[Original French speaking article here]
Ever since our very first VinoCamp in Paris, there’s been an idea bubbling in the back of Gregoire Japiot’s head. VinoCamps are great ways to start conversations, but then we all go our separate ways and its hard to keep the conversation going. It’s hard to execute all the brilliant ideas we’ve generated.
The original barcamps were all about technology, so geeks could get together and actually put some programming code together at the end of a session. They organized hack days where everybody would come in and code together. But I can’t just bring my vineyard to the VinoCamp. And change in the wine world tends to take a lot more time than the e-world.
But now we see that VinoCamp has some real momentum. We have the critical mass to actually create some of the concepts we’re discussing.
So Greg started a Vinocamp Lab. The Lab will be an open space where anybody can come in and help work on a project that was born out of a VinoCamp session.
And in typical vinocamp fashion, we start off running. Here is a list of projects that have been discussed at VinoCamp. Please go to the website and vote on the ones you think we should work on first. You have multiple votes so don’t be stingy.
Tchin-roulette: A chatroulette-style service that lets wine geeks chat with other wine geeks. Chat Roulette is a service that randomly pairs strangers for conversations. So you’d be paired up with a wine lover you never met to chat about anything at all.
Wine marketing watch: A collaborative project to catalogue and organize information about wine, wine marketing, and so on. Practically, this could be a lot like a passive search or google alert for all things wine business related. Only instead of a complicated computer program like Google’s, we would have a devoted team of vinocampers collecting and collating data. And curating it and presenting it in digestible form.
Live tasting tools: A program that allows people to attend virtual wine tastings. Today, winemakers like me use skype to make appearances at tastings of our wines around the world, but skype isn’t designed for that so there are certain limitations. Imagine a platform (a bit like O’Reilly Webcasts http://oreilly.com/webcasts/ ) that is catered specifically to wine tastings. So you have a window where you can write a tasting note and hit publish and it’s automatically sent to tweetawine, tasteawine, adegga, vinogusto, cellartracker, etc. and shared with the people at your tasting without cluttering the chat window. There’d naturally be a chat window to encourage conversation. The winemaker or whoever is presenting could receive instant feedback in an unobtrusive way and cater the presentation to the audience or respond to questions live. You could do tastings where people are scattered around the world if you sent them bottles ahead of time. Lots of ideas.
Treasure hunt / Game kit: This is an idea to use mapping and augmented reality in a series of fun treasure hunt games. Send wine lovers roaming through the streets of Paris to find hidden clues, wine themed puzzles, and so on. The VinoLab contribution would likely be in the realm of making it easier to do the augmented reality stuff. Hold up your iphone and take a picture of a certain bottle of wine and suddenly you get the next clue: GPS coordinates to a restaurant on the other side of town! You get the idea.
Crowdsourced Label Design: A place where people can collaborate on wine label design.
Community Crushpad-ish: A project where VinoCampers could make a custom barrel of wine on participating vineyards, follow the vineyards from afar by video and photo, and presumably pay to finance the production of that barrel.
BabelVino: Tools to help overcome the language barrier wine bloggers face.
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By Ryan O’Connell
O’Vineyards
http://ovineyards.com/
Love That Languedoc
http://love-that-languedoc.com/
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and to go further in Babel-Lab manner here the German version on the Vinocamp Deutschland Blog:
http://wp.me/p1xACr-2h