Heads down, hard at work on a product launch, it is easy to forget just how much progress has been made coaxing a tiny seed of an idea into a dynamic site. This post looks back at the key milestones we hit in December, and queues up what’s to come in Q1 2010:

December

beta tasters invited

We invited approximately 30 “beta tasters” out for a spin on the booquet site. We wanted to gather opinions and first impressions, so invited a list of close friends and Twitter colleagues to provide us feedback.

Overall, the comments we received were very helpful, with the majority of “room for improvement” comments landing in the simplify this, and clarify that departments. We’ll be working on implementing some of those suggestions in future releases and will pay special attention to highlighting the site’s less intuitive features, such as: Personalized wine feeds and Personalized top charts.

A theme in the feedback that makes us happy and is worth calling out here is: Most beta tasters really liked the look of the booquet site and how simple/uncluttered the pages are.  (Kudos to Jeff Rodanski and his team at Slice of Lime.)

Look for a second round of invites in February.

January and into Q1 2010

iPhone app dev work accelerates

This stuff is hot. Kyle Davis is leading us through the process. Right now we’re busy integrating  web services and finalizing our graphic theming strategy. With continued focus we should have a fully expressed version of the app for internal demo within 4-6 weeks. This app is a priority for us, so everyone on the team is focused on making it happen. If you knew what we had planned, you’d think, “I wish I had the booquet iPhone app now,” every time you shopped for wine. It’s going to be extremely useful.

Profiling wines by sentiment

Samuel Chevalier is working with us to add greater value to our wine databases and our recommendation engines. We kicked off an innovative project based on his work yesterday, and will drive toward completing Phase 1 of implementation prior to opening up the site to the public.

Certifying and improving the core wine data

Since so much of the booquet promise to help you “Find wine you love” depends on how well we deliver high-quality data in context, we are making a significant investment in scrubbing incoming feeds for incongruities, gaps, and typos.  Pascal Bouvier, our founder, and CJ Grimes, CTO are leading this heavy lift.

Thanks so much for your interest in booquet. We hope you’ll check back for additional news and notes monthly. Or, follow @booquet on Twitter.