Hey Everyone!

It’s been a while since I’ve posted something on here and for that I apologize. Everyone has been hard at work preparing Foodea for the next stage in its evolution.

Over the last few months, we have been focused on figuring out what we can do to give you a greater experience when exploring and using Foodea. We are approaching a point where the site will grow, change, and emerge with a whole new look and feel.

What changes are in the works you might be asking? Namely, Foodea will be all about YOU. You are the stars of Foodea and your creations and explorations are at center stage. Once the Foodea evolution is complete you will have a whole new opportunity to share your food ideas more efficiently, across a wider range of platforms, and engage with others much more easily. You’ve worked hard on your recipes, articles, videos, and photos, and we want to give you the acknowledgement that you deserve.

Stay tuned right here for more updates, as well as news on our official public launch that will be happening a couple of months from now. As always, feel free to share your own ideas of where you think Foodea should go.

Happy cooking!

We had the privilege of doing a demo of foodea.com at DemoCamp Toronto 19.

It was a great event, with an enormous amount of community support. This time the event went back to its roots and was held at the Imperial Pub at Yonge and Dundas. The pub was a great venue, as it made the event more intimate and more conducive to conversation. For the presenters, it was also a great layout, as everyone in the audience was easily able to see and hear the demos.

As our first public demo of Foodea, it went off without any technical hiccups. In the brief five minutes we had, we explained the philosophy behind foodea, showed off our new homepage widget (thanks to Dritan!), gave a brief technical walk through of the site and it’s functions, and then did some Q+A. The questions asked by the community were great. Plus, it inspired many to search foodea for bacon related recipes, which is always good!

One of the questions asked was really interesting, “Why do we have so many content areas, instead of focusing on only one?” The answer to this is very simple, and fundamental to our philosophy. For us, foodea is where food lovers connect to share their passion. Foodea provides the tools and capabilities to facilitate this interaction. We believe users will gravitate towards the areas that interest them, and because we are a user generated community, we are not the content creators, or providers (we are also foodea users as well, check out our my kitchen pages, Matthew and Mike).

During the event, we ran a twitter search to see what the community was saying about us. We were ecstatic at the results:

@erin_bury - Erin Bury

@fuzzz - Andre Gaulin

@kurtgooden - Kurt Gooden

@lamachannel - Laura

@Sunir - Sunir Shah

@ahmadnassri - Ahmad Nassri

Check out all of the tweets here, and connect with us on twitter: @matthewharris and @mikeblankier

Also had some feedback from the blogosphere:

ThomasPurves.com
At first glace, Foodea is classic democamp, here’s a vertical special interest social media rails site I made in my pajamas. Essentially a social recipe site with the ability comment, edit, upload photo/video etc and the ability to export ingredients to a shopping list (not a bad idea). All ingredients also hyperlinked to the “pantry” area of site where they have a wikipedia like section dedicated to food ingredients.
http://www.thomaspurves.com/2009/03/03/democamp-19-million-toronto/

Mike Conley’s Blog
A food related website.  Lists recipes, lets users rate them, comment, etc.  As a user, you can add this recipe to your “Favourites”.  Recipes can have back-stories, you can add photos and videos (great for folks like me who need to see cooking happen to pull it off).
http://mikeconley.ca/blog/2009/03/03/democamp-march-3rd-2009/

The other demo-ers showed off some great ideas and products:

Akoha is the world’s first social reality game where you can earn points by playing real-world missions with your friends. Think of it like a real-world pay it forward. We really enjoyed Austin’s presentation, and picked up a few decks to give it a try.

BackType is a conversational search engine that indexes millions of comments from across the web so they can be discovered, followed and shared. These guys were super intelligent, and we will definitely be using backtype to keep track of foodea chatter on the interwebs.

Dex is a professional networking and CRM app.  It’s like if linkedin, salesforce.com and xobni had a (smart) baby.  A great idea, as it integrates all the social networking sites as well, and Scott was a really approachable and nice guy.

Image Spark is a tool aimed at creative professionals that lets you upload, discover and organize images that inspire your work. We love designing, and inspiration at foodea, so we’re looking forward to playing around with this innovative tool.

Albert Lai, Kontagent: Get Viral. Get Kontagent. Viral Engineering – More analytics, less STD. Kontagent is a provider of analytics for apps on social media sites, specifically facebook. Once we get around to launching a facebook app, kontagent is going to be a valuable source of metric information.

Aside from the demo’s, there were also a few Ignite Presentations. Ignites are short five minute presentations using 20 slides that are rotated automatically after 15 seconds. The Ignites at DCT19 were insightful and inspiring.

Leigh Honeywell, HackLab.TO: Leigh introduced us to HackLab.TO and the global hackerspaces community. HackLab is like a geek community centre where anyone can become a member, and have a place to work and play with technology!

Amos Latteier, n8rtxt.org. This was a great talk and crazy idea. You text your location to 416-662-3408. In return you get a personalized nature haiku. Here’s one of ours: Spring night, Victoria St & Dundas Square, Toronto, ON, Canada — “dark silvr mapls / Eaton Centre, a few stars / near cafe tabls”. At the end of the ignite everyone in the room was texting for their own haiku.

Shawn Konopinsky, Infusion Development – Designing for a big table. An eye opening discussion of the evolution of user interfaces, and the movement towards NUI.

Varun Mather, Alertle - What we did right and where we screwed up - a look back on the crazy past few yrs running a “Web 2.0″ (now dead, too) startup. A frank and open presentation on the promise of a great idea, building it out, and watching it fail. Varun is the man for being able to stand up there, and give this talk.

Aidan Nulman, @anulman - a call-to-action for DemoCampers to get involved with local community organizations needing specialized work. Spoke about @Communitie, a project focused on social good, by connecting specialized workers in Toronto with local non-profits that need specialized work.

What did we get out of our DemoCamp experience? We had a great time demo-ing foodea to community. Saw many fantastic projects and met lots of interesting people in the Toronto startup community.

Bottom line. We plan to rejig our strategy in the coming days and shift our focus towards bacon

Happy holidays from foodea.com!

Foodea.com is moving forward at a rapid pace and 2009 will be a banner year.

We wish you and your family a wonderful holiday season and a very happy New Year!

The Foodea.com Team
www.foodea.com

This past weekend the foodea.com team made some cookies for the holidays. We decided to make a few featuring our mascot, Foodea Guy.

Did you make some of your own themed holiday treats? Share them in the comments!

Here is a sampling of what can be found on Foodea.com.

This week we feature a great pork roast recipe, as well as the world’s “best” chocolate chip cookie.

Read the rest of this entry »