About two years ago, wine impresario Gary Vaynerchuk bought the wine-review site Corkd, but then he let it languish. He was busy with Wine Library TV, and branching out with speaking gigs, his own site, a book deal (Crush It!), another online TV show, and spending way too much time on Twitter. Corkd was pretty much ignored, and was even badly hacked last January. But Vaynerchuk promised that he would relaunch it better than ever.
And now he has. First, Vaynerchuk hired a CEO for Corkd, Lindsay Ronga. And on Tuesday night the site relaunched quietly with a much more social design. You can now sign in with your Facebook ID through Facebook Connect. And any review or rating can be sent out to your Facebook stream or to Twitter, with a link back to Corkd.
Online wine store and community site Vinfolio has raised $4.5 million in a Series A funding round led by Panorama Capital after receiving an undisclosed amount of angel investment earlier. San Francisco-based Vinfolio offers a set of integrated services and resources to basically help wine enthusiasts and collectors buy, sell, manage and enjoy wine.
Vinfolio CEO Stephen J. Bachmann said the investment will mostly be used to accelerate the growth of its Vinfolio Marketplace, an online platform for buying and selling wine that currently boasts over 250,000 wines up for bidding, and the startup’s expansion in Asia.
Yahoo just opened its doors to a bunch of new OpenSocial apps. People who use MyYahoo as a startpage can now add apps from Mint, KaChing, WordPress, and more. The apps include a small view which appear on your MyYahoo page, but can also open up into a canvas view (which is essentially a dedicated page on Yahoo for that particular app). The Mint app, for instance, gives you a dashboard view of your finances and alerts. The WordPress app lets you do a quick post to your blog right from Yahoo. All together, Yahoo added 14 new apps for users to choose from. You can check your meds (Drugs.com), gas prices (GasBuddy), fantasy stock portfolio (kaChing), food and wine pairings (MyRecipes + Snooth), share books (WeRead), or just play Flood-It (LabPixies). You gotta add Flood-It, love that game.
Raise a glass to Snooth, a social wine review site that is gaining some traction and recently closed another angel round of financing of about $1 million. Angel investors included Joe Meyer, Kevin Fortuna (both from Quigo) and Ted Jansen (former SVP at Expedia), who are now on the company’s advisory board. The New York City-based startup last raised an angel round a year ago for the same amount. Snooth lets you rate, review and talk about wines. On Snooth, anyone can be Robert Parker. And you see what all your friends are reviewing and rating in your own feed. There is also an iPhone-optimized site, and a full-fledged app is in the works.
Snooth offers data to wineries and wine merchants, giving them an idea of where people who are interested in their wines are located, and makes money from lead generation (when a member clicks through to buy a bottle). The site has signed up 11,000 wine merchants worldwide so far.
In a letter to its shareholders, a copy of which TechCrunch has obtained, CEO Philip James gives an update of the business:
A New York City-based startup called Snooth just raised $1 million in angel financing, on top of an earlier $300,000 round. Snooth is a social wine recommendation site that lets you search for more than 300,000 different types of wine. It has 1.9 million reviews, both professional and drinker-generated. Hic.
You can see what wines your friends have reviewed, or send recommendations directly to them. The site also offers recommendations through collaborative filtering techniques, and there is a Facebook app as well. The way the site makes money is by hooking you up with about 600 (going to 1,000) online wine merchants nationwide on a pay-per-click basis. Competitors include WineLog, TasteVine, Vinorati, and the very 1.0 WineSearcher.
The site Launched in June, and is getting between 200,000 and 250,000 unique visitors a month, says founder Philip James.
I gave the site a quick run-through and like the Ajax interface. There are sliders to narrow your search by price and vintage. And there is natural-language search, so it knows what a “spicy cab” means. The ratings for wines I know seem to be on the money. (Okay, I only tried three). Check it out and tell us what you think in comments.
Here is the press release.
