Tag Archives: Napa Valley

About 3063 days ago Search Engine Optimization

Conquering the Digital Haystack

Jason Wiener’s girlfriend left him — and that might be good news for your business. What do the love travails of a 31-year-old Chicagoan have to do with you? Suffice to say that Wiener’s quest for a new gal led him to online matchmaking services. His trouble finding a good match, in turn, led the software whiz to realize there might be better ways to find all sorts of things online, not just dates. And so it was that Dipsie — Wiener’s 18-month-old start-up — was born. Dipsie, Wiener claims, will do nothing less than usher in a new era in searching the Web. “We’re able to find more information and get people more relevant results than they’ve ever had,” he boasts. Better searches, of course, will make it easier for consumers to locate products and services, as well as improve how advertisers position electronic advertising — and that’s why you might care about Wiener’s love life. Whether Dipsie, which released its first product in late 2004, will deliver on such promises remains to be seen. But clearly it’s time to revisit the search engine. Google’s IPO didn’t end the search wars, it fanned the flames. Few fields are as rife with activity, and a slew of start-ups are angling for position. Some claim new and better technology than the PageRank algorithm made famous by Google. Others seek merely to be different — filling voids left by the big players. And though the technologies, in most cases, are brand-new and untested, they promise to change the way consumers search the Web — and the way advertisers reach those consumers. A look at three of the hottest search start-ups — all planning services for small businesses by early 2005 — shows how. San Francisco-based Blinkx launched last July and already claims more than a million users. What does Blinkx do differently? Its technology not only matches keywords but also locates related concepts. So if you’re reading an article on CNN.com about, say, the war in Iraq, Blinkx will point to other articles on other sites about those events, terrorism, and Mideast geopolitics in general — with far more precision than CNN’s related-article box. What’s more, Blinkx searches everything — not just the Web but also the contents of your computer, including e-mail messages and attachments and files on your hard drive, as well as weblogs and digital television content, which are currently ignored by most other search engines. The technology then organizes the data into channels: Local (for your personal files), Web, News, Shopping, Video, E-mails, and Blogs. Download the free software and Blinkx monitors whatever you’re working on, displaying links in a toolbar on the top right corner of your screen — in effect offering answers to questions you haven’t even asked yet. Suppose a Blinkx user e-mails a friend in San Francisco suggesting a visit to some Napa Valley wineries. As the recipient reads the message, the Blinkx channel icons will twinkle and change color. Clicking on one will bring up a list of up to 10 links. The Local channel might show the way to a PDF on the user’s hard drive that contains the Napa Valley wine train schedule. The Web channel might lead to the homepages of various wineries. Alongside these, when Blinkx rolls out search-related advertising in early 2005, will be paid ads. But these won’t be like the paid links we know today. Most current search-related ads are based on keywords or fixed phrases. Advertisers purchase the keywords and bid to be listed prominently when the search results appear. “That’s great if you’re Mondavi winery and can afford to buy the word wine,” says Blinkx’s co-founder and chief technology officer, Suranga Chandratillake. But suppose you own a gourmet cafe in Napa that offers special deals for tourists. How do you express your offer in a few words so that you will turn up on searches? “You can’t,” Chandratillake says. But because Blinkx searches both keywords and the broader concepts behind those words, advertisers can design ads based on descriptions and concepts. The technology, Chandratillake says, is aimed squarely at small companies that have increasingly been squeezed out of traditional Web advertising by keyword bidding wars. Write a few paragraphs that describe your offer — such as, “We’re a cafe, a family-owned business, near the wine train. Come in and get a free cup of coffee.” Blinkx will analyze the concepts behind those words, so that if anyone (like our hypothetical San Francisco friends) types in “Napa Valley, wine and coffee,” the cafe will get a high ranking — right alongside Mondavi, Starbucks, or any other big advertiser that’s paid handsomely for the keywords. “The small business that offers something unique for a niche can actually advertise effectively alongside the big guys,” says Chandratillake. “There’s no way of doing that with the Google system.” A different kind of assault on Google comes from Snap, a Pasadena, Calif., start-up out of Bill Gross’s Idealab that debuted in October. Bear in mind that it was an earlier Idealab company, GoTo.com (later renamed Overture), that pioneered online search and pay-per-click advertising and was sold in 2003 to Yahoo for $1.6 billion. Snap wants to go beyond GoTo. Rather than pay-per-click, it offers “pay-per-action” advertising. In other words, tracking software installed on an advertiser’s site registers a fee only after a sale is made. “You pay only when you actually complete a transaction,” says CEO Tom McGovern. As was the case with GoTo and other forms of paid search, McGovern expects Snap’s early advertisers to be smaller firms. “Small and medium-size businesses really made GoTo in the early days,” he says. “Dell and Compaq and Amazon didn’t come for a long time. If you come early, you benefit as far as the cost.” Of course, if Snap is successful, that discount won’t last long. Snap hopes to keep small companies onboard by adding special features for local advertisers — most of which are small businesses. Which brings us to poor lovelorn Jason Wiener. When struggling to find dates online, Wiener began to think the process would be easier if the technology recognized the concepts behind what people were looking for — rather than simply matching traits such as occupation, age, or hobbies. Wiener, for instance, loves to snowboard and might list that as a hobby. But a keyword search wouldn’t match him with, say, a woman who enjoyed skiing — even though they both love hitting the slopes. Hence Dipsie, which searches based on semantic rules rather than keywords or even concepts. Wiener claims his semantic algorithm can sift through Web information and get you in one click what might take several with a conventional engine — if it got you there at all. He also says the ability to map concepts will enable him to index some 10 billion webpages, more than double the four billion claimed by Google. The company’s search engines are currently targeted at consumers and do not yet feature paid advertising. But Dipsie has another product that’s geared to business owners: Dipsie SEO, which launched in late 2004 and is designed to help websites improve their visibility on search engines such as Google and Yahoo. Suppose you own a small public relations firm. Dipsie SEO takes a phrase from your site, like “our public relations experts,” and rewrites it in semantically similar ways — “our publicists,” “our publicity pros,” or “our promotions staff” — loading the site’s pages with terms that help it do better on the search engines. Companies pay as little as $29.99 a month for the service — the fee goes up as the volume of information rises. There are scores of similar products and services out there. But most of them involve paying consultants to create new webpages or add keywords to allow buried information to be crawled by search engine spiders. Dipsie, says Wiener, “does it automatically. None of them can.” Keep in mind that none of this exists in a vacuum. Blinkx’s ability to scour your computer and all its programs, for example, is not much different from Google Desktop Search and a similar product planned by Microsoft. Will Google or Microsoft buy Blinkx and crush it, or ignore it? Who knows? At the same time, all the big players — joined by firms like directory giant Dex Media and online business service provider Interland — have launched search initiatives of their own. Many of these are aimed at small businesses, including affordable fixed-price plans that guarantee certain numbers of keyword clicks and local advertising programs. At the moment, it’s the trend that’s important rather than any one particular offering. With technology trends changing rapidly, paying attention now will keep you ahead of the curve — and ahead of your competitors.

About 4373 days ago E-Commerce

Best Cellars

Best of the Net Internet wine sellers offer a great selection of labels and vintages. But laws governing interstate wine shipments can put a cork in your festivities Imagine uncorking your favorite wine one night — maybe a nicely aged 1990 California Cabernet Sauvignon or a terrific bargain Pinot Noir — only to realize that you’re down to your last bottle. No problem: glass in hand, you turn to the Internet and root through virtual cellars packed with thousands of bottles of wine. At first blush, wine and the Web look like a natural match. But ordering wine online isn’t quite as easy as ordering books or CDs. The number of suppliers is not the problem. Hundreds of Web sites peddle wine, including those of Internet retailers, wineries, and established brick-and-mortar wine merchants. But state laws governing the sale of wine across state lines make the process of finding a site that both suits your tastes and ships to your state a challenge indeed. We asked three company leaders with varying degrees of wine expertise to test six wine-selling sites: those of three online retailers, two big brick-and-mortar retailers (one located on the East Coast, the other on the West Coast), and an online cooperative made up of some 50 California wineries. The panel evaluated the sites for quality and variety of merchandise, interactive features such as wine searches, and ease of use and technical performance. The reviewers purchased wine from a variety of growing regions, including California’s Napa Valley, Washington State, Italy, and Chile. Two of our panelists had in fact bought wine online previously, and all three panelists enjoyed the experience of reviewing wine-selling Internet sites, but they said they wouldn’t be ditching their local wine store just yet. “A nice complement to wine stores — not a replacement,” says Shawn Kravetz, president of Esplanade Capital LLC in Boston and a wine enthusiast for more than a decade. In stores, “it’s nice to see the bottles, clipped articles, and prices in front of you.” The main benefit of these Internet sites: the vast selection of wines available, particularly rare or high-end bottles. One site offered a case of 1865 sweet wine from France’s famed Château d’Yquem for $208,550. For the more budget-conscious, a case of Bordeaux from the legendary 1961 vintage was available for about $4,000. The enormous selection of wines online was both a blessing and a curse, according to our judges. Panelist Jim Roop, president of the James J. Roop Co. in Cleveland, complained that most sites did a poor job of allowing customers to narrow their search. Sometimes, he says, you wind up with a list of “400 different wines” instead of the “40 Merlots between $20 and $40 you’re really trying to get to.’ And those state liquor-shipment laws were a hassle, preventing two of the panelists from buying bottles from some merchants. A labyrinth of state laws restricting who could sell liquor, and how, cropped up at the end of Prohibition, in 1933, when the details were resolved on a state-by-state rather than a federal level. “Every state is different,’ says Richard Blau, a lawyer at Holland & Knight LLC in Tampa and an expert on the laws that govern the alcohol industry. Many states prohibit wineries and retailers outside their borders from shipping wine directly to their own residents. However, a dozen states, including California, Colorado, Illinois, and Missouri, are more liberal than others in permitting wineries and retailers outside their lines to make direct shipments to the states’ consumers. Those 12 states have struck so-called “reciprocal agreements,” which basically say, “If I can ship to you, you can ship to me.” Some Web sites have been known to fulfill orders in violation of state laws — a move that can trigger legal action against the supplier and seizure of the wine. (For more information about pertinent state laws, visit www.wineinstitute.org.) Our Massachusetts and Ohio panelists came up dry at both K&L Wine Merchants and Winetasting.com. Massachusetts and Ohio are among approximately 30 states that restrict or bar outright direct shipments from other states. To circumnavigate prohibitions, some online sellers make special arrangements with local wholesalers and retailers to supply wines that are already available in a particular state, or they get licensed as retailers in the state. But K&L and Winetasting.com didn’t have either of those selling mechanisms in place for Massachusetts and Ohio and so declined to fulfill Internet orders there. Delivery, too, can be an issue, since an adult must sign for the wine. And shipping costs of $13.95 a bottle, as was the case in several transactions, can make online shopping uneconomical. “For an expensive or rare wine, it might make sense. But why pay the shipping costs when I can pick up the same bottles at my local wine shop?’ asks panelist Chris Dominguez, president of Stockpoint Inc. in San Francisco. No clear-cut winner emerged from our survey, although retailer Wine .com got solid marks from two panelists for its “decent” to “great” selection and “reasonable” shipping charges. (Unfortunately, Wine.com was swallowed up by competitor eVineyard as we were going to press and was consequently cut from the rest of this article.) In general our panelists tended to prefer sites that catered to their personal regional preferences, be it Bordeaux or Napa. Dominguez’s number one choice was the Web site of K&L Wine Merchants, a brick-and-mortar retailer in Redwood City, Calif. The California-wine lover praised K&L’s site for its ease of use and “excellent” choices. Roop’s first pick was WineBins.com, an online seller. Roop, a Bordeaux enthusiast, liked the “absolutely huge range of product, particularly older French wines.” Kravetz liked best the Web site of New York retailer Sherry-Lehmann. “Seems like a wine store instead of an Internet business,” he says. And there was no obvious loser either, although our panelists did find fault with some offerings. Dominguez dinged Sherry-Lehmann. The second time he visited its site, the pages failed to load. His wine took more than four weeks to arrive, and he thought the shipping costs from New York to California were high at $13.95 a bottle — although the company agreed to waive those fees because of the shipping delay. Roop handed the booby prize to Winetasting.com, the online cooperative of California wineries. It didn’t help that the Ohioan couldn’t place an order with that site. “But most aggravating of all is that there is no pricing listed next to the wine,” he says. A browser must click on a particular wine to see its price. Kravetz said WineBins.com was his least favorite, criticizing the “average selection” and the site’s “impossible” loading time. “Maybe the wine ages while the page loads,” he jokes. Roger Fillion is a freelance writer living in Evergreen, Colo. The Savvy Entrepreneur’s Guide to Wine Online eVineyard What it’s good for Reasonable shipping fees. Good variety. Wine ratings. Don’t waste your time if You’re looking for a particular bottle. Although the site boasts more than 5,000 wines, one panelist complained of unsatisfactory selections among the California wine makers he was interested in. What our CEOs had to say “Enjoyed their variety, incorporation of Wine Spectator [magazine] ratings, and higher-end offerings, coupled with a very reasonable $4.95 blanket shipping charge for a bottle or a case,” said one CEO. But another panelist stated: “Simple, decent, a bit entry-level.” What you should know Offers Amazon.com-style recommendations by listing other wines purchased by shoppers who chose your wine. K&L Wine Merchants What it’s good for Rare U.S. and European wines. Ease of use. Tasting notes from own staff, Wine Spectator, and wine gurus like Robert Parker. Don’t waste your time if You live in a state with restrictive alcohol-shipping laws. Internet orders are accepted from just 13 states. What our CEOs had to say “Will not deliver to my state. Too bad. I like their top-10 list and their site overall. Not fancy, but good.” What you should know Web site for big California retailer in Redwood City. Site typically offers about 3,000 wines. Sherry-Lehmann What it’s good for Wines of all prices. Good descriptions. Free delivery for New York state residents who spend in excess of $95. Don’t waste your time if You live outside New York state and don’t want to pay steep shipping charges. What our CEOs had to say “A good selection of both high-end and low-end product. But you better buy only high end, because their shipping charges are through the roof, at $13.95 for one to three bottles and $55.80 for a case of 12.” What you should know Will not ship to nine U.S. states. Oenophiles can buy wine futures — lock in a price for a 1999 Bordeaux that won’t arrive until June 2002. WineBins.com What it’s good for Less expensive California bottles to older Bordeaux dating back to the 1800s. Shipping fee for one case is a reasonable $9.50. Don’t waste your time if You really dislike slow-loading pages — which one panelist complained about — and don’t want to pay the same $9.50 shipping fee for just one bottle. What our CEOs had to say “Offers by far the widest range of product of the group,” said one judge. But another criticized: “Searching by ‘flavor’ is good [only] for novices.” What you should know Virtual retailer owned by Geerlings & Wade Inc., a direct marketer and Internet retailer of wines. Offers 1,000 wines. Serves 29 states. Winetasting.com What it’s good for California wines, especially hard-to-find product such as bottles available only from the wineries themselves. Examples: Cabernets from the 1980s or Merryvale’s highly rated 1997 Profile, a red blend. Don’t waste your time if You don’t want California wines. What our CEOs had to say “Requires some effort to search. Limited selection. But very high quality. Kind of like shopping at a boutique instead of a wine emporium.” What you should know Virtual cooperative made up of some 50 California wineries. Site is a hub from which you’re transported to a winegrower’s own site. Serves 20 states. Our panelists Chris Dominguez is president and cofounder of Stockpoint Inc., a San Francisco-based provider of online and wireless investment-analysis tools and financial information. A resident of northern California for the past dozen years, he regularly visits Napa Valley. Shawn Kravetz is president of Esplanade Capital LLC, a hedge-fund-management company in Boston. A wine enthusiast for more than a decade, he especially enjoys red Bordeaux. Jim Roop is president of the James J. Roop Co., a corporate-communications consulting firm in Cleveland. Roop is past chairman of the Cleveland Wine Auction, a benefit event, and a member of Commanderie de Bordeaux, an international society of Bordeaux lovers. Please e-mail your comments to editors@inc.com.