Tag: Wine

Putting machine learning into wine

Two South Australian students are showing how the wine industry can use machine learning and cloud computing

As we gather more data, the opportunities to apply it become wider. A good example of this is Seer Insights, a South Australian company started by pair of university students that calculates the likely grape yields for vineyards.

Seer Insights’ product Grapebrain is made up of two components, a mobile app that the farmer uses to count the grape clusters on the vines and then a cloud service that analyses the data and produces web based reports for the farmers.

The current methods are notoriously unreliable with Seer Insights estimating mistakes cost the Australian viticulture industry $200 million a year as harvests are miscalculated resulting in either rotting fruit or wasted contractor fees.

Born in an elevator

Seer’s founders, Harry Lucas and Liam Ellul, started the business after a chance meeting on their university campus. “We started off doing this after being stuck in a lift together,” remembers Liam. “Originally we were looking at the hyper-spectrum imaging for broadacre farming but when we started looking at the problems we ended up talking to wine organisations about this.”

“The technology predicts how many grapes will be coming off the vineyards at the end of the season to enable people to sort out their finances,” Harry says. “The growth process grapes go through is difficult to model so we use machine learning to do that.”

For both the founders having an off the shelf product, in this case Microsoft’s machine learning tools, to run the data analysis made it relatively easy to launch the product.

As a winner of Microsoft’s Tech eChallenge, the startup has won a trip to the United States as well as being profiled by the company as a machine learning case study.

Over time as these tools become more accessible to small companies we’ll see more businesses accessing machine learning services to enhance their operations.

As companies face the waves of data flowing into their businesses over the next decade, it will be those who manage it well and gather valuable insights from their information that will be the winners.

Panning for digital gold

A new breed of social media analytics is finding gold in online data.

Today social media analytics startup Vintank announced their acquisition by the W2O Group, a network of data driven marketing and communications firms.

W2O’s acquisition shows how data analytics and visualisation is increasingly an important tool for management in a world where businesses are drowning in information.

Last year Vintank co-founder Paul Mabray spoke to Decoding the New Economy about the company and how social media data is a valuable tool for the wine industry.

“The wine industry is last industry to have been changed by internet,” Mabray says. One reason for this in his view is how that the sector hasn’t had a disruptive startup like Yelp or Open Table to drive change and upset incumbents.

Despite the wine industry’s reluctance to adopt digital technologies, social media and the disruption of established media channels is having a profound effect on the sector’s marketing and sales.

“In the old days there was a playbook originating with Robert Mondavi in the 1970s which is create amazing wine, you get amazing reviews and you go find wholesalers who bring this wine to the market,” Mabray told Decoding the New Economy during a visit to Australia in 2014.

Dealing with global proliferation

Mabray also flags the massive growth in the wine industry as being one of Vintank’s driving forces, “the global proliferation of brands the increase of awareness and consumption patterns where people like wine more, those playbooks didn’t work in 2009 when the crisis started.”

A proliferation of new competitors coupled with disrupted communications channels isn’t unique to the wine industry, the attraction Vintank has to the w2O Group’s president Bob Pearson; “VinTank provides us with a way to create agile audience engines for a brand, where we can learn what an audience is doing online, understand what content they like.”

For many businesses social media is a both an opportunity and a mystery; while customers are telling the world what they’re buying through services like Facebook and Twitter capturing, managing and using that information remains a challenge.

Panning for digital gold

As Robyn Lewis of Visit Vineyards whose database holds details on over 30,000 Australian wineries and associated tourism business says, “the gold is in the data.”

Panning for that gold is Emma LoRusso of Sydney social analytics startup Digivizer who told Decoding The New Economy two years ago “the truth is in data”. Services like Vintank, Salesforce’s Radian6, Klout and startups like Digivizer attempt to add context to that data.

Another aspect of Vintank’s technology is the ‘geofencing’ of information, creating a virtual geographic perimeter so only data relevant in that region is flagged. As well as reducing noise, this increases the value to local wineries and tourist operations.

In some respects the geofencing is possibly the most powerful part of services like Vintank as it allows regional operators to focus on visitors and customers to their districts rather than worrying about national or global activity.

W2O’s acquisition gives Vintank access to a broader market outside the wine industry as well as deeper data analytics capabilities. For W20 the purchase adds to the social media tools the company can offer.

Data driven business

The Vintank deal with W2O shows how the marketing and advertising industries are increasingly becoming data driven. For other business functions this is true as well.

For businesses of all types, understanding the data pouring into their companies is going to be the difference between success and failure in an increasingly digital world. Providing those tools to do so is one of the great opportunities in today’s economy.

Lost in the crowdsourcing masses

Wine review app Vivino illustrates how the world is changing for experts

The crowd is as smart as wine experts claims review app Vivino in a blog post comparing its users’ ratings of wines against the long established industry standards of Wine Spectator and Robert Parker.

Crowdsourcing’s advantage claims Vivino is “the experts can’t rate everything. But 8 million (and growing) Vivino users just about can. Will a 4.0 wine on Vivino be the new ’90 point wine’?”

Although Vivino are talking up their book on this, the message here is that the wisdom of crowds – or the Cult of the Amateur as author Andrew Keen described it in 2007 – is taking the place of all but the highest profile experts’ opinions.

Removing the informed commentator

This is true in almost every critical field from journalism to food and travel writing, if you don’t have, or a can build, a big following in your chosen niche then you’re just one of the crowd punching out a blog, Facebook posts or Instagram feed.

Wine writers and experts are in the same position, if the aggregated opinions of eight million users can give you an informed opinion about a vintage then why spend good money to consult someone who has spent years studying and working in the industry?

In some ways this is the downside of blogging; suddenly anybody with an internet connection can hold themselves out as being an informed critic. A case that stands out is an Australian food blogger who criticised a Sydney cafe for it’s ‘weird sushi sandwiches’ and strange Japanese fusion food without realising he was eating a Scandinavian open sandwich.

One of the effects of the web is that it’s both diffused and concentrated influence – a vast array of informations sources meaans small international group of high profile experts find their standing grows as they become more accessible while most of the industry is drowned out by forums, apps and social media sites.

The challenge for many of us is how are we going to stand out from the crowd.

Links of the day – Mind games, wine growers and the Naples mafia

Mind games, wine growers and the Naples mafia are among today’s links.

Mind games, wine growers and the Naples mafia are among today’s links along with last person in Britain who lived under Queen Victoria passing away and a touching series of portraits showing the end of the film photography industry.

Cutting out the middle man

Reka Haros is a wine maker in Italy’s Venuto region. Like many small producers her winery struggles with distribution and sales in a crowded market. Reba’s solution of going direct to the customer is one that many businesses should be considering in a noisy world.

Life in protection

I don’t fear death, I fear being discredited. The story of Italian journalist Roberto Saviano and his eight years in protection after writing about the Naples mafia.

Picturing the decline of film photography

Canadian photographer Robert Burley travelled the world with his 4×5 field camera to document the end of analogue photography. It’s a poignant portrayal of how an entire industry comes to and with one technological change.

Last of the Victorians

Ethel Lang, the last surviving Briton to live under the reign of Queen Victoria, died last week at the age 114.

Manufacturing false memories

A frightening physiological experiment shows a cunning interviewer can convince most of us  we committed crimes which we are totally innocent of. This truly is a disturbing story.

A unicorn in the wine industry

The wine industry once thought the internet was a cute idea, now companies like Vintank are showing them what it means

“I was a closet tech guy until the 2000s,” says Vintank’s founder Paul Mabray in describing how digital technologies are changing the wine industry to the Decoding The New Economy YouTube channel.

We’d spoken to Paul before about the forces changing the wine industry and visiting him in the Napa Valley gives some perspective on the opportunity the sector has in capturing the enthusiastic US wine market.

Paul’s first venture into wine technology was with Inertia Beverage Group in 2002, “when I started Inertia I said ‘hey, there’s this thing called the internet'”, Mabray recalls. “They said ‘hey Paul you’re so cute, the internet won’t be around in a couple of years.'”

The internet being a fad turned out not to be the case and Vintank evolved out of the rising importance of social media to industries like wineries.

“Vintank is the mission control of social media, the one stop engagement platform for the wine industry,” says Paul of his social media listening service which he and co-founder James Jory established in 2009.

Wine is lagging other industries in adopting social media and other digital technologies because it’s avoided many of the disruptions other sectors have had to deal with.

“The wine industry is the last industry that hasn’t been changed by the internet,” Mabray says. “If you look at hotels with expedia.com or restaurants with Yelp or Open Table, that hasn’t happened yet.”

A key facet of Vintank is its use of the freemium business model in offering a basic service for free; a common practice in the consumer (B2C) market but fairly rare in business (B2C) software services.

“It’s a very different way to do freemium in B2B. Freemium in B2C you do mass adoption — that tiny fraction that pay makes it profitable because so many people have it.”

“In the B2B freemium model what you have to do is distribute it for free and then you measure the usage; who is using it the most is where you send the sales team in.”

For Mabray, we’re in early days of using digital media and the wine industry is one of the sectors that needs to adopt the technologies quickly: “The driver for me is this horribly complex problem that needs to be solved — the wine industry needs digital to survive.”

Context and the digital divide

Paul Mabray, founder of US online monitoring service Vintek, sees a digital divide developing as businesses struggle with social media big data and Facebook.

“This is the most difficult time in history to be a wine maker, declares Paul Mabray, Chief Strategy Office and founder of Vintank.

“Never has the wine industry been as competitive as it is today.”

Update: The Wine Communicators of Australia, who sponsored Mabray’s visit, have posted Paul’s presentation that covers this post’s theme in more detail.

Mabray’s business monitors social media for wineries and collects information on wine enthusiasts. Since Vintank’s founding in 2008 the service has collected information on over thirteen million people and their tastes in wine.

Rewriting the rule book

Social media, or social Customer Relationship Management (sCRM), is what Mabray sees as being part of the future of the wine industry that’s evolving from a model developed in the 1970s which started to break down with the financial crisis of 2009.

“In the old days there was a playbook originating with Robert Mondavi in the 1970s which is create amazing wine, you get amazing reviews and you go find wholesalers who bring this wine to the market.”

“As a result of the global proliferation of brands the increase of awareness and consumption patterns where people like wine more, those playbooks didn’t work in 2009 when the crisis started.”

With the old marketing playbook not working, wineries had to find other methods to connect to their markets and social media has become one of the key channels.

Now the challenge in the wine industry, like all sectors, is dealing with the massive amount of data coming in though social media and other channels.

The cacophony of data

“If you rewind to when social media came out, everyone had these stream based things and the noise factor was so heavy,” says Mabray.

“For small businesses this creates an ‘analysis to paralysis’ where they’d rather not do anything.”

Mabray sees paralysis as a problem for all organisations, particularly for big brands who are being overwhelmed by data.

“The cacophony of data at a brand level is just too much,” he says.

“It’s as noisy as all get go and I think the transition is to break Big Data down into small bite size pieces for businesses to digest is the future, it shouldn’t be the businesses problem, it should be the software companies’.”

A growing digital divide

Mabray sees a divide developing between the producers who are embracing technology and those who aren’t, “the efficiencies attributed to technology are obvious whether they’re using CRM, business intelligence or other components.”

“The people who are doing this are recognising the growth and saying ‘hey, this stuff actually works! If I feed the horse it runs.”

While Mabray is focused on digital media and the wine industry, similar factors are work in other industries and technology sectors; whether it’s data collected by farm sensors to posts on Instagram or Facebook.

Facebook blues

Mabray is less than impressed with Facebook and sees businesses concentrating on the social media service as making a mistake.

“I think that every social media platform that’s been developed had such a strong emphasis on consumer to consumer interaction that they’ve left the business behind, despite thinking that business will pay the bills.”

“As a result almost every single business application that’s come from these social media companies has met with hiccups. That’s because it wasn’t part of the original plan.”

Facebook in particular is problematic in his view, “it’s like setting up a kiosk in the supermall of the world.”

The business anger towards Facebook’s recent changes is due to the effort companies have put into the platform, Mabray believes; “everyone’s angry about Facebook because we put so much into getting the data there.”

“We said ‘go meet us on Facebook’, we spent money collecting the items and manufacturing the content to attract people and now we have to spend money to get the attention of the people we attracted to the service in the first place.”

Despite the downsides of social media Mabray sees customer support as one of the key areas the services. “It’s easy to do in 140 characters.”

Context is king

“Everything come back to context. There’s this phrase that ‘content is king’,” Mabray says. “Context is king.”

“Anyone can produce content. It’s a bull market for free content. We have content pollution – there’s so much junk to wade through.

Mabray’s advice to business is to listen to the market: “Customers are in control more than they have ever been in human history: Google flattens the world and social media amplifies it.”

For wineries, like most other industries, the opportunity is to deal with that flat, amplified world.

A life in photojournalism

Photographer Charles O’Rear talks about wine, Windows XP and the future of photography

The latest Decoding the New Economy video is an interview with wine photographer Charles O’Rear.

Charles was on tour with Microsoft to promote the end of Windows XP, it was his photo of a Napa Valley hillside that became the background feature the system’s default ‘Bliss’ theme.

The interview is a long ranging discussion on how photojournalism has changed over the last four decades along with the evolution of both the art and science of photography itself.

Australia’s grapes of wrath

The Australian wine industry is a good example of where the country’s industrial policies and business leadership have failed.

In a great post, The Wine Rules looks at what ails the Australian wine industry after the news of Cassella Wine’s problems.

Three things jump out of Dudley Brown’s article – how industry bodies are generally ineffectual, the failure of 1980s conglomerate thinking and how fragile your position is when you sell on price.

Selling on price

It’s tough being the cheapest supplier, you constantly have to be on guard against lower cost suppliers coming onto the market and you can’t do your best work.

Customers come to you not because you’re good, but because you’re cheap and will switch the moment someone beats you on price.

Worse still, you’re exposed to external shocks like supply interruptions, technological change or currency movement.

The latter is exactly what’s smashed Australia’s commodity wine sector.

A similar thing happened to the Australian movie industry – at fifty US cents to the Aussie dollar filming The Matrix in Sydney was a bargain, at eighty producers competitiveness falls away and at parity filming down under makes no sense at all.

Yet the movie industry persists in the model and still tries to compete in the zero-sum game of producer incentives which is possibly the most egregious example of corporate welfare on the planet.

When you’re a high cost country then you have to sell high value products, something that’s lost on those who see Australia’s future as lying in digging stuff up or chopping it down to sell cheaply in bulk.

Industry associations

“It’s like a Labor party candidate pre-selection convention” says Brown in describing the lack of talent among the leadership of the Australian wine industry. To be fair, it’s little better in Liberal Party.

There’s no surprise there’s an overlap between politics and industry associations, with no shortage of superannuated mediocre MPs supplementing their tragically inadequate lifetime pensions with a well paid job representing some hapless group of business people.

Not that the professional business lobbyists are any better as they pop up on various industry boards and government panels doing little. The only positive thing is these roles keep such folk away from positions where they could destroy shareholder or taxpayer wealth.

Basically, few Australian industry groups are worth spending time on and the wine industry is no exception.

Australia conglomerate theory

One of the conceits of 1980s Australia was the idea that local businesses had to dominate the domestic market in order to compete internationally.

A succession of business leaders took gullible useful idiots like Paul Keating and Graheme Richardson, or the Liberal Party equivalents to lunch at Machiavelli’s or The Flower Drum, stroked their not insubstantial egos over a few bottles of top French wine and came away with a plan to merge entire industries, or unions, into one or two mega-operations.

It ended in tears.

The best example is the brewing industry, where the state based brewers were hoovered up in two massive conglomerates in 1980s. Thirty years later Australia’s brewing industry is almost foreign owned and has failed in every export venture it has attempted.

Fosters Brewing Group was, ironically, one of the companies that managed to screw the Australian wine industry through poorly planned and executed conglomeration. Again every attempt at expanding overseas failed dismally.

In many ways, the Australian wine industry represents the missed opportunities of the country’s lost generation as what should have been one of the nation’s leading sectors – that had a genuine shot at being world leader – became mired in managerialism, corporatism and cronyism.

All isn’t lost for the nation’s vintners or any other Aussie industry, Dudley Brown describes how some individuals are committed to delivering great products to the world. There’s people like them in every sector.

Hopefully we’ll be able to harness those talents and enthusiasm to build the industries, not just in wine, that will drive Australia in the Twenty-First Century.

Picture courtesy of Krappweis on SXC.HU