What happens when you put together two technology geeks who also happen to love wine? VinTank is born. VinTank is a small analyst-consulting firm that designed its own revolutionary software program that mixes wine and technology. It’s the genius idea of Napa native Paul Mabray and his friend James Jory. Unlike other social media monitoring tools, says Mabray, Vintank has the most powerful algorithms to understand what people are saying about wine, and incorporates tools to listen to the full context of true wine conversations. They take in over 1 million wine conversations a day and actively analyze more than 170,000 social sites, 15,000 wine blogs, 90,000 forum sites, 10 million social customer profiles and more. They give their winery clients access to this information on an easy-to-understand online dashboard. The wineries then use that informatation to market their product to particular customers who precisely meet the profile that matches their target market. This is the second wine tech start up for Mabray, and he is also only one of three wine tech CEOs who has raised over $10-million in the last decade. “There hasn’t been any real great change in leadership for the wine industry since the 1970s,” said Mabray. “Technology is that catalyst for change and we want to make a difference in this industry. We are the little company that could, and we’re pushing the envelope further by pushing the wine industry into digital.” Mabray describes his business partner, Jory, as the Kung Fu master with a fishing pole for developing the state-of-the-art software program that may impact how we all will shop within the next twenty years. VinTank also earned a place in the book The Age of Context, which was released late last year. www.vintank.com ▲ VIN TANK Its software mines the online wine world to find customers JANUARY / F E B R UARY 2 0 1 4 21
NVLife_Feb_2014
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