Tag: widget

  • iPhone Wine App Points to Potential of Location-based Data

    INTERVIEW: Rick Breslin, Principal of Hello Vino, tells smartphone.biz-news how the food pairing and wine suggestion tool came about – and the team’s plans for both monetising it and capitalising on location-based data.

    Rick Breslin, Principal of Hello Vino, makes no bones that his company’s wine pairing and suggestion tool is aimed firmly at consumers that know nothing about wine.

    Stuffy it ain’t. It offers to help users do everything from selecting a good vintage to give as a gift, to picking a suitable bottle of wine in a restauarant or to go with a dish while browsing the supermarket aisles.

    "The general idea was to help consumers get over the pain points when they go into a store and are faced with hundreds of bottles of wine," Breslin told smartphone.biz-news.

    "Our target market is beginner wine consumers who typically are overwhelmed by the wine buying process."

    Hello Vino launched an iPhone app in June but it offers a multi-platform delivery – mobile web, Web and SMS.

    The tool helps users find a wine in one of four areas:

    • wine with a meal/food
    • wine for an occasion
    • wine by country/region
    • wine by taste/style

    Breslin said data on labels and brands is provided through a partnership with snooth.com, the social database of world wines, which has access to over one million wines brands worldwide.

    He said that by tapping into this massive resource, Hello Vino provides users with a different way to find a wine – with the potential to make over 2000 wine pairings.

    So even if someone is looking for a wine to go with a dish as simple as pizza, they are asked whether they’re having cheese, pepperoni, chicken, veggies, white sauce and so on, and a recommendation for wine is then made.

    Technology no Barrier

    If wine knowledge and culinary taste are no barrier to using Hello Vino, neither are technological limitations.

    Anyone can access the site on their home PC and use the Hello Vino widget to find an appropriate wine.

    Breslin said the wine search service also works on any smartphone.

    Users entering the mobile website are redirected depending on the type of handset they are using to ensure as smooth a user experience as possible.

    This includes a stripped-down WAP version.

    For those that don’t have access to the mobile internet, there is an SMS service in which people can send a text message to get advice on choosing a wine.

    The iPhone app, however, comes with some additional features, including a search function so that users can enter a particular wine and get its details, a label shot and rating information.

    In the future, there are plans for native apps for Blackberry, Palm’s Pre, Samsung and Nokia handsets.

    "We want to give smartphone users the best experience and we will use native apps to deliver that experience," he said.

    Location-Based Potential

    Looking further ahead, Breslin said they are planning to take advantage of GPS and inventory data to provide consumers with location specific information.

    "If you were in, say, Joe’s Wine Shop, your GPS would show your location and pull up the store’s inventory for you to choose from," he said.

    Hello Vino was set up by Breslin and two fellow web developers working in the wine industry.

    They saw a lot of traffic being driven by demand for information about pairing food and wine and decided there was potential for a mobile application.

    "We were working on a little widget where someone could do a simple Q&A to find what wine they might like to try based on a dish or for an occasion," said Breslin.

    "Then we thought: mobile is emerging. There is a huge opportunity to package this resource onto a smartphone-formatted website."

    Hello Vino launched earlier this year at the Boston Wine Expo. The apps’ users are currently around 90 per cent US-based, with the remainder mostly in the UK, France and Italy.

    Breslin said this is because their marketing efforts have been initially in the US but it is hoped that the overseas market will continue to build.

    Revenue Possibilities

    While the Hello Vino app is free, he said they have started the monetisation process through several different avenues.

    "There are more than 2000 different pairings on the app – that’s valuable," he said.

    "There is an e-commerce website selling wine that wants to use the Hello Vino widget on their site and import their inventory onto it."

    Another revenue earner is the sponsored placement of wine brands, where a particular brand can appear as one of the suggested wines in a user search.

    Breslin said this offered the largest potential, but the team is waiting until adoption levels are higher before approaching brands.

  • TringMe Offers VoIP Calls From Silverlight Apps


    TringMe has launched a widget that allows users to make VoIP calls from Microsoft Silverlight applications. 

    Silverlight doesn’t allow access to a mic – a problem for VoIP calls – so TringMe used a backdoor Flash widget to access it. 

    The Indian start-up’s founder and CEO, Yusuf Motiwala, said they had used a workaround to get past the lack of microphone support in Silverlight. 

    Controversially, this makes use of a competing platform to strengthen an existing platform. 

    Motiwala said it opened the VoIP door to "millions" of Silverlight developers. 

    "There are Silverlight developers who like to create telephony applications but due to the Silverlight limitation, it wasn’t possible so far," he said. 

    "However, with this, they can now easily integrate telephony functionality in their Silverlight applications". 

    Essentially the hack allows users to get the benefits of Silverlight while using Flash for things that Microsoft hasn’t yet programmed into Silverlight.

  • Yahoo Widget Engine Gets HDTV Makers' Backing


    Yahoo has agreed deals with a host of big-name HDTV makers, including Samsung, LG, Sony and Vizio, that will result in their sets supporting Yahoo’s online service.

    The alliances put Yahoo firmly at the forefront of the drive towards the convergence of the Internet and TV.

    The new TVs will be available from as early as the spring and will support widgets – small Internet applications – that operate alongside broadcast TV content.

    After making the announcement at the Consumer Electronics Show in Las Vegas, Yahoo said the applications can be used for a variety of Web activities.

    These include YouTube, MySpace, tracking stocks and sports teams, buying and selling on eBay, messaging friends using Twitter, or using Flickr.

    The widgets give viewers more interaction with the programs they’re watching.

    There will also be applications based on Yahoo-branded services such as Yahoo Finance.

    Yahoo will use the technology as a means to to sell advertising.

    The technology also allows outsiders to write TV applications for the platform.