We may have found wine’s new killer app. The realization came last month, when Jancis Robinson announced that she would let readers access her reviews via CellarTracker.
Launched in 2004, CellarTracker (cellartracker.com) has become a powerful clearinghouse for wine information. I’ve followed creator Eric LeVine’s project for years, sometimes skeptically. Originally it was intended as a way for collectors to track and check out each other’s cellars. But the concept has so much more potential: a page for each wine in its database, currently 735,000 and growing daily. Users can rate one, read about one, buy one. And now they can see what critics think in the same place.
Thanks! Does anyone have the actual physical paper? Is the screenshot of the new site in that or just online?
Jon Bonné was a lot of fun to talk to. Really nice and a very bright guy. I wish Bob had the balls to actually comment for the article. If he had even taken five minutes to talk to the reporter, even off the record, he would have learned something. I know that I learned a lot and gained valuable perspective.
Eric, I think Bob would have learned what an uphill battle he has with his own software.
You strike me as the inclusive type who would welcome his partnership.
I respect and value Robert Parker’s tasting notes, but think he needs to wake up to the will of the people in a Scott Brown just won the Massachusetts Senate Race kind of way.
MyWines may end up being lovely software, or it may not. I actually expect it to be pretty good when it comes out. The thing is, cellar management software is pretty niche and pretty nerdy. This is not so much about 1 cellar manager versus another OR even about community/amateur content versus professional content.
It has taken me close to 6 years to build up nearly 50,000 people actively tracking and about 22,000 have written notes with several thousand people like us who are very active and generating a lot of very useful content. Last year CT users generated 400,000 reviews. This year it will be closer to 600,000. In a few years the site may well generate 1,000,000 notes every single quarter. Unless Bob fundamentally alters his $100/year walled garden model he will never, ever attract a large and sticky enough core audience to generate a community content engine like that. But I’ve been begging for 5 years to have a conversation about how we can help each other and consequently help all of you. For the past 3 years I have been told, “we can talk once we ship MyWines.” Whatever happened to multi-tasking?
Whatever. I know what I need to do. Now back to it…
Maybe RMP should hire VaynerMedia (http://www.vaynermedia.com" onclick="window.open(this.href);return false;). Don’t know much about these guys but they purport to help “up-and-coming” brands with social media
Gary’s advice can be boiled down to: “use twitter! use facebook! Get users to interact. Keep using it with passion!” It seems so obvious, but most companies aren’t doing it.
Yikes, but I think you might be right. You have been responding to people’s wants and needs for how many years? All of those features are already part of CT!. Anything which does not have those features is running in second place.
The game is won. Bob will not catch up.
I never saw your goal as one to defeat him, yet his arrogance not to speak with you actually speaks volumes. Too bad. What a shame on his part.
Its weird—on the one hand, Bob has this bravado about MyWines that still hasn’t seen the light of day (it must be appearing this coming week as he said he had some big surprises before the end of January) and at the same time, they are obviously intimidated by CT as evidenced by moving EVERY thread that basically mentions CT to Social Hall. I mean, how many other wine threads do you see routinely moved to SH? Only CT, which is an indicator of their underlying fear of it. If they had no fear, they would not care one way or the other.
Hehehehe…they have written the script that they themselves seem to deserve.
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