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.

Words of wisdom sent to me today…

Two Glasses of Wine

When things in your life seem almost too much to handle, when 24 hours in a day are not enough, remember the mayonnaise jar and the 2 glasses of wine…

A professor stood before his philosophy class and had some items in front of him. When the class began, wordlessly, he picked up a very large and empty mayonnaise jar and proceeded to fill it with golf balls.

He then asked the students if the jar was full. They agreed that it was.

The professor then picked up a box of pebbles and poured them into the jar. He shook the jar lightly. The pebbles rolled into the open areas between the golf balls.

He then asked the students again if the jar was full. They agreed it was.

The professor next picked up a box of sand and poured it into the jar. Of course, the sand filled up everything else He asked once more if the jar was full. The students responded with a unanimous ‘yes.’

The professor then produced two glasses of wine from under the table and poured the entire contents into the jar, effectively filling the empty space between the sand. The students laughed.

‘Now,’ said the professor, as the laughter subsided, ‘I want you to recognize that this jar represents your life. The golf balls are the important things; your family, your children, your health, your friends, and your favorite passions; things that if everything else was lost and only they remained, your life would still be full.

The pebbles are the other things that matter like your job, your house, and your car. The sand is everything else; the small stuff. If you put the sand into the jar first, he continued, there is no room for the pebbles or the golf balls.

The same goes for life: If you spend all your time and energy on the small Stuff. Pay attention to the things that are critical to your happiness. Play with your children. Take time to get medicalcheckups. Take your partner out to dinner. Play another 18 holes. There will always be time to clean the house and fix the disposal. Take care of the golf balls first; the Things that really matter. Set your priorities. The rest is just sand.’

One of the students raised her hand and inquired what the wine represented.

The professor smiled. ‘I’m glad you asked. It just goes to show you that no matter how full your life may seem, there’s always room for a couple of glasses of wine with a friend.’

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.

One of the things that’s been most interesting to watch is how people are using Drync. With thousands of active users adding wines to their cellars now, and tens of thousands of searches each month, we’re starting to see lots of interesting trends in the data.

For instance, we’ve started watching “top wines” that users have added to their cellars…

Interesting that the most popular wine right now is a $38.00 bottle! Another interesting stat is that we are approaching 800,000 wines that we search, and have performed over 25,000 searches in the last month!

And of course, the most exciting thing about this is that people are clearly using and getting value from the product. As entrepreneurs, that’s the ultimate reward.

We just did a demo - check it out!

Dync Wine - find your wine. from brad rosen on Vimeo.