In a recent blog post, I touched on some killer use-cases for mobile wine apps. Namely, finding specific wines at local retail stores, and wine search based on barcode or image recognition technology. Given the “barcode buzz” of late, I thought I’d revisit barcodes and do a bit more of a deep dive. This post will focus on the barcode use-case and compare it to a more traditional type-ahead text entry scenario.

If you’re not into reading the detail, the conclusion is that using an “intelligent”, well-tuned type-ahead interface where you type a few letters from each of the words on the wine label and let the app fill in the correct words, gets you a more accurate result more often and *much* more quickly.

Wine Search Using Barcode Recognition

Barcodes are pervasive in consumer products because they work and make identifying the contents of a package fast and accurate. The reasons they work include, on the technology side - dedicated hardware, good lighting conditions,  generally flat packaging, and an easily adapted environment to improve reading conditions ie. you can move the product around until you get a good “read”. And on the data side, there is a standards body that manages the database of UPC codes (barcodes), ensuring “clean data” (ie no duplication or re-use of codes) and that all product codes are accessible centrally.

No doubt the world of wine could benefit from a similar structure and technology. Scanning a wine barcode and receiving detailed information, including market prices for a given wine is compelling. The problems, as I outlined in my previous post, are the following:

• We don’t have dedicated hardware with a little red light that creates a specific, readable reflection. Nor do we have flat packaging or good lighting conditions. We have a digital, low-ish resolution camera with no flash, curved bottles, and are typically in a store or restaurant with low light. That said, some of the new technology, like Red Laser by Occipital, is excellent and does its best to correct for the inherent shortcomings of using a phone for barcode recognition.
• There is no single central database of unique wine UPC codes.
• Only 30% of wineries use UPC codes at all today, and of them, *very* few boutique producers use them and their use is sparse outside the US
• Wines found in restaurants do not typically have barcodes on them
• Because there is a cost associated with generating new UPC codes for each SKU, wineries re-use UPC codes. This ambiguity requires that the user visually guide the barcode recognition system when there are multiple matches for a given barcode.
• Oftentimes, wineries will use a single barcode for all of their wines. That’s right - one code for all years of all wines. Oops.

That said, let’s get to some empirical data…

Now that there are some barcode-based systems for smartphones on the market, we took one to a retail store and started doing barcode lookups. Here are the results:

Overall accuracy (meaning that it found the wine on first “snap”): 48%

But that data needs qualification. First of all, the system basically only worked on US wines, and our data was skewed towards US wines. Here is a more granular breakdown:

US Wines - 11 out of 12 wines were recognized correctly (92%)

International Wines - 3 out of 17 were recognized correctly (18%)

Digging deeper, we found:

• NO vintages were available through the barcode recognition system. In other words, the user always has to identify the year if the system comes back with the right wine.
• 3 out of 29 wines were from producers that used the same barcode for every wine they produced.
• For 8 out of 29 wines, the barcode was read correctly but they were not found in the database.

The time it takes to use one of these systems to look up and identify the correct wine, assuming it is available in the UPC database, is about 20-30 seconds.

So, while the technology is undoubtedly amazing, factors outside of our control limit the usability and usefulness of using barcode recognition for wine search. But what are the alternatives, given that no one wants to sit in store or restaurant tapping at their phone for 5 minutes while people stare at them?

Text Based Wine Search Using Typeahead

Text based search on a phone is pain in the ass by any measure. We tap tap tap and then wait for a result to come back. At Drync, we’ve heard from our users that they don’t enjoy that process, and we ourselves have gotten fed up with having to do it.

So Rob, one of our engineers who is into solving really hard problems, gave himself a Thanksgiving puzzle to solve: could we analyze our 600,000+ historical wine searches done by users, and the 100,000 unique words they used in describing those searches, and implement a type-ahead system that pro-actively tries to figure out what you’re typing and fill in the words?

(For those of you who aren’t familiar with the phrase “type-ahead”, it’s a technique commonly in desktop applications - like Outlook/Mac Mail and web browsers - and on the web when a user is being asked to type something, like a search query. The Google app for the iPhone does this beautifully, if you want to see an effective example.

To cut to the chase, Rob was successful on his typeahead journey and was able to reduce the number of “keystrokes” (tapstrokes actually) by ~50% on average when searching for a wine using Drync Wine. We were impressed.

As an example:

Before, if you were searching for “chateau de Beaucastel Chateauneuf-du-Pape 2004″, you’d probably type “2004 chateau beaucastel chateauneuf du pape”. That’s 43 tapstrokes.

With Rob’s typeahead system, here’s what you’d type:

ch <select chateau from the typeahead list>

beauc <select beaucastel from list>

chat <select chateauneuf-du-pape from list>

That’s 14 taps, or a 67% reduction in tapstrokes. Also, it only took ~10 seconds to enter, and another 2 seconds for Drync Wine to look up the wine. Pretty good in my book.

You draw your own conclusion, but ours is that a typeahead interface is quite a bit better for users than a barcode recognizer, despite the sexiness of using your phone as a barcode scanner. Does that mean we’ll never implement a barcode recongition system for wine search? ABSOLUTELY NOT. We are just going to wait until the data side of the equation becomes more reliable and comprehensive.

* The Drync Wine typeahead interface will submitted to Apple shortly and hopefully will be available before Christmas 2009.

In a record 22 hours from submission, Drync Wine v2.5 Pro and Free were released by Apple. Below is a list of new features and bug fixes.

Cellar enhancements

• Cellar backup & retrieval (via User Accounts)
• Multi-device Cellar sharing (via User Accounts)
• Offline editing
• Faster rendering and navigation
• Added Location attribute
• Sorting by varietal, winery, alphabetical
• Changed ‘expert rating’ to ‘user rating’ in Cellar List

Wine Information

• Added hundreds of Gary Vaynerchuk/Winelibrary reviews and videos
• Thousands of new wines and expert reviews
• Added vintage chart and “drinkability” info to most wines

Wine Search

• Improved search speed by 4x
• Search for recommended wines in price range e.g. “cab $40″

Let us know how we’re doing at feedback@drync.com!

I have to admit something. I re-gift wine. Frequently.

Here’s the scenario that happens all too often: we’re running out of the house to a dinner and realize we didn’t get a gift. So I go to my wine “cellar” (more like a wine cupboard), and stare at it. How much should I “spend”? And for that matter, how much is each bottle I own worth (of course, I have no idea because either they were gifts or I picked them up years earlier while traveling overseas etc.)? What are we likely to eat that we might want to pair the wine with?

Well guess what (this is going to come as a big surprise) - Drync Wine can help! In fact, it did help me just recently, in three ways.

First, I now have my wine cellar cataloged in Drync Wine. I know the value of each bottle, as well as have expert reviews and winemaker’s notes for each. For instance, I was shocked to find out that bottle of Antinori Tignanello a classmate gave me is worth $114 (! don’t give this one away !), and the 2002 Fond de Cave Malbec I schlepped back from Argentina is worth less than I paid for it…

Second, I was given a bottle of 2005 K Vintners The Creator the other evening. This turns out to be a $55 bottle of wine that received a rating from The Wine Advocate of 96/100. According to the winemaker, I’ll find “black olives, tapenade, dried herbs, earth, and spice” in there. Whoa! Definitely not re-gifting that.

And last, as we are walking out the door it’s super fast and easy to refer to my Drync Cellar and choose an appropriate wine to re-gift.

I’m not proud of this lazy habit, but it is what it is. And I assume I’m not alone.

-brad

Just a quick note to announce that the FREE version of Drync Wine is now available in the app store. It is version 2.2. Apple is currently reviewing our 2.2 release of Drync Wine Pro. We expect to see it for sale this week.

How is the FREE version different than Pro? In two ways:

• FREE has ads
• FREE has a 10 wine Cellar limit

Here are the features we’ve added to v2.2:

• Cellar Sorting - in addition to Cellar Filtering, which was launched in v2.1, you can now sort your Cellar by rating, price, year, or entry date.
• Custom Wine - this is a long-awaited feature that allows you to enter any wine into Drync, without first requiring a Search. Simply touch the ‘+’ button at the top of your Cellar List View.
• Faster - we’ve optimized a number of the screens, added caching in places, and removed some slow Javascript that was causing sluggish performance.
• Bugs - believe it or not, there were some bugs. Yes, it’s true. But we gott’em, may they RIP. Bugs included missing ratings on the Cellar List page, blank year chooser in Quick Notes, missing Cellar entries, and others.

We’re excited - Drync is quite solid at this point.

So, what are we working on? Well, if we told you we’d have to k….   Aw that’s BS. Here are a few things:

• User Accounts - these will allow Cellar Backup, switching devices, and sharing Cellars
• Improved Search - search can always get better, and we’ve cooked up some new stuff that you will see very soon. It will be faster and more flexible in terms of what you can enter.

Lots of requests for a website to manage your Cellar. No comment… but stay tuned.

February was quite a month. In typical fashion, I let our planned v2.0 release “balloon” from a manageable set of features to something quite a bit larger than that. Now pleasantly on the other side of the release, I can look back and admit that maybe we should have bitten off something smaller.

However, perhaps it was worth the extra effort and time. Today we were chosen as the top wine app in the app store by Macworld. That feels good and probably justifies the “stress” induced by feature creep. What I particularly like about this article is the author is exactly our target audience - not a wine expert per sae, but a wine lover and interested in remembering and learning more about the wines he tries. I also like his correct (imo) analysis of the Wine Enthusiast Guide app, which has a lot of information but loses some of the key mainstream use-cases.

Our v2.0 release really zero’d in on user feedback, which was incredibly clear. We received hundreds of requests for the following features:

• Cellar filtering
• Editable fields for wines stored in people’s Cellars
• More reviews
• Visibility into what other users are drinking

All that’s in there. The Cellar filtering took quite a bit of doing, and in the end we settled on a solution that, while perhaps not perfect for everyone, is quite elegant (we think). A simple “search” bar (a common iPhone paradigm) into which you type keywords that you would like to filter your Cellar on, such as Red, Chardonnay, or Steak.

What didn’t make it that users have requested? The key items, which will be released in the blink of an eye, include:

• MUCH faster search (we’ve completely re-vamped our Search back end)
• Cellar sorting (i.e. by rating, alphabetical, etc.)
• Cellar backup

There will be much more, but that’s the teaser.

Thanks for your support. Keep the feedback coming. I think you’ll find that we respond quickly to it!

-Brad, CEO

We’ve had literally hundreds of feedback requests for new features. This makes us very happy. It means people are using the app and care enough to make their opinion known.

Here’s a brief glimpse of our next release, followed by a usability question. Please send us your comments!

Top requested features:

• Cellar filtering
• Shared Cellars
• Cellar synchronization for offline use
• Custom wine entry in Cellar
• Editable fields
• More reviews (not really a feature, but a request nonetheless)

The good news - we’re gunna do most of them (and some other cool stuff), in our next release.

The question I’d like to put out there is around “Cellar filtering”. Most of the wine apps, whether on the web or phone, allow you to choose one or more categories to filter by i.e. region, style, grape, year. You apply the filter and get a new list. It’s pretty straightforward, but not very “iPhone-like” and doesn’t allow for filtering on other text that may exist in a wine record, like your personal notes.

Another approach would be to put a ’search’ box up there and let users type in whatever they want. We could enable type-ahead for common filtering terms to reduce typing on the iPhone. This approach is super flexible for the user, a very common iPhone paradigm, but requires typing, which many iPhone users despise.

What do you think? Send us your thoughts - it’ll make a difference, I promise.