I’ve been telling people over the last few months, “a really great mobile app would be one where you could scan the wine barcode or label in a wine shop or grocery store and get average point ratings from trusted sources as well as price information that would tell you whether you were getting a bargain.”
Last night Brad Rosen, who was with uLocate (which owns Where.com and purchased Rosen’s Zync), contacted me to tell me of his new effort: Drync (pronounced ”drink”). It’s an iPhone app ($4.99) and does pretty much everything I’ve been talking about except enable you to scan a barcode. However, you can search by name for wines.
What’s the local angle? I suppose one could build out “where to buy” information, but that’s more relevant in a desktop app, when you’ve read a review and want to know where you can get it. In a mobile app, you’re typically going to be in the store standing right in front of the wine or wines you want information about.
Here’s a demo video.
November 20, 2008 at 7:04 pm |
Greg –
Glad to hear that you’ve been thinking about this! What’s funny is that the “barcode thing” is where we started. I actually had one of our engineers spend a month trying to solve that problem.
Two problems became quickly evident:
* lighting conditions (in restaurants etc), combined with lack of flashes on phones and bottle curvature, make the task of doing “border detection” on barcodes super difficult.
* there is no centralized wine barcode dbase, anywhere. In fact, wineries recycle barcodes once a vintage is sold out.
We also looked at using actual humans (yes!) to transcribe labels (mechanical turk, indian team), but again, picture quality in so many situations was just too poor. That, and the fact that many many French labels are nearly impossible to read in broad daylight (cursive etc.).
That said, I agree that it would be very useful to snap a photo of a barcode or label and get a market price, reviews etc., so we’re not giving up and have new ideas and technologies we’re exploring.
-brad
November 20, 2008 at 7:19 pm |
How funny. What you say makes sense. I bought the app.
November 24, 2008 at 9:53 pm |
With regard to your Comment – “there is no centralized wine barcode dbase, anywhere” – that’s not exactly true; I maintain one. With regard to your follow-on Comment – “In fact, wineries recycle barcodes once a vintage is sold out” – that only applies to Wines at the Wineries themselves. At Retail, Vintages can last on Store Shelves for years. Must say though, of all the iPhone Applications I’ve seen for Wine, yours is the best.
November 24, 2008 at 10:12 pm |
I have been using this quite a bit.