Dear CellarTracker User,

As we finish 2008, I wanted to announce some exciting site changes, pass along a couple of holiday offers from partner sites, reflect on the growth of CellarTracker over the past few years, and thank everyone for their part in making this possible.

LOOKING FORWARD TO 2009

I have been working on several exciting projects that should come to fruition in 2009 including:

• A significant user-interface redesign: This is a topic that CellarTracker users like to argue about. On one hand people will occasionally ask "what do you have against graphic designers, and why is your site so, umm, err, ugly?" On the other hand, devoted users who have learned the current user interface don't want me to mess things up or give in to the pressure to make a deeply functional thing pretty. Suffice it to say, I want to have my cake AND eat it too, so I have been working for the past few months with the fantastic team at Fellswoop to come up with a user experience that will be cleaner, more readable, better organized, more functional, modern, faster and a whole lot more. We have already had some great usability tests and are moving into the home stretch on the design, and then I will spend the next several months bringing our joint vision to life. My goal is to have this live by July, but I will know a great deal more in the next 6-8 weeks as I map everything out and start to (re)build it.
• An application programming interface (API): With every passing day more and more folks approach me with ideas to build tools to extend the CellarTracker experience, so for the past few months I have been building out a targeted API to serve some of these needs. The Cor.kz app for your iPhone is the first of these, but you will see many more, from Macintosh desktop widgets to home automation extensions for your Crestron and hopefully much more. The API is still young, but I am excited at how quickly some of these external tools are coming together. If you are a geek and playing with XML is your idea of a good time, I have some toys for you!
• Operational scaleout and performance: Hopefully this will remain quite invisible to you, but as the site has grown the need for bigger, more scalable, more reduntant server infrastructure has grown with it. In the next 2 months I hope to make the site both faster and much more scalable for future growth with a pretty beefy set of server upgrades.
• New partnerships: Here is where I have to be vague. Suffice it to say that some exciting new partnerships should bear fruit in 2009 and hopefully bring you features and scenarios which I could never build on my own.

PARTNER OFFERS

In the holiday spirit, I wanted to pass along two special offers from partner sites:

• CELLARSENSOR™ - special holiday offer
  It has been almost 18 months since I sent out an offer for CellarSensor, a temperature and humidity monitoring product that integrates with CellarTracker. In that time the cost of the hardware has come down significantly making this a much more affordable solution. I personally have been tracking my cellar conditions for the past 2 years and have found the product to be a reliable way to protect my investment. Please check out their special holiday offer.
  
• FOR THE LOVE OF PORT - free December newsletter
  Roy Hersh is a dear friend, a member of my tasting group and the author of a website/newsletter that is indispensable for those who love Port, Madeira and Douro wines. His wine reviews are also integrated within CellarTracker for co-subscribers, and at $59/year this is a no brainer subscription if you love these wines. You can find his website here, and he has also encouraged me to send all CellarTracker users a free copy of his December newsletter.

METRICS

People who used to work with me at Microsoft loved to make fun of the little slips of paper that I would carry around with various metrics on the projects I was living at the time. True to form, when I started CellarTracker I picked 3 metrics which I have tracked ever since.

Since its launch in 2004, registration has grown to more than 69,000 members. On an average day, you are tracking (adding or removing) nearly 11,000 bottles for a total of 11.1 million bottles. The database includes more than 564,000 wines from 48,000 producers, easily the largest of its kind. The CellarTracker community has also emerged as an abundant source of wine reviews with more than 1,000 wines reviewed in a typical day for a total of 760,000 wine reviews, all written by you, real wine enthusiasts. Peer or 'amateur' reviews are not a replacement for those written by professional critics, but you are generating as many reviews in two weeks as the Wine Spectator publishes in an entire year. You have created the largest collection of wine reviews in the world, all freely available for the wine-loving community to enjoy. The site is also quickly becoming one of the most heavily visited wine websites with 10-15 million page views per month from hundreds of thousands of unique users.

FIGURE: Annual community wine reviews

The bottom line is that with each new user, CellarTracker gets more useful for everyone. All of this is a testament to the passion that wine inspires and power of community, core principles of CellarTracker from its inception.

THANK YOU!

Finally and most importantly, I want to thank all of you for your participation, support, encouragement and suggestions. It is my honor and pleasure to serve you!
(And when I said the same thing last year I got about 2,000 replies insisting that it was your pleasure. Let's just say the feeling is very mutual!)

Best wishes to a great 2009,
Eric LeVine
www.CellarTracker.com