News on Adegga

Lots of news coming from Adegga. I decided to put them all on the same post to make it easier to read what has been happening.

Private Messages
I always felt that for a social site like Adegga not having an internal messaging system was a big fault. We’ve now launched this feature and discovered a bunch of new things our users can do on top of it (like sending us feature requests directly - which we like - of course).

Multiple Rating Scales and half points
For people that feel more comfortable using a shorter scale (1 to 5 or 1 to 20) than the more famous 100 point scale, we launched an improved version of our unique multiple rating scale system. We’ve now added half points.

New Tasting note Page
Rating a wine or writing a note can be a daunting task. We’ve simplified the interface of this important screen and it’s now very easy to simply add a rating or a note. Check what we did.

European Wine Bloggers Conference 2008
We’re very honored to be invited by Ryan and Gabriella of Catavino to participate in the organization of the first European Wine Bloggers Conference. The conference will take place in La Rioja, Spain on the 29th August 2008 and the team will be there to meet a bunch of amazing people that have been changing the world of wine. We can’t wait.

Upcoming
There’s a bunch of stuff coming out in the next couple of weeks. Here’s a small tasting of what we’re working on: (much) more prices and wine shops, a simple yet useful mobile version, a special account for wine producers and much more. Stay tunned.

March 30, 2008 | Tags: adegga, ewbc2008, features | Leave a Comment

John Bell, Social Media and Adegga

I met with Hugo and John Bell yesterday afternoon in Lisbon in a nice cafe near the river to talk about social media. He did a nice post on what happened. Here’s my point of view.

What is social media?
John and Hugo agreed that defining social media is not easy because it’s something that is based on a lot of different things. John added a group of things that help define social media: user generated content and easy participation tools (like blogs).

Trying to get more information I’ve decided to search around the web and found a couple of answers (Wikipedia, Stowe Boyd, Jeremiah Owyang, Robert Scoble and many others.) but this one from Chris Heuer is the one I think explains it better: Social Media is redefining how we relate to each other as humans and how we as humans relate to the organizations that serve us. While it is commonly represented by blogs, podcasts, vlogs, wikis, user generated content and social networks, it is not about those specific things as much as it is about what happens around and because of those things. This includes most notably the ability and desire to easily share with each other, to build upon that which is shared and to discover people, places and things that are of interest to you, because the sharing of these things with these new tools, is making visible that which was previously unknown.

Who is John Bell
John’s is a social media evangelist working for OgilvyPR but he’s not your average agency guy. He’s doing a very interesting work in exploring and understanding what social media is and how it is changing (creating?) the relationships between companies and their customers. He’s also the head of 360º Digital Influence where he is helping clients have a clear understanding of what’s important and relevant in the web.

How to measure social media
John asked us questions to know what we think about the Portuguese social media scene. It was really interesting the way he was organizing our answers into structured ideas.

We had an interesting discussion on how to measure social media success and John has some very good thoughts on the subject. He includes such metrics as number blog mentions, number of blog posts, number of recommendations and search visibility as ways to measure a social media campaign. His work is proving that for a company or brand looking to use social media, measurement should be about the level conversation and not about pageviews or ad impressions.

Adegga and social media
John wanted to know more about Adegga. I explained how we’re trying get wine producers and wine lovers to engage in a conversation with each other. We believe that the wine industry has been hiding behind wine ratings, wine critics and expensive advertising and that has been creating doubts and damaging the relationship that people have with wine. A more open and honest approach is needed and Adegga has the ability to provide the tools that to both producers and wine lovers can use to engage in that conversation.

I finished by doing a demo of the upcoming features we’re preparing to launch soon and John gave me his valuable and experienced insight. It’s great to get such feedback from someone with his kind of experience and knowledge. He really liked Adegga and did a very nice write up about it on his blog.

One last thing. John seems to be getting a thing for Lisbon (who wouldn’t?). Next time you come (SHiFT?) take a look at my Small Guide to Lisbon and see what great places this amazing city has to offer.

March 15, 2008 | Tags: adegga, john bell, social media | 1 Comment

Adegga as a startup

Lots of great tips came out of this weekend’s online discussion on tips for startups, money and productivity. Jason Calcanis wrote a list of 17 tips for startups. Adegga does not have $20 million of funding but I decided to pick some of Jason’s points and tell how we do things there.

Doing a startup means that sometimes you don’t see the whole path
but you need to keep walking.

1. Buy Macintosh computers, save money on an IT department

We’re are 3 in the team, one full time and 2 part-times. Only one of us uses a Mac (me with a 15″ MacBook Pro). The other 2 in the team use PCs with Windows. We’re all using our own computers.

We have had some initial problems in setting a multi-platform development setup but now that all that is done we’ve been running just fine. Out staging server is the same Mac and things move into production once they’ve been tested there.

Working with LAMP on a Mac is several times easier than on a Windows, however most of our users use Windows, so having access to 2 PCs helps us do a lot of Windows testing. (I know we can use Windows on a Mac, but we haven’t needed that).

2. Don’t buy a phone system.

We use Skype for most of our calls. Once in a while we use our mobiles phones. Email is our favorite way of communicating with clients. As we contact people in different time zones and different languages and the team only gets together 3 times a week, this is the best (and cheapest) method to stay organized.

3. Buy cheap tables and expensive chairs.

When we meet to work we use a big wood table from IKEA where we can all work together and collaborate. We also have an IKEA whiteboard where we write what we’re up to and the occasional brainstorming session. We then take pictures and send them via email to archive the meeting.

No fancy chairs for now although I have a nice borrowed one.

4. Use Google hosted email.

We use Google Apps to power our email system and company calendar. No spam and it works everywhere.

5. Fire people who don’t love their work.

We’re all passionate about our project and we’re only 3 so we have to do everything between ourselves. For me it means accounting, marketing, developing, sales, etc. For my two team mates it means sometimes working 4 hours after a full day at their day job and Sunday. It’s not easy but we forget everything when someone says they love Adegga and totally get what we’re trying to do.

6. Get an expensive, automatic espresso machine at the office

We have a Nespresso. It keeps costs down, coffee quality up and saves times every time we meet.

7. Don’t need to rent an office

Adegga was built without an office. We use my living room to meet and each of us works from home when developing. It’s confortable, has Wi-Fi and it’s cheap. Until we get to a level where we can rent a small office this is the way we do it.

The best advice
Sticking to these tips is definitely not a sure path to success. As Tony Wright says, every startup is unique and in the end it’s all about Building something people want, being persistent and never giving up.

March 10, 2008 | Tags: adegga, startups | 3 Comments

Adegga Just Launched Open Registrations

Adegga is now open for anyone to create an account.

During the last couple of months the team has fixed a lot of bugs and developed great new features with the help of our beta users.

There’s a lot more coming soon. We have been working hard on some features to help everyone discover, choose and enjoy wine without complexity. Check Adegga’s blog to keep updated with new developments.

January 20, 2008 | Tags: adegga | 5 Comments

Adegga Launches Wine Blogger Accounts

Wine Bloggers are a great source of wine information and have been changing the way people get informed about wine and most importantly the way people relate to wine.

At Adegga we have a couple of ideas to help promote wine blogs. Recently, we have been testing Wine Blogger Accounts and now we can finally announce them.

Here’s an example of how a wine blogger profile looks like:

We have also added a list of Wine Bloggers on Adegga ordered by how many people have added them to their watchlists making it easier for other people to discover new wine bloggers.

We have a lot more features to help wine bloggers. If you’d like to have one of this accounts please leave a comment bellow or contact me.

January 16, 2008 | Tags: adegga, wine-blogs | Leave a Comment

Updated wine cellar

Boostrapping and developing Adegga barely left me time to update my cellar with the wines I’ve been buying.

Recently I bought a couple of bottles when I was in France and also had the opportunity to buy some not yet released Portuguese wines at a special price.

Here’s the result of the update. My cellar overview is looking much more eclectic: 5 countries and 8 vintages.

From my cellar there are a couple of wines that I’m looking forward to try. Three french wines from the Loire valley: Clos du Papillon 2005, Domaine de la Roche Lambert Anjou Elevé en Futs de Chêne 2005 and the Château de Roquemont Saint-Emilion Grand Cru 2002. From Italy the Bianco di Custoza Superiore Cà del Magro 2006. And finally from Portugal the Quinta de Chocapalha 2005.

My ratings and notes will appear on my tasted wines.

October 31, 2007 | Tags: adegga, cellar, day to day, wine | Leave a Comment

Augmented reality using the Web

Jack Schulze and Matt Webb have produced a great presentation called The Sound of Interaction Design which talks about the kind of interactions that people (here focusing on Generation C) are looking for when dealing with products.

This presentation is on how a new generation wants social, creative, networked products, and how design can help not by identifying tasks to be productively performed, but experiences to be deepened and made fun

Throughout the presentation they show a couple of interesting prototypes. One of them is the Availabot.

It’s a puppet you plug into your computer, with USB, and it represents one of your friends on instant messaging. When the person goes offline, it falls over. As they come online, it stands up.

They also point out the Arduino chipset (available here) which is a prototyping toolkit that lets people easily start interacting physical computing. And also Instructables where people can post and share their projects. The Wii is another great example of how physical computing is having an impact with the way with used to interact with digital devices.

The Web 2.0 phase of the Web is making people create and share content on the Web as never before. This is content still mainly being used online. Its value is growing as it’s being validated by online social interactions. This information is hardly available in the physical world.

Feeding the real world with web content using physical computing might just be something that will make our life’s easier. I can imagine having an augmented reality where some useful information is being pushed to me on demand.

An example: imagine yourself going to a physical wine shop and while looking for at wine bottles you have at your disposal the digital information (maybe from adegga) of which wines you already own or which ones you’ve tasted. Just like a Web layer on top of a real world one.

Having a generation desiring and feeling comfortable with this kind of networked interactions (think Web or Wii) is half-way to experiments with making real useful applications / devices that can make people’s life easier.

Does anyone have examples where Web content could be (or is being) useful offline ?

Update: A friend sent me this amazing demo video from a augmented reality software developement company.

March 1, 2007 | Tags: adegga, augmented-reality, interaction-design, interfaces, physical-computing, Web | Leave a Comment

Next week in London

It’s been only a week since I came back from LIFT and I haven’t had time to digest all the things that were talked / presented / learned (my notes) / written / posted / photographed and filmed there.

Anyway, I’m leaving today for a few days in London. Besides the vacation, I’ll be at the Future of Web Apps conference in the middle of next week where I will also attend Tara Hunt’s Building Online Communities workshop. I’m looking forward to have a conversation about my social wine application Adegga with her.

I’ve also been invited to the London Girl Geek Dinner where I’ll meetup with Nicole.

Like last time I’m taking much needed time off to think, sleep, travel, smell, see, hear and dream.

February 17, 2007 | Tags: adegga, fowa, lift07, london | Leave a Comment

about

My name is André Ribeirinho, I'm an entrepreneur who lives in Portugal
More about me. Contact me.
my startup

Adegga is a social wine discovery service. The idea is to take the complexity out of wine and allow people to discover wines based other people's choices.

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