Turning wine into water

posted by philip in Wine Industry

I’ve spoken about the glut of wine across the globe, with billions of bottles being destroyed annually. And, if I didn’t do it then, I should say it again now, its government subsidies that cause this mess. I know its a complicated issue, but people’s hard earned tax money, not only goes to support hard working farmers (we can debate subsidies in general if we need to), but worse, to first subsidize the growing on unneeded grapes and then to subsidize the expense when they either gets destroyed or distilled into fuel. At that point it would probably be cheaper just to pay the farmer to leave their fields fallow.

My proposed solution back then? Easier said than done, of course, but it’s simply to grow good grapes. Don’t forget, its not Opus One thats being turned into gasoline, but rather some industrial strength bulk wine that no one is willing to buy.

Well now, in a perverse twist, yet again caused by subsidies, the growers have another option.

California is suffering such a water shortage (its now illegal in Long Beach, CA to serve a glass of water in a restaurant unless the customer asks for it first), that farmers can profit by reselling their water supply at up to triple the rate. As a capitalist, that sounds great. Farmers own valuable asset / people wish to buy asset / farmer sells. I don’t blame the farmers, at this stage in the game its silly not to sell it. The problem is the mis-aligned incentives these subsidies cause in the first place.

Now we have municipalities, in dire need of water, paying more than they’d have needed to otherwise. The local residents will have to cover these extra expenses through extra taxes. Which considering it was their taxes that funded the subsidies in the first place doesn’t really seem all that fair.

Why we like the community

posted by philip in Snooth

We recently stumbled across a site called ‘Command Shift 3‘, and when you see a site that likes you, you can’t help but like it back!

Command Shift 3 is a community powered ‘Hot or Not’ style site in which users get to vote on their favorite web sites from a design point of view. We’ve always been proud of Snooth’s design (thanks Clint) and its ease of use (Mark), but its always nice to get feedback from a larger audience.

According to the 454 battles Snooth has been in on the site, we have a 75% win rate which puts us as #1 best designed wine site and #3 best designed search site (amongst a few others). We beat Google (not sure how they win any points for ‘design’ to be honest. Utility and functionality, of course, but design?) as well as other fantastic sites like Last.fm and Wikipedia. Thats great, but best not to disturb the sleeping dragons.

Given how our own site functions, who are we to argue with the wisdom of crowds?

PS. For the non Mac users out there, Command Shift 3 performs the Print Screen function. So now you know the target demographic the site was intended for…

Lets back up for a moment

posted by philip in Snooth

Saturday morning, slightly dazed, just finished breakfast. Obviously time to fire up the old lappytop and check up on recent doings. The familiar four paned window popped onto my screen, closely followed by the dreaded blue screen of death!

Needless to say I ended up having a wonderful weekend booting, rebooting and re-re-booting, wiping and reinstalling my operating system, trawling backup media in varying states of decomposition unearthing saved data, remounting hard disks and finally rooting around for the sales receipt and accompanying guarantee.

I’ll be fine, but I didn’t set out to talk about that. Nor the shiny new mac that (long overdue) replaced my windows machine.

Luckily, Snooth, as a corporate entity, takes backups way more seriously than I, or most other people for that matter, do in our private lives. It’s important to us. We have been entrusted to care for millions of your reviews and we want to make sure that our setup is as iron clad as possible.

We take multiple backups daily, then store those in locations thousands of miles apart. If one of our server’s melts, we’ve setup utilities that allow us to one-click reinstall that server’s entire operating environment. We’re focussed on redundancy. Server’s will one day fail, the site will eventuall, albeit temporarily, go down, however, a copy of the data will exist elsewhere. Ready to be rolled onto a new machine.

So while I toil away this week putting my system back in order you can be comfortable knowing that as a corporation we treat this as an enterprise class endeavor.

PS. If we had a meeting or you sent me an email recently, be patient. I’m still restoring my data.

Who are we?

posted by philip in Snooth

Yes the New Year just happened, its finally 2008. However, I still can’t do a teary eyed post on how far we’ve come. I can, instead, toss out some Snooth stats which are pretty interesting:

- We launched the site on June 4th 2007.

- Since then our traffic has grown between 50 and 100% per month to give us over 300,000 monthly visitors. We’re now one of the 5 largest wine sites in the world in traffic.

- We have over 2 million reviews, making us the largest wine site in the world in number of reviews.

- We are the worlds largest wine social network in traffic (unless someone can prove me wrong. I’ve checked Alexa, Compete and Quantcast).

- People have visited us from 182 countries. There really aren’t too many left: West Guyana is the only one left in the America’s. Uzbekistan, Burma/Myanmar and North Korea the only 3 left in Asia. No gaps left in Europe or Australasia and a few in Africa. [Note: I can’t see the smallest islands on my map, so can’t tell how many visitors from places like St Kitts, Tuvalu etc].

- Whilst the US user base dominates, we’re performing increasingly well across the globe. According to Alexa, US users make up 56% of our traffic at the moment (down from 75% 3 months ago).

- We recently raised an additional $1 million in financing.

You’ll be seeing a lot more of us in 2008. There’s a lot planned. Our team’s bigger than before. We’ll be picking up the pace and are all looking forward to see what we can do for you over the coming months. Cheers!