OwnIT: Your Wine Your Way

NAPA, CA--(Marketwire - December 9, 2009) - The OwnIT movement launched last week with the express goal of helping wineries take control over how their wine is represented online. The movement headquarters will be the YourWineYourWay.com website, where interested parties can collect to join the conversation and get involved.

OwnIT is a movement that will change the way wine is represented online. Enter your product and profile information in one location and have it published to mobile applications, online retailers, wine related social networks and more! Finally provide consistent, quality, and controlled wine information to everyone, every time.

"With more than 30 wine-related social networks, 50 mobile wine applications, 300 online wine retailers, and 250,000 offline wine retailers, it is nearly impossible to provide consistent and quality wine information to everyone," says Paul Mabray, Chief Strategy Officer for VinTank. "This leads to confusion on the part of consumers, frustration on the part of retailers, confusion AND frustration on the part of wineries. Everyone is looking for a solution, and that is where OwnIT fits in."

With OwnIT, wineries enter their wine information the way they want it displayed on a single site, just once. The data is then published to mobile applications, online retailers, wine related social networks and more. In other words, through the completion of a simple, detailed, and intuitive form, a winery's information is delivered digitally in the format of their choosing.

"Wineries are looking to control their image, data, and information in order to ensure their brand is recognized," says Evan Cover, Founder and CEO of Cruvee. "With OwnIT, wineries can have ONE place to enter their wine information and send all requests for that information to ONE place. This ensures their customers see the wine the same way, everywhere and wineries have complete control over their brand and message. All for free."

Companies that support OwnIT include: Adams Walter Communications, Balzac Communications & Marketing, Breath(E) Media, Cork'd, Cornerstone Cellars, Cruvee, Drync, Foster's Group, Hahn Estates, Hello Vino, Kendall-Jackson Wine Estates, Rodney Strong Vineyards, St. Supery Vineyards & Winery, Vinfolio, VinoVisit.com, VinTank, Wark Communications, Winegrowers of Dry Creek Valley, Wine Industry Insight, Wine Industry Network, Wine Log, Wine Spoken Here, Wine Tamer, and Wine Industry Network.

"One of our biggest challenges as an agency is making sure that the brand messages of our client wineries are consistent across the board," says Michael Wangbickler, Account Manager at Balzac Communications & Marketing and Executive Director of the Academy of Wine Communications. "OwnIT gives us more control over how client winery information is displayed, making it easier for us to manage branding and communications, all from a single source. To get all this information in one place will make all of our jobs a lot easier, and make us a lot more efficient and effective."

"I am frustrated with creating new logins and profiles on all the different sites just to fix my data," says Rick Bakas of St. Supery Vineyards & Winery. "OwnIT will solve that."

"Changing my data in one place and it is replicated the same across the internet, makes this a no brainer for us," says Adam Beaugh of Kendall-Jackson Wine Estates.

"It's exciting to be supporting a message that benefits the entire industry and more importantly, the end user," says Lindsay Ronga, CEO of Cork'd. "Empowering the user with consistent information helps the winery achieve brand stickiness and ensures that social media sites have accurate information populating their sites. Information equals power!"

"The only thing a small producer has is the story of the passion that drove them to make their wines," says Craig Camp of Cornerstone Cellars. "OwnIT is the way to make sure that story is told -- and told accurately."

"Having lived deep in the data for the past 18 months, we've experienced first-hand how serious a problem the wine industry has with 'dirty' data," says Brad Rosen of Drync. "We've been waiting and watching, hoping someone would step up and work centrally to bring all the players together and to clean up the mess. The OwnIT initiative will do just that. We're very excited."

"I see the future of wine online becoming the main market place rather than the secondary marketplace that it is today and OwnIT will allow me get the data we need to make wineries look good," says Dan Lintz of VinoVist.com.

"OwnIT is making the future of our products consistent," says Tim McDonald of Wine Spoken Here.

To find out more information about OwnIT, visit their website at http://www.yourwineyourway.com, or contact Evan Cover at 707-294-1395 or ownit@yourwineyourway.com.

Links:

OwnIT Website - http://www.yourwineyourway.com

About OwnIT

OwnIT is a movement created from the collaboration between Cruvee.com's efforts and the countless number of conversations they had with both wineries and technology companies. They listened to the friction points that both sides of the industry were facing and developed a solution to help best represent wine and data online in a consistent and quality fashion. Their existing technology was built from the ground up and corrects this inherent challenge with wine and data distribution along with matching online conversations that are tied to brands and wine.

Contact Information: Contact Information: Evan Cover Phone: (707) 294-1395 Email: Twitter ID: @yourwineyourway