the Web Chef's e-Bytes

Happy July 4th!

No comments needed - Baby dancing...

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Internet Statistics

BBC reports on a Pew Internet study finding that 63% of Americans now have broadband, an increase of 15% since last year.  There were also a reported 17% of Americans who wanted broadband Internet access, but could not get it in their home location.  This lack of access is something that hopefully will be in part addressed by the stimulus funds working their way through the economy. 

Even in the current recessionary environment more and more people are investing in upgrading their connectivity.  In fact CNN reported from the same study that "more than twice as many people said they had cut back or canceled cell phones or TV rather than Internet service - 22 percents versus 9 percent.

Recipe Management - Online or Offline? Print or Software?

As the Web Chef and a food afficionado, I'm always interested to read about where consumers are finding food tips and recipes and how they are using online and offline tools to manage, organize and share their recipes.  I've been a devotee of Epicurious.com for a number of years, but also enjoy the pleasure of clipping and trying recipes from the Food section of local and national papers. 

Lifehacker had an interesting poll and review of the benefits of using online recipe management vs. traditional offline print.  Of the 1580 votes, Lifehacker found that 36% of respondents weren't ready to move away from their print-based note cards, binders or notebooks.  They continued to like these "old fashioned" ways as part of their cooking process. 

My partner and I are part of this group.  Even though we designed our kitchen during our remodelling and expansion project to include a Cat5 Internet connection and a pull out shelf  for a laptop, we've found that the "traditional" mode still works best.  (Besides that the shelf is now full of our overflow of Penzey's Herbs and Spices) We use a set of binders where we can take recipes from print sources (taped to a three hole drilled sheet), from friends, from online sources (printed out) and combine them into a binder indexed by major ingredient. 

Lifehacker blogger Jason Fitzpatrick reviewed the online tools including the top four were rank ordered by survey respondents with these results - Other (18%), Evernote (17%), Other (18%), SousChef (14%), AllRecipes (9%) and Big Oven (5%).  

So what other tools are out there? 

I was curious so I did a search and came up with quite a few including 23 indexed and referenced in DMOZ..org and a few others that are either software or web-based:

• Food (online community and recipe storage)
• LivingCookbook (software for Windows)
• MacGourmet (software for the Mac)
• MasterCook (software)
• MyRecipeCircle (online community)
• OpenEats (online community)
• Recipezaar (online recipes)
• TasteBook(create your own cookbook)

You can also find a ranking and review of ten tools at TopTenReviews, where BigOvens ranked #1, followed by Living CookBook and MasterCook Deluxe. 

Photograph of soup is from stock.xchng.

My name is Alice. I want to be your direct household goods supplier.

Madison, WI-based Alice has launched to be your direct household goods supplier.  From the founders of social shopping service Jellyfish, since sold to Microsoft for $50 million, Alice.com has received positive press in the local media and in the technology media with a recent review in TechCrunch, a major web 2.0 and technology blog.  According to TechCrunch, Alice has over 6,000 goods and has a robust search engine that allows you to search by room, by product type, by price point, by coupon availability and by your philosophy (green products).  The service creates a profile with a reminder system for when you should be expected to re-order the products you've previously ordered.  It also crawls the web to find coupons for the products offered at the site.  The other neat feature, according to TechCrunch, is that it has a built-in shopping comparison engine that crawls the web to compare Alice's prices with those of other online vendors of the same product.

When I registered on the site, I found that they also had an interesting feature with coupons displayed as a footer on the site that you could scroll through.  The coupons had a limited offer in terms of the number available helping create some imagery of scarcity and urgency around that particular offer.

In terms of social media, Alice has three blogs - a founder's blog, a community blog and a company blog and also is on Twitter where they had 1794 followers. 

Interestingly the Alice favicon is a duck.  I'm not sure why, since the logo, at least in its beta version, is a stylized box or doorway.  The tagline is everyone needs an alice, so maybe Alice will later be introduced as the duck. 

I initiated a live chat session with an Alice representative and found the responsiveness and knowledge to be a positive.  I asked the rep why the disconnect between the favicon and the logo and she indicated that the duck was symbolic for "getting your ducks in a row" and that the duck does show up periodically throughout the site.  She rightfully suggested that I register on the site to see what she meant.  What I found is that the duck is the metaphor for the categories of items that you might want to add to your shopping cart as you can see from the screenshot on the right. Once you're in the site you make the connection with the favicon duck, but somehow before you've registered it isn't totally clear.  With the tagline "everyone needs an Alice" I assume that Alice is the duck helping me shop.

When I went to the community blog I found what might be considered another tagline "we heart household products" and at the company blog they are using "welcome to the alice company blog". 

 
 

AMA New Commercial (a spoof), plus YouTube enhancement

Interesting to see how on YouTube you can now choose the size of embedded video plus select one of several border color options as I've done with this embedded video spoofing the American Medical Associaton.

New IB Madison Voices Blog Posting - Trends in Internet Use

Interested in finding out more about trends on the Internet? 

Check out my new blog posting "It's the norm, not just for porn" at IBMadison.com.  The posting tracks some of the latest research results on trends and directions in the use of the Internet.  Included are reports showing that 48% of Americans use the Internet at least one hour a day, 82% increase in Social Networking utilizing and 339% increase in video utilization since 2002. 

PPT - Powerful Presentation Techniques Resource Guide Rev 10 Released

I've updated the PPT - Powerful Presentation Techniques Resource Guide listing to include several new books, blogs, web sites and article links that I've come across or that have been submitted to me.  The Resource Guide is now in its 10th version.  You can download and share the Guide -  Download PPT-PowerfulPresentationTechniquesResourceGuideRev10

If you have additions or changes that should be made to the listing, please send me an e-mail.  

If I can be of any help in assessing your team's current level of presentation or PowerPoint skills or assist you with your training needs, please let me know.

Paul J Gibler. MBA
the Web Chef
ConnectingDots
pgibler@connectingdots.com
(608) 255 4092

Follow me on Twitter

Looking for quick links and insights on the latest in e-marketing?  You can also follow me on Twitter in addition to at this blog.  I'm tweeting as the Web Chef and you can follow me here. 

Paul Gibler

Social Media in B2B

Social Media usage in the consumer marketplace has had significant coverage. It is relatively new in the B2B space. Forrester conducted research using their social technographic ladder that categorizes people into 6 clusters according to their participation in social media, found that even in the B2B space there is significant participation in social media within the technology purchase space. They've created a tool that allows you to see the breakdown of their research results by company size and type of purchase.

In addition to the research results referenced above Laura Ramos at Forrester had a blog posting earlier this year and have a Slideshare presentation that you might find interesting.

The Social Technographics® Of Business Buyers

View more OpenOffice presentations from Oliver Young.

If you are interested in further information on social media for B2B you might find the B2B Social Media blog of interest. There is also a LinkedIn Group on B2B Social Media that I've joined to continue learning how others are using social media tools in this space. Peter Kim has created a social media wiki that tracks companies use of social media in both B2B and B2C applications.