[By NBC-1TV H. J Yook]BlackSquare Inc., maker of market-leading wine ecommerce application Blackboxx, announced a milestone collaboration with a major newspaper in Asia.

Hong Kong-based South China Morning Post Publishers Ltd. (SCMP) collaborated with BlackSquare to create Wine Circle, a dedicated English language ecommerce site for wine lovers. The site recently launched at https://winecircle.scmp.com/

Wine Circle is the world's first cloud-hosted wine store operated by a leading newspaper and is powered by Blackboxx, a software as a service (SaaS) platform built specifically for direct to consumer wine ecommerce.

The South China Morning Post is Hong Kong's most trusted and widely read English language newspaper, delivering regional news of Hong Kong, China and Asia to local and international audiences.

According to BlackSquare‘s CEO, Matthew Protti, “What’s unique is that SCMP is the first major newspaper to adopt cloud-hosted ecommerce. We‘re excited that Blackboxx was chosen to help SCMP deploy their wine related digital assets and products to readers. It further demonstrates the enterprise level movement to cloud hosting for wine ecommerce that’s happening globally.”

Newspaper based wine clubs have a long, successful history. With Wine Circle, SCMP now joins the ranks of such newspapers as the New York Times, Wall Street Journal, and Daily Telegraph.

Wine Circle is operated by SCMP‘s strategic marketing group in partnership with Kerry Wines Ltd., a premium wine distributor to Hong Kong and Greater China consumers. SCMP will support Wine Circle’s marketing with newspaper inserts, editorial and wine events for members.

“SCMP readers are often wine enthusiasts,” said SCMP‘s director of marketing, Anne Wong. “Wine Circle combines interesting wine articles and reviews from columnists, wine critics and independent bloggers with the opportunity to buy excellent wines at exceptional prices. We also offer special wine events to Wine Circle members, providing SCMP wine lovers a ’one-stop shop' local website.”

“We applied our international wine ecommerce experience to guide SCMP in developing this new line of business” said Protti. “With our local partner, Actel Consulting, we worked closely with SCMP's marketing group to put them on the cutting edge of monetizing their digital assets.”