced that it will also be opening the Widget Bazaar to third-party developers.

Older technologies that have sought to integrate the web and TV have failed to make much of an impact, and it remains to be seen whether new television interfaces will be able to compete with the laptops, netbooks and smartphones that have already joined their owners on the living room couch. The larger implications are less uncertain: by giving viewers real-time connectivity as they watch, Verizon is tapping into a growing consumer trend. More about that in our sister-site's latest briefing on nowism.

Website: www.verizon.com/fios
Contact: www22.verizon.com/content/ContactUs

Spotted by: Duncan Rickelton

If Facebook users can conjure up real-world flowers, candy and drinks from within the social network, then why not give them a way to capture their favourite Facebook images in a real-world photo album? Better yet, why not make it free with a little advertising support? That, indeed, is just what HotPrints does, thanks to a set of new apps for both Facebook and Bebo.

HotPrints' new HotBook app gives Facebook and Bebo users a way to bring their social network photos to life. Users simply indicate which images they'd like to include in their 16-page, soft-cover HotBook; there are currently nine themes to choose from in designing the compilation, which can be shipped anywhere in the world. Perhaps best of all, UK-based HotPrints has teamed up with select partners to sponsor one free book per month per customer, including even shipping and handling. Advertisements are included, but not on the same pages as the photos; rather, they're removable full-page inserts. In addition, for every 10 friends who install the HotPrints application, HotPrints credits the user for another free book. Those who would rather skip the ads, meanwhile, can pay USD 2.99—GBP 1.99—for an ad-free version.

With more than 300 million active users and 2 billion photos uploaded each month on Facebook alone, it would be difficult to find a better place to give out free photo love. Add to that the examples we've already seen of free photocopies, printing, notepaper, phone calls and notebooks, and the message is clear: there will never be too much free love!

Website: www.hotprints.com
Contact: info@hotprints.com

On most levels, news and the internet are a match made in heaven. Instant publishing, access to a global audience, hyperlinks, multimedia, etc. Nonetheless, many publishers are struggling to create a profitable business based on advertising alone, and are considering moving at least part of their content from free to fee.

Aiming to make it simpler for publishers to charge for their content, newly-launched bitcents offers an easy to integrate micropayment system. Instead of each publisher having its own subscription and payment method, readers will be able pay once to access paid content—archived articles, in-depth stories and other types of (premium) material—from all publishers working with bitcents. The company adds an interesting twist: it's inviting developers to create subscriber networks. Each network will recruit its own readers, who will have access to content from all of bitcents' publishers. The idea is that subscriber networks will create their own tools and/or methods of content curation to differentiate themselves from other networks and to attract their own audiences. In return, they'll receive a cut of the revenues created by sending readers to publishers' paid content. (A sample subscriber network can be found here: tppnce.)

Of course, for bitcents to work, it will need to attract enough publishers who produce content that readers are willing to pay for. Meanwhile, other ventures—like the soon-to-be-launched Journalism Online—are also working to create a new economic model for the news industry. Keep a close eye on this space—change is in the air, and business opportunities won't be far behind.

Website: www.bitcents.com
Contact: info@bitcents.com

Spotted by: Anne Hansen

It should no longer come as any surprise to brands large or small that they are the subject of conversation online—whether they participate or not. Launched by Seth Godin, Brands in Public is a new site that aggregates all those diverse conversations and presents them through a unified public-facing dashboard that gives any brand the chance to lead the discussion.

A Google search on a brand name may retrieve many of the online conversations going on out there, but Squidoo-powered Brands in Public differs by virtue of the fact that the brand in question can curate the conversation. By sponsoring the page about its brand, a participating company can edit the introductory text, highlight the tweets and posts it likes, point to its blog, videos, Twitter feed and corporate website, and even—if it's truly bold—highlight ways to get in touch. No censorship is involved, since the automatic feed of conversations from across the web—via Twitter, blogs, YouTube, Google Trends and more—is just that: automatic. Rather, it is through the left-hand side of any brand page that the company in question can answer its critics, highlight its fans, contribute questions or quizzes, or point to its official materials. So, rather than passively monitoring the public conversation, in other words, participating brands actually coordinate it and shape it as it happens. Brands in Public is supported by Boston-based BzzAgent. The cost of participation for a brand is USD 400 per month; no long-term commitment is required. For nonprofits, however, there's the chance to be selected for a free Brands in Public page, thanks to a special selection process at the beginning of every month.

There's no doubt consumers will talk about pretty much any and every brand under the sun—again and again, in forum after forum, and probably with widely varying results. It's by having a hand in those conversations, however, that brands can embrace what our sister site would call foreverism and turn transparency tyranny into transparency triumph. Bottom line, as Brands in Public puts it: "People are talking about you. Are you going to show up?"

Website: www.squidoo.com/brandsinpublic/hq
Contact: bzz@bzzagent.com

Website: www.lanima.co.uk
Contact info@lanima.co.uk

Spotted by: Cecilia Biemann