Rose Cantine

I’m Andy Abramson, a PR professional, blogger, wine writer and travelling technology nomad.

As a Friend of Esme (FOE) who she knows loves wine, food, restaurants, travel, I’ve agreed to begin some posting here. Over time I’ll share my thoughts on what’s good, where to go and most importantly what to taste.
So join us all for the tastiest adventure in the blogosphere, right here on Rose Cantine!

My best friend, Mary Hodder, has launched a private beta of her start-up, Dabble.com. Dabble is the place where you bookmark, tag, assemble and share video that you find all over the Internet. You can see the videos that your friends point to, what they say about them, and so on. It’s a fabulous service and I’ve been using it for several months now.

To sign up for the private beta, go to Dabble.com.

My dear friend, Om Malik, has decided to leave Business 2.0 and start out on his own:

“I wanted to wait till end of this month, to announce my decision to strike out on my own, and my role within Business 2.0 going forward. I wanted to call people I love and respect, and tell them individually. An archaic notion in this era of email, IM and broadband – but still! And then life happened. I will get to my future plans later in this post, but for a few minutes indulge me.”

I am very happy for Om and excited because it’s so much more fun and inspiring to run your own show. I’ve been running Muniwireless.com for three years and I simply can’t go back to working for someone else again. I was always working on other people’s projects and one day, I asked myself, “When do I get to work on my own projects?” I had a lot of ideas and one day I decided, that’s it. Time to launch my own gig.

I should be used to being interviewed by now but I really hate listening to myself talk (either on a podcast or in a video interview). In the past week I have been interviewed by Glenn Fleishman (the Wi-Fi Networking News podcast series) and by David Weinberger (Supernova 2006 blogcast).

Go to the Supernova 2006 blogcast series to see the other interviews conducted by David.

I have recently been to several small hotels and B&Bs in Belgium that you should not miss:

The Patio Houses in Mechelen (lovely house with spa, friendly owners, great food): my review is posted here.

Verne Dreaming in Ghent: unexpected and over-the-top, it looks like a Shanghai bordello (review in Dutch).

Casa Bo in Falaen (Ardennes): a former girls’ school, it has been converted by a Belgian and American film maker couple into a peaceful getaway (review in Dutch).

I’ve been blogging since June 2003. That blog, Muniwireless.com, has turned into the resource for cities and regions that want to know about city- and countywide projects and post bids for wide-area wireless broadband deployments. It is also used by vendors, systems integrators, legislators, policy makers, community wireless activists, journalists and anyone who wants to know about municipal wireless broadband networks around the world.

In three years, Muniwireless has grown from a blog that I write in my pajamas to a small publishing and events company. I partnered with Microcast Communications to bring Muniwireless to this next stage. We organize conferences, seminars, webinars and roundtables. We also have a quarterly magazine. I still blog in my pajamas from time to time.

But I felt that I needed a platform and database for more personal stuff like travel notes, hotel and restaurant reviews, discussions on books, art and movies, and all the other things that interest me but are not appropriate for Muniwireless.com. So I started this personal blog.