Snooth will undergo scheduled hardware maintenance on Wednesday, February 10 from 2AM-5AM ET. During this time, the site will be unavailable. We appreciate your patience as we upgrade our servers.
While building Snooth, we spend a good bit of time talking about wine. We’re data people, so one of the things that interests us are factoids or wine tips, anything that might expose the nuances, or the story of wine. Now that we’ve had a chance to accumulate these bits of information, we were able to put them in a format we thought would be most useful for everyone.
Each day, the Daily Wine Wisdom widget will display an interesting tidbit or wine fact that any wine lover might find interesting. The best part is that you can embed it on your blog, so you can get the newest tip every day on your personal page. It will also live here on the Snooth blog. We hope you enjoy!
Check out Daily Wine Wisdom on Snooth.
364 days ago, on the 1st January 2009, I blogged my expectations for the coming year. They were not supposed to be wishes, or predictions, but ‘conservative’ estimates. I cringe when I go back and read the arrogant tone I used when proclaiming what we’d accomplish, and I’m glad that many times during this year I fretted that we’d miss these targets and I’d have only myself to blame.
Now, on the ultimate day of the year, its time to revisit these targets and see how we fared:
Net: 5.5/7.0
Not too shabby, and I’m particularly pleased we hit the numerically defined goals.
I’ll not do this again, the board doesn’t like me publicizing these forecasts, so for 2010, I’ll leave it to you to extrapolate. We tripled our monthly traffic in 2009, we had a 600% jump in registered users and we built a network of 10 million users per month. I can tell you that I cannot wait for 2010, the Snooth team is revved up and ready to rock the coming year, and we love coming in to work each day and helping create the wine site each and every one of you deserves.
Thank you for all your support, this is your site, and have a happy new year.
About a year ago we launched pages for every winery, region, grape, store and other key wine tags in our database, over 100,000 pages in total. At first these were rather empty, but over time we were able, with our users and partners help, to flesh them out. As the content of the pages evolved, so did the way that you used them. And so, we felt it was necessary to give them an update so they could better serve the current needs of you, our users.
Two weeks ago, we quietly launched the new versions. They had been under development and testing for over 2 months, which makes this one of our most carefully thought out redesigns. We split tested multiple versions, allowing us to answer key questions, like “should the pages should be fact oriented, feed or socially oriented?” and “how should the images be presented?”.
The new versions offer some key advantages, for example the images and stats have been given more prominence. They now have their own tab, which gives them more space and makes browsing easier. The maps are larger, and the reviews and commentary have all been broken out.
We hope this makes more a more pleasing and engaging experience when using Snooth.
The early results look promising, we watch the key metrics closely and we’ve seen a 20% decline in bounce rate for users that land on these pages. At the same time users are spending more time on these pages site and viewing more pages afterwards.
The current look is not final, there never will be a finished version, but we feel this is a step in the right direction. We’re looking forward to hearing your feedback on how we can make these and other parts of the site better in the coming months.
Snooth registered user base growing by 500% per year
New York, NY (November 16, 2009) — Snooth, the world’s largest wine site, today announced that it had added its 250,000th registered user.
This milestone comes a few months after Snooth announced its 100,000th registered user earlier this year. Over the last twelve months Snooth’s registered user base has grown over 500%, with a 300% growth in overall traffic over the same time period, to todays figure of over 1 million users per month. The number of registered users, those who sign up to have a profile on Snooth, is currently growing at a rate of over 15% every month.
“In March this year we were excited to announce our 100,000th member, so its a real pleasure to welcome our 250,000th member just a few months later,” said Philip James, CEO of Snooth. “We’re adding around 1,000 members daily and with each passing day their actions and contributions to the site enrich the experience for every other user.”
Since its inception in June 2007, Snooth has grown to be the world’s largest wine site, with over 1 million users per month, 1 million wines and prices from 11,000 merchants and wineries worldwide. The site currently handles over 5 million searches per month and has over 250,000 registered users.
About Snooth
Snooth is the world’s largest wine site, with over 1 million monthly users. Launched in June 2007, Snooth is a free, highly interactive, social database of the world’s wines, offering both casual and expert wine drinkers the ability to search, obtain personalized recommendations, interact with fellow wine lovers, as well as seamlessly buy from a global network of over 11,000 merchants.
Designed to be easy to use, users have the ability to search by their own personal preferences (bold, peppery, fruity, etc), by a specific meal-pairing, price, or by region or producer. Snooth’s recommendation engine also provides customized selections based on stated preferences and user feedback. The more information a user gives on wines they enjoy, the more personalized and detailed the recommendations become.
Snooth’s massive database of 1 million wines and 2 million reviews, powers many third-party wine applications, reaching a total audience of over 5 million users per month, and functions as a central repository of wine data. Snooth is also available on-the-go through its mobile or iPhone applications.
Snooth was awarded the Model of Excellence by InfoCommerce in 2008, and is the recipient of multiple medals from the Wine 2.0 trade organization. Snooth has garnered much press within the tech, wine and food spaces from publications including Forbes, Oprah, Techcrunch, Mashable, the Guardian, and many others.
Snooth’s team is comprised of experts in data management, user experience, and wine. Snooth’s advisors and investors include past and current management of Blue Fly, Price Grabber, Experian, Quigo, Inertia Beverage Group, and Global Wines and Spirits amongst others.
Please visit http://www.snooth.com for more information on the largest wine site in the world
The tech team at Snooth will be performing regular maintenance on our systems Wednesday, November 11 from around 12AM ET. The site will be unavailable during this period. We expect the maintenance will last for no longer than one hour.
Thank you for your patience.
This week we have a number of updates focussed on making Snooth more interactive and social. First off is a bit of functionality that users have been asking about for a while. When you’re browsing the prices for a wine, you can now sort the merchants by featured status, name, price and even bottle size. We’re excited to continue helping people find better prices for wine, and this should make it even easier to do just that.
In 2009 Snooth spent a lot of time working with food and wine. In partnership with Epicurious.com and MyRecipes.com we were able to bring you recipe pairings directly on the wine details pages. We’ve heard from many of you that this is very helpful. We did want to gather feedback on individual pairings in the interest of promoting the good matches and tweaking any bad matches out of the system. To that end, we added the ability to vote on specific pairings. We’re looking forward to the added feedback on our electronic sommelier.
Finally, you’ll see more and more links around the site to Twitter and Facebook. We love seeing information from Snooth make it out to other social networks. Adding these links makes it easier than ever to get the word out about the wines, wine articles, and discussions about wine you’re following on Snooth.
Today marks a sad day for the wine industry: Amazon Wine, yet to launch, may now never see the light of day. I’m sure many retailers, wholesalers and even some wineries are breathing a collective sigh of relief at this news, for Amazon, with its history of pricing, service and operations, threatened many a wine business.
For you and I, as wine consumers, this is bad news. Its also bad news for Snooth, as a company that is fighting the good fight to help demystify the arcane and convoluted world of wine. While Amazon may have ultimately become a competitor of Snooth, they stood the best chance of any company out there of shining a light in all the dark nooks and crannies of the industry. Hopefully putting an end to shady and illegal practices such as bait and switch, selling a wine that the store doesn’t yet have in inventory, using shipping as a profit center, dual pricing and so many more.
Many of us hoped that Amazon would use its might to force these issues, and others, into the spotlight, forcing new regulation, opening up consumer choice and making the wine industry a better place for all of us. Sadly, these hopes have just been shelved for the next few years.
This story is breaking now, and you’ll be able to keep up with it via Wine Industry Insight and Wine Business amongst others.
Spam, spam, spam! When we first started building Snooth, there were only a few stalwarts here using the site, adding content and reviews and browsing the forum. (To be completely fair, the forum didn’t even exist back then.) Unfortunately, one of the prices of growing a community these days is fighting the war against spam. A while ago, spammers started to create accounts on the site and would message 10-20 users before abandoning their accounts. You, the users of Snooth, would have no recourse other than to write to us, and we would delete the user, but we always knew we could do better.
The day is finally here. As of today, you can now mark messages as spam to remove them from your inbox. We’ve also added the ability to delete old messages. We hope these two features will help you to keep your inboxes free of unwanted or outdated messages.
It would be even better if the spammers got the hint and didn’t even try to come knocking. I’m not holding my breath for that, but a guy can dream.
Hand built algorithm highlighted as featured application on popular start page
New York, NY (September 29, 2009) — Snooth, the world’s largest wine site, today announced that its popular A-Z Wine Pairings application will now be featured on the front page of Yahoo!
Users can peruse thousands of recipes from leading publications such as Food & Wine, Cooking Light, Real Simple and Health, among others, and get automatically generated wine pairings based on each individual dish.
The app highlights the most popular recipes, pairings, and wines of the day, with links to purchase the corresponding bottle.
For example, for a Tomato-Chicken Pasta dish, Snooth’s digital sommelier recommended “Fontaleoni Vernaccia di San Gimignano 2007″ with the rationale, “This mineraly white offers nice acidity with a medium bodied feel, allowing it to partner perfectly with this meal.”
The functionality was hand built using Snooth’s database of the world’s wines and the decades of accumulated wine knowledge among Snooth’s employees, particularly that of Gregory Dal Piaz, Snooth’s Community Manager. Snooth’s expertise in systematically analyzing and categorizing wine data was transferred to analyzing and categorizing recipe data in order to create the complex pairing algorithm.
“This algorithm is an interesting combination of our backend tech functionality, as well as the human expertise of our resident wine guru Gregory Dal Piaz,” said Philip James, CEO of Snooth. “We’re trying to democratize the wine experience and make finding good wine easier, and now everyone has access to a top-tier sommelier with the click of button.”
Since its inception in June 2007, Snooth has grown to be the world’s largest wine site, with over 500,000 users per month, 1 million wines and prices from 11,000 merchants and wineries worldwide. The site currently handles over 2 million searches per month and has over 125,000 registered users.
About Snooth
Snooth is the world’s largest wine site with over 500,000 monthly users. Launched in June 2007, Snooth is a free, highly interactive, social database of the world’s wines, offering both casual and expert wine drinkers the ability to search, obtain personalized recommendations, interact with fellow wine lovers, as well as seamlessly buy from a global network of over 11,000 merchants.
Designed to be easy to use, users have the ability to search by their own personal preferences (bold, peppery, fruity, etc), by a specific meal-pairing, price, or by region or producer. Snooth’s recommendation engine also provides customized selections based on stated preferences and user feedback. The more information a user gives on wines they enjoy, the more personalized and detailed the recommendations become.
Snooth’s massive database of 1 million wines and 2 million reviews, powers many third-party wine applications and functions as a central repository of wine data. Snooth is available on-the-go using its iPhone application.
Snooth was awarded the Model of Excellence by Infocommerce in 2008, and is the recipient of multiple medals from the Wine 2.0 trade organization. Snooth has garnered much press within the tech, wine and food spaces from publications including Forbes, Oprah, Techcrunch, Mashable, the Guardian, and many others.
Snooth’s team is comprised of experts in data management, user experience, and wine. Snooth’s advisors and investors include past and current management of Blue Fly, Price Grabber, Experian, Quigo, Inertia Beverage Group, and Global Wines and Spirits amongst others.
Please visit http://www.snooth.com for more information on the largest wine site in the world.