Print
Email
Print Edition Stories
MHT's Efrain Viscarolasaga: How social networking is changing business
MHT's Galen Moore: Military snipers aid accuracy with iPhone
NECN: Scvngr tours explore cities, campuses by cell phone
A Boston startup wants to help solve your drinking problem. That is, if your problem is remembering what you like to drink.
Drync LLC aims to get there “fustest with the mostest” — there being what co-founder Brad Rosen sees as a fast-growing market for mobile applications that help connoisseurs keep track of luxury goods like wine.
The app, available for $5 on the App Store for Apple Inc.’s (Nasdaq: APPL) iPhone, offers a virtual cellar designed to let you keep track of wines you’ve drunk, wines you own, or wines you’d like to drink. Users can search their own tasting notes, or punch in a few words from a wine label to look up wines in a database, Rosen said.
For those looking to snap a cell phone photo and search by label, forget it. Rosen said with curved bottles, dimly lit restaurants and low-resolution cell phone cameras, the problem is intractable.
In 2005, the U.S. Supreme Court ruled states must allow shipment of wine ordered online — a boon for services like Drync, which offers a buy button. But Rosen conceded many people will want to use the application like a wine-store shopping list. To that end, he said, the company is looking into ways to integrate with retail and distribution databases, so users can see where to find the wines they like.
Drync’s back end, written on Ruby on Rails, comprises a custom-built harvesting system, aggregation system and de-duping system, Rosen said. He wouldn’t talk about the search engine the software uses, except to say it’s an open-source product.
Rosen counts about 15 of what he calls “solid competitors,” but he’s hoping his team will have more startup juice than hobbyists and offshoots from wine magazines. Bootstrapped Drync has seven employees, all wine enthusiasts with startups on their resumes. Rosen, who co-founded Zync Inc., is the only full-time worker. Zync, a Boston developer of predictive social networking applications, was acquired by uLocate Communications Inc. in August 2008. Rosen is joined at Drync by ActBlue’s Bill Kirtley, who leads coding; Eric Sagalyn, a former coworker at uLocate; Jeremy Debate, a contract iPhone programmer; and Jodi Goldstein, formerly of Mobicious Inc. and sendwine.com.
Launching into the second Great Depression with an application that handles luxury drinks on a luxury handset? Rosen said he’s are not worried.
“The 25 to 35-year-olds are consuming tons of wine,” he said. People used to eating out are saving money by drinking expensive wine at home instead, he said. “I’m challenging that it’s a high-end market. I actually don’t think it is.”
Techs and the City
In The Italian Job, Michael Caine and a crew of Britons plot to shut down the city of Torino, Italy, by swapping out the data tapes that run the city’s traffic monitoring system. The gimmick was nearly science fiction for 1969, when the film was made.
Fast forward 40 years. Film producers looking to put a techie spin on next summer’s big heist film would do well to snoop around the Senseable City Lab at MIT, where a group of researchers led by Italian civil engineer and architect Carlo Ratti is figuring out how to use data to make cities work like sentient beings.
The group’s latest project, in Amsterdam, monitors cell phone activity in real time, looking for irregularities that could flag an emergency. Another project tracked UK tourists in Barcelona based on their uploads to the photo sharing website Flickr. A New York project, the results of which are due out soon, assigned web-style authority to physical places by tracking people’s movements between locations as links.
All this has incited some hand-wringing by privacy advocates, and spawned fears that the information could be misused, researcher Andrea Vaccari admits. Telecom operators see that concern as a double standard, in which software companies get off easy, he said, citing Google Inc.’s (Nasdaq: GOOG) massive use of customer data.
Selling ads against words in a private e-mail hardly raises an eyebrow, these days. Vaccari believes the same level of acceptance is in store for ways to make use of all kinds of data — whether contributed, or implicit.
“Your searches are saved. Your e-mails are parsed,” he said. Just to let you make and receive calls, telecom operators already have to know where you are, he pointed out. “If you want these services, someone has to know.”
Comments
If you are commenting using a Facebook account, your profile information may be displayed with your comment depending on your privacy settings. By leaving the 'Post to Facebook' box selected, your comment will be published to your Facebook profile in addition to the space below.
RSS Feeds
