Love this. Looks really slick! I like how it can give a rating for friends and family too.
There are a number of wine and beer scanning apps I've had on my phone for a while. Have been wondering how the image recognition is happening on them. Is there some SDK out there that everyone's using?
@KristoferTM Thanks Kris- The friends score thing is my favorite part. I can buy Christmas gifts for my friends with complete confidence. And it can be a surprise. Looking forward to buying some gifts for the first time in a while.
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This looks quite interesting! I'm wondering though, if you can use the app when you are at a restaurant and you are looking at a menu (and don't have the label available to scan).
@forrestmaready@jdbt It's really interesting that you're going to be using AR. It seems to be slowly making a comeback (from the Layer days) but not in the way it was typically used ie. as a gimmick.
I'm amped to see what you do with it. Are you working directly with restaurants at this point?
Congrats on all the attention you're getting. It's cool to see hard work rewarded.
@d2burke@jdbt Regarding restaurants- I know we've talked to a few larger organizations, though I don't know if I'm supposed to say which ones. I always hate when I see other people talk secretive like that and now I'm doing it myself. That feels as annoying to say as it does to hear.
@forrestmaready@jdbt haha...srsly right? Truth be told...I'm on an AR project right now and I've been arguing with my producer that NO ONE uses AR anymore...only for this to launch ;)
Anyway, good stuff man.
We're a little busy this morning as you can imagine, but everything is holding up OK so far. For those of you coming here and don't know much about Next Glass, the chemistry thing is not a marketing gimmick. We actually have a real lab with a ThermoScientific Mass Spectrometer (among some other instruments). We sample 100-125 beers/wines every day and generate 'DNA' profiles for each product. They start at around 200,000 chemical compounds per sample and we whittle it down to a level that can work quickly enough for mobile apps and thoroughly enough to be the best prediction of taste on the planet. It's still a work in progress, no doubt, but the scores can be freaky sometimes. Ask me anything else, I'll do my best to answer. Cheers!
@rrhoover Yes- we have to know what you like. You and you alone. Doesn't matter what your friends like. A couple of ratings (both positive and not so positive) are good. About 10 or more is where we can really start to tease out the compounds that you respond to.
This is going to be an app I'm going to bang on a lot. I guess my major question upfront is how big are you going to get your recommended wines? From my initial flip though them, it looked like they were pretty standard wines in wide distribution.
@SacBookReviewer Hi Ross- if you're talking about the wines in the "Onboarding" section at the beginning, those were very common wines that we figured more people had tried. You asked how big, so I'm guessing you meant expensive? We have wines in there in the $200 range, but that's definitely not our focus. Nothing goes into the app without running through our lab, so we can't just casually someone's favorite $2400 Champagne into the system. We'd have to purchase it and test it first. I'm not sure the current count, but I think there are around 11,000 wines we've tested so far. That seems like a lot, but there so many Mom and Pop vineyards all over the place that it makes it difficult to find everyone. Our problem there is in procurement, not budget or bandwidth. We will test anything we can find, it's just that we have a hard time finding wines and beers that we haven't tested yet. I don't think we're going to have complete coverage of a 70-page wine list at your favorite restaurant, but for most consumers at Trader Joe's or Bev-Mo, we should have everything.
@forrestmaready No, I didn't mean big = price, (I like wine, but I'm not a snob about it), I was thinking the size of the database. I'm less interested in Screaming Eagle recommendations and more on cool small wines that match what I already like so I can skip the tastings and head straight for the drinking. Too often I spend an hour at a winery to walk away with nothing that impressed me, but I also don't want to stick with the same 20 wines all of the time. And I sympathize with your problem of tracking down new wines and processing them. We were discussing your business in the office today and wondering about the costs involved in testing each wine and speculating on the ongoing expense.
The reason I asked about distribution, was answered in your final sentence. Most of the wine is bought in supermarkets, so focusing on that hits the large end of the market. Its the non-distribution (or low distribution) wines that are for me the more interesting ones, but also have a that high hurdle of either having to taste prior to buying (so a winery visit or in-store tasting) or purchase without previously tasting and risk liking or not.
I'm going to be playing with it this weekend. I have high hopes for it.
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