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cruvee's groovy Print
Written by Nikitas Magel   

An Interview with the CEO of Social Wine Media Platform Cruvee

wine_computer_flippedThe wine industry is changing.  One area in which we see this happening most rapidly, sovaldi sale not surprisingly, find is in media.  The dynamic and interactive nature of the internet is allowing a new generation of wine consumers and trade professionals to share information in ways and to a degree that the industry has never before seen, stomach but is poised to revolutionize the buying and selling of even the most artisan-driven, limited-production wines on the market.  Yet with all its power and versatility, using the web as an effective source of wine information does has its limitations.  One of the issues holding back the real explosion of online wine media is the lack of a tool or technology to actively organize wine information from the otherwise loose collection of wine blogs and forums, winery websites, and wine-oriented social media sites, so as to render it all truly useful and immediately accessible.  Cruvee, however, is one system and service that attempts to do exactly that.  Intrigued with the implications, I reached out to its CEO, Evan Cover, to learn more.

NM: Can you say a little bit about how the idea for Cruvee started and whom else has been working on the project with you?

EC: We have a couple of partners here.  Alex Kramer is our VP of Strategy; he's knows a great deal about technology and how to implement it in the marketplace.  He had his own software company prior to this, and has a lot of experience in that world.  Our other partner is Kevin Vogt, who's a Master Sommelier at Delmonico's at the Venetian [Hotel and Casino in Las Vegas].  Now, me, I come from a hospitality background and more from the sales and marketing side, and [the other partners] developed a software product for me.  We've since stayed together.  We all sat around and started talking one day about what's going on in the world of wine and what's going on in the world of the web, and decided, "Hey, let's make something happen here, because we all have a lot of great ideas."  Of course, it takes a long time to get something like this rolling and moving forward and our business model changed twelve times over — but hey, you know what? — we feel like we've come up with a great product and something that both the consumer and trade will really enjoy.

NM: So, tell me about the product.  Can you explain what Cruvee is — especially in terms that someone unfamiliar with online social media might be able to understand — and why is it important?

EC: We bring your wine lifestyle online, by showing you relevant wine information based on whatever preferences that you build into your Cruvee profile, or by keywords you give when you sign up.  We consider ourselves a wine lifestyle aggregation platform, basically being able to analyze anything that's dynamically created for wine, or the information on wine that's on the web, and tailor it to a consumer.  We would do this for a member on the Cruvee site in real time, based on their preferences and things that they've done within the actual site itself that will allow them to focus on information about wine that is relevant to what they want to see, rather than just random bits information, if you will.

Now, the reason we started this whole thing is because there's just too many sites out there that have content that's, again, not relevant to what you want to see, or they're very specific sites for specialized things like wine purchasing or cellar management.  We really wanted to be able to bring everything into one location, if you will, to give people the opportunity to have not only a social network, but also to be able to learn about wine by having other wines introduced to them that they may personally consider important based on their profile.

NM: But why do you think something like Cruvee is really necessary?

EC: Well, it's such a fragmented industry, right?  There are so many different sites out there [with which] you can do one thing at a time.  For example, CellarTracker may be the leader in cellar management, whereas WineSearcher may the best place to search for wine and buy it online — you can go even more generic and say that FaceBook is the best site to connect with other people and their interests — so why not bring all that information together in one area for a member to be comfortable when they want to bring their wine lifestyle online?  Cruvee is bringing it all together.



 

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