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!

Wine on the iPhone is now formally a hot category. When we launched Drync Wine 10 months ago, there were only a handful of wine journaling apps available. We were lucky to have been early in the market with an innovative app, and to have received the coveted “love” from Apple to jump start our journey. That was cool, we thought we were rock stars.

As with any “real” market, competitors arrive and the honeymoon ends. This has been particularly true on the iPhone because barriers to entry are low. There are now over 50 wine apps in the app store, many of which are worthy of the real estate on your phone and some that are not. Apple’s unpredictable app promotion practices have further muddied the field as of late.

But, given an equal playing field, we believe that quality wins. This week vindication arrived in the form of a “definitive” analyst report on all things iPhone + Wine. Produced by Paul Mabray at Vintank, a respected wine industry analyst firm, and published by Palatte Press in a two part series, the report reviews 50 wine apps and names the best of the bunch.

We’re proud to say that we were chosen as one of the top 5 wine apps on the iPhone. The unique thing about this report is that, unlike your average journalist who tries a few apps at dinner and writes about their experience (which is cool too, don’t get me wrong), Vintank has been intimate with the wine industry for years and performed an insightful, exhaustive deep dive on the subject of iPhone apps as they relate to wine consumers and industry.

Check out the report here: http://palatepress.com/2009/10/wine-iphone-apps-the-top-five/

A lot of work went into this report, not only because of the sheer volume of apps, but because it involved breaking down the key consumer use-cases related to wine and mobile, tying those to the myriad features presented, testing specific user scenarios for each app, and then looking at the overly complicated wine value chain to understand the longer term opportunity. No small affair. The net net is that from a user’s perspective, there are three key “user scenarios” that matter and are achievable today -  point-of-sale research, pairings, and journaling - and a handful of apps have been successful delivering to those use cases.

At Drync, we’ve focused to date on the “research and remember” value proposition. That is, enabling you to quickly find any wine and learn about it from probably the most exhaustive database in the industry, and then store it away with comments, ratings, and photos, in your virtual cellar for future reference. That speaks to the “POS research” and “Journaling” use-cases. We have more coming, but that’s the starting point and so far our focus seems to resonate with users.

Particularly impressive about the Vintank analysis is that they took the time to grok and test the key technologies behind the apps, and how they improve the user experience. In the case of Drync Wine, that included understanding the depth of our search technology (which we would argue is the industry’s best for wine related searches and enables the user to type just about anything to find their wine), and our data merging capabilities (used to identify duplicate records and merge them, therein reducing confusion for users).

Looking forward, we see three key “features” that were not considered in the Vintank report but that we believe will improve the user experience dramatically in the future:

• Find a Wine Nearby - In theory, if you know the inventories of the local retailers, and you’ve got a GPS on the phone, you should be able to direct a consumer to a local store to find a particular bottle of wine. This in our view is a killer use-case, but difficult today to deliver on. The reality is that the wine industry as a whole is not particularly tech-savvy. In fact, 9 out of 10 retailers that I visit still use pencil and paper to manage their inventories. But, slowly, through the efforts of companies like Beverage Media Group, the industry is coming online. Once we hit critical mass, good things will happen for consumers. We promise!

• Look up a Wine by Label or Barcode - people are talking about this today. The idea is that you snap a photo of the barcode or label on a bottle of wine, and the app automatically recognizes what wine you’re looking at and provides detailed information about it. No doubt this will be an amazing feature when delivered with high usability and accuracy. The reality today is this: there is no standards body maintaining barcodes for wine, wineries re-use barcodes, compared to bottles produced each year only a very few are given a barcode, and barcode scanning accuracy needs to improve significantly to address the mainstream user. Image search is equally interesting, and daunting. There are several companies with university borne technologies that attempt to mimic the human cerebral vision function. They compensate for angles, blurr, low light, curvature, and reflection. And it’s likely they can successfully be applied to “wine image search”. The problem here is that there is not definitive database of high quality wine label images. That’s the requirement - high quality images, and lots of them. There are a few companies working on this and likely it will happen at some point.

• Purchasing Wine on your Phone - This also will happen. Online wine retailers need to support mobile web and mobile payments, and they need to get their inventories online. When that happens, apps like Drync will start to refer qualified customers to them.

It will all happen, and we’re doing our best to push the envelope!

Big thanks to Paul and the team at Vintank.

-brad rosen, ceo, drync.