Julia’s Expanded Edition

The past 3 weeks has been an amazing time for me. So much as happened in the world of e-cigarettes, photography, the world stage, and, yes, my personal life. It’s practically been non-stop since my last column. But…there is much more interesting things going on right now than my personal life so it would seem narcissistic and overindulgent to do so… I’ll spare you the details and get right to the good stuff.

New eLiquid Reviews

In August we have several new eLiquid reviews in the works, and best of all they are all brand new to Spinfuel! The first up, scheduled for this coming Monday (or Tuesday at the latest) is our review and interview with VaporCraze! These guys are excellent flavorists and of all the flavors we’re reviewing we can’t think of a single one we didn’t like. I can’t wait to bring it to you.

Next up is Rocket Fuel Vapes! The Spinfuel Team B in Florida will be reviewing Rocket Fuel and the early word is that you’ll be hearing a lot more about them in the future. I don’t know much right now, but so far so good.

Potion Vape is scheduled after Rocket Fuel. We’ve yet to receive their submissions so there’s nothing to report. Still, they are new to Spinfuel and it feels great to bring in new vendors. Not that we don’t love the brands we’ve been working with for more than a year, it’s just that expanding our flavor palates is always a good thing.

John has a 3-flavor mini-review coming up with 3 very different eLiquids from our friends at Mountain Oak Vapors. He’s told me very little other than all 3 are all-day vapes, and when John considers an eLiquid as an all-day vape that usually means he loves it. Tranquil Tea, Independence, and Strawberry Smoothie are the flavors from MOV that he will bring to the pages of Spinfuel soon. They sound a lot different than his current lust for all things Chai, no?

Speaking of Chai, John is hard at work at developing his Vanilla Chai Latte and I think week after next he’ll bring another “Fun with Concentrates” to the pages of Spinfuel. There are no plans to produce the eLiquid for resale but if its as good as he hopes it will be I am hopeful he will try to find a vendor that can reproduce his recipe and put out a “Spinfuel Vanilla Chai Latte” under their brand name. Wouldn’t take be cool?

High End Vaping

I recently conducted an interview with a delightful woman from Vape Revolution. Read the Interview here. Vape Revolution, or simply VapeRev is an incredible company specializing in high-end European vaping gear. With names like “Atmizone, Atmomixani, J Creations, Team Rampage, VapeRev is bringing to the US a new (to us) level of “art meets function”. I can’t wait for you to meet them with our first interview.

High-end hardware isn’t the only thing VapeRev brings to the Vaping Universe though, they also offer several specialty eLiquids that are only available through VapeRev, including Mr. Good Vape, Juice by the Numbers, Jameson’s, FlavorZ by Joe, Midas, Classified, and others. Including, yes indeed, our friends from The Plume Room!

Chinese Hardware On The Upswing

Have you noticed the sudden influx of a whole lot of new products coming ashore from Innokin, SMOK, Joye, and others lately? We’re already written about several of them, including e-cigarettes like the SMOKTech Magneto and the Kamry K101, Clearomizers and tanks from SMOK and Vision, not to mention the ProTank and ProTank II. It was like the first 3 months of 2013 products trickled in and then the flood gates opened and we’re being deluged with cool new products that are so much better than anything produced in 2012. This is such an exciting time to be in the business, not to mention being a Vaper. The fine people at Innokin are sending us an exciting product that you may have seen around already (MyVaporStore has them in stock now) and we hope to bring you a review soon, the Innokin iTaste 134. Does this thing look cool or what?

Innokin iTaste 134 MyVaporStore

In The “Hard To Believe” Category…

The other day, Dave Foster, our Administrator (who works harder than anyone else at Spinfuel) received an email from an e-cigarette vendor that I simply have to reprint below. Now, I’m going to leave the name out to avoid any embarrassment because I don’t think they were doing anything more than following the ways this industry works. They clearly didn’t know what Spinfuel eMagazine was all about, despite our clear-cut message we put out there all the time. That message being “We cannot be bought”. Surely many others can be bought or this type of nonsense wouldn’t exist.

Here’s the part of the email you need to see:

“Now, because you own a great E Cigarette online magazine, I would like to know what it would take for you to write a positive review about our Electronic Cigarettes and to encourage your subscribers to visit our website.  Certainly, we will be more than happy to send you a sample of our XXXXX disposable E Cigarette in order to help you write your review.  I look forward to hearing from you.”

WHAT WOULD IT TAKE FOR YOU TO WRITE A POSTIVE REVIEW…

ARGH!!!!

This is the kind of thing Dave says he gets all the time, but he decided to show us this one because it came from a big company, one we have never reviewed, and will never review. This is how disgusting some of these businesses are. Just because the Mainstream Media are so easily bought these days by crooked politicians doesn’t mean online magazines like ours will EVER be bought, not even for a million dollars. And here’s the simple, but honest truth, no one here, not in the North office or the South office, could live with themselves if they sold their soul for a few shackles for some piss-poor cookie-cutter e-cigarette brand, knowing they could make money from lies we would have to tell.

Oh, and to top it off, Dave shows us another email, this one from some guy that owns a pure “affiliate site”, where every link is full of affiliate code and all the top brands are cig-a-like shit that shell out 30% and 40% commissions to jerks like him who would sell an e-cigarette made of dog poo if he thought he could make a commission.

The eMail:

“It’s my pleasure to let you know that I am interested in gaining a few text links from your website Spinfuel.com. I work for a number of sites vary from Electronic Cigarette, ECig and given the similarity with the content of your site, I feel it would great to discuss about the advertisement prospect. I will provide all required information, as well as the link text and the URL. It would be great to hear back from you about this.”

“SIMILARITY WITH THE CONTENT OF YOUR SITE”???? Check out the site (link removed in November 2015 because of new ownership of the website in question.)  this guy runs and you tell us, are we crazy? Do YOU see similarities?

It took Dave half dozen emails to get this guy to stop emailing him. He kept pestering and pestering, and then Dave stopped replying to his stupid emails and he finally stopped sending them. I think he got the message. But you know what? This guy will continue to build his network of links and back links and so many people with no experience about how e-cigarettes really work and how great a difference there is between a Green Smoke/South Beach crap and a Triple 7 or Halo G6. It’s just sad this crap is allowed to happen.

Sponsors Versus Advertisers – Semantics?

We receive at least a couple of emails every day asking about advertising in Spinfuel eMagazine. As you can see, there are a few more advertisers here today than there was a year ago. Four of the spots we sell to an advertising agency because, to be completely honest, they pay well and they pay steady and regardless what other may think, Spinfuel needs to generate income or we simply can’t exist. None of us are rich, you know?

Anyway, while we do have final say over what company will be shown in those spots we’ve decided that as long as they aren’t scam alert brands we will go ahead an let them advertise. But, they are “advertisers”, not sponsors.

A sponsor is a company who has decided to advertise in Spinfuel eMagazine AND a company we have vetted. In other words, a company we feel proud to show on our pages. There is currently a waiting list of advertisers looking for a spot in Spinfuel, and that’s a nice thing to have, but the number of companies we have turned away from Spinfuel would make your head swim. Companies that sell overpriced and/or junk won’t find a spot on Spinfuel. We want you to be able to trust the Sponsors you see in Spinfuel and although we cannot promise to get it right 100% of the time, we work hard to make sure we get it as close as we possibly can.

Lastly….

Spinfuel eMagazine is growing faster than ever these days. We have already surpassed our projections for December 2014 in July, so we’re 18 months ahead of projections. The reason is because of you, our readers, who stop by everyday to read something new or catch up on something older. Whatever the reason, we owe you everything. Our mutual trust is our bond. We will never do anything intentional to break that bond, no matter how hard some companies press us to “play the game”. We will never play their game. That is our promise to you.

So thank you for allowing us to become your source for great eLiquid reviews, hardware reviews, and even some of our controversial positions on the world stage or the wrong-headedness of politicians all over the world that want to see the only effective means to rid the world of tobacco-related illness and early death, e-cigarettes.

From fighting the e-cigarette scam artists to the push back on the politician’s hell bent on stopping the popularity of vaping, we promise to tell you the truth, every day.

Until next time,

Julia Hartley-Barnes