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March 31st 2006 saw the launch of minvision.com, a new e-commerce website for high-end minerals
for collectors. This site has been developed by Jolyon Ralph, who also developed mindat.org.
The MinVision website sells mineral specimens from two of the world's leading mineral dealers - Crystal Classics and The Collector's Edge Inc.
Together they have some of the most exciting mineral stock on the planet - they have purchased major collections (such as the Marty Zinn collection,
in cooperation with Kristalle), and are responsible for active mineral mining all over the planet, mining leases themselves and helping
rescue specimens from ongoing ore mining operations.
MinVision uses the latest web technology to provide a powerful system for browsing and buying minerals, far advanced from anything you will have seen from any other mineral dealer. The site is also going to be updated far more frequently than other sites - sometimes updates will be daily. And you can receive emails on a regular basis informing you when minerals that match your collecting interests and budgets are added.
Other than the obvious advertisment for my own website, the reason for this notice is to explain how MinVision will impact on mindat.org, and to reassure those of you who are worried about these commercial endeavours.
I have wanted to find a way to sell minerals online for some time, but I also realised that I could not do this within mindat.org itself - I needed to make sure that there was a distinction between the commercial site (MinVision) and the community/data site (mindat) - so a brand new website was required - and MinVision is it. Finding the partners to help me with this project was simple - I decided to start asking at the top of the market. I did not need to work my way down the list. MinVision will remain independent of mindat. To this end, the editorial team who run mindat are not in any way involved in the new project (other than, of course, myself. But I am just one of many now).
Existing advertisers will continue to be able to advertise on mindat.org - and MinVision will advertise on mindat.org too (and are paying for these adverts just as other dealers are - except MinVision is paying a lot more!). It has also given us the chance to think about what we do, and we want to make sure our advertising is MORE open to dealers of all sizes. We know at the moment that our advertising system is too expensive for many potential advertisers - we want to simplify our system but at the same time provide more options for advertisers who want a presence but can't afford the front-page banners.
We are now in a very lucky situation that with our advertising revenue we can not only comfortably pay for the running costs on mindat.org, we can also put money aside for the future, just in case, and also to help fund some of our new projects, such as Mindat Books - where we aim to provide, for free, hundreds of out of print books and magazine articles for you to download and read (either copyright free or where we have permission from the copyright owners to do so). MinVision will also give me more free time to spend working on mindat.org rather than my normal day job. There are some major new developments and improvements coming up for mindat.org - some of them a direct result of the development work I have done for MinVision, using the technology to improve mindat.
No! Mindat Auctions are still coming - this project did delay them a bit, for which I apologise - and Mindat Auctions will be open to all collectors and dealers to use whether selling 1 rock or 10,000. As with MinVision, the technology behind Mindat Auctions will be state-of-the-art.
Every specimen bought from MinVision helps directly to pay for the operation of mindat.org. But buy from Minvision because you like the minerals and you want them for your collection. There is no other reason!
Visit www.minvision.com