Most people who are interested in automobiles will probably know of the app VINwiki, but for everyone else here´s the principle:
People can post repairs, damage reports and pretty much everything else that´s relevant for a cars history in correlation with the cars VIN number on the app. If you wanna buy a car, you can look up the VIN number on the app and can get access to a lot of documented history of the car. It is also a very helpful tool to find out more about production numbers of cars. For example, VINwiki found out that Ferrari actually made more Enzos than they claimed they did, because of the number of Enzo VIN numbers on their platform.

My point here is, I think such a platform, not for cars but for vintage watches would be really cool. When we see a watch with a lot of scratches on its case we sometimes talk about the watch having a history, but most of the times we never get to hear the story behind them. Most watches trade hands very often in the course of their life-time and because of that a lot of the history behind a timepiece gets forgotten. I think this is quite sad, and a platform where collectors could post news of their watches in conjunction with their serial number would be a cool thing.
What do you guys think of that?

 

I personally like the idea. When buying a watch it would be nice to know more history than just the seller claiming "yeh pal it's all original".

However, the market puts a premium on "fresh to market" pieces, and this will make some people reluctant to list their own watches on such a wiki site.

 

What would be the purpose of the DB? I am just asking because the way I understand your idea, it would be based on a honor system, with the assurance that truthful info would be entered by honest collectors and, evidently, if some kind of value or monetary assessment would eventually be made, well: humans will always be humans. Sadly.

As always with a DB: garbage in, garbage out.

So, to take the example of CARFAX: seeing a car with no accident in its history does NOT mean that this very car never had an accident. It just means that no accident was ever reported in the DB... but could have been although no police report would have been filed and no body shop would have made an entry in the DB.
So, again, this is a very interesting idea and one that is close to the certification of a watch in the same way that GIA assesses gemstones. (Note: Eric Wind has touched on this topic on a number of occasion... but unlike baseball cards or coins, I hope we all agree that we don't want to end up in a situation where the collectible watches are sealed in a plastic bag from fear of it getting damaged or altered after such assessment).
I look forward to others' thoughts on this topic.

 

Sorry, I am lost.
What kind of Information do you hope to gain with such an App.
Should the owner/seller/buyer/ tell whether the watch watch was found in a sock drawer or that it was in need of the service ?
I mean you can order a EoA for your Omega, that´s it.
Best

 

VinWiki is a cool app because it allows people to organically track vin/serial numbers of collectible cars to gain an insight of when, where, why, etc, a car was sold. It has created a community of car enthusiasts that spend their time trying to find the exact history of a manufacture and all that. It’s actually pretty cool and if you’re a car guy you should check it out.

I think this idea is great and if I was able to code, I’d try to implement it ASAP.

 

Vinwiki gets it data from DMV’s, the insurance databases, and dealer databases.

how exactly do you get the watch data?

 

From the owners. Imagine you upload one of your own watches with its serial number and all the information you have about it (service history, where you bought it etc), then you decide to sell the watch at some point. You know a lot about the watch, but you will probably not tell everything to the guy who you sold it to, so some information gets lost there. The Omega archive extracts are great but they only tell you which country the watch was originally delivered to and when it was produced. I personally would love to know what countries my watches have traveled to before reaching me, and which people owned it.

 

This site exists which aims to provide provenance for vintage watches. It’s a neat idea but only works if there’s a huge number of people who enter information. https://chronovault.co/