Comments for BURN

Comment on How to Get Rich Quick – The Lesson Behind the Facebook IPO by Guy

Guy — Mon, 13 Feb 2012 11:10:49 +0000

Let’s not forget the grafitti artist who painted the Facebook office back in 2005 and who decided to take some stock instead of being paid… He’s now worth $200m on the back of that little decision.

Comment on Top Tips to Improve Direct Mail and Email Results by peter

peter — Sun, 28 Aug 2011 21:27:49 +0000

loved the part about ‘tipping the balance’ – that’s a very strong argument, and getting it just right can have pretty huge implications. great article – i’m going to bookmark this site in case i require your services in the future.

Comment on Give estate agents a break by Charles

Charles — Thu, 24 Feb 2011 08:32:46 +0000

A wolf in sheep’s clothing is still a wolf.

Comment on Will iPhone app for nervous flyers take off? by Sam

Sam — Wed, 18 Nov 2009 12:45:09 +0000

The thing I find odd about this, is that they are charging for the app! You would have thought that a. the publicity it generates would have been enough return, but also that by helping others, in return they’ll fly with Virgin having conquered their fears.

On a side note, a friend once told me that the only reason they ban Mobile use on planes is because the billing is almost impossible to work out i.e. where the aircraft was when the call was made. Would seem to make sense?

Comment on Will iPhone app for nervous flyers take off? by Ken

Ken — Tue, 17 Nov 2009 15:16:14 +0000

Reminds me of the time I once had the (mis)fortune of sitting next to an aircraft engineer who spent pretty much the whole of the flight from Houston to London telling me about all the stuff that could go wrong on a plane. He tried to reassure me by saying loads of stuff can go wrong and the plane would still fly, but I’d have preferred to stay in my blissfully ignorant state. Too much information.

Comment on Food for thought by Barnaby Dorfman

Barnaby Dorfman — Sat, 14 Nov 2009 00:20:01 +0000

Thanks for the mention of Foodista! It’s funny, but the mass collaborative editing introduced by Wikis is both one of the most successful and counter-intuitive developments of the Web. Even now, few people understand how Wikipedia works. I would also argue that there’s a lot more subjective opinion there than people realize.

While it’s true that there is a lot of creativity in cooking, there is also a lot of objective fact, e.g. the boiling/freezing temperatures of water. There is also a lot of general agreement of what common dishes are. That’s why menus in restaurants work..we know what to expect.

On the factual side at Foodista, we’ve created pages to write about basic foods, cooking techniques, and kitchen tools. When it comes to recipes, we have two types, “public” which anyone can edit and “personal,” which you can lock when you add your original creations. Rather than have a ton of duplication, we’re trying to capture the things people agree on and highlight where there is debate and/or originality. It’s much harder to find a creative version of Goulash if you have to sort through 500 recipes that are 98% identical. As for lowest common denominator, it’s just not what we’re seeing. Most of the editing being done, and needed, is around formatting, punctuation, and spelling…less about fundamentally changing ingredients.

Finally, though we are a Wiki, we have a lot more structure than Wikipedia. We’ve written software to automatically find and discover connections between concepts in cooking. Our goal is to help people learn about both science AND artistry in the kitchen. Check out this experiment as a fun example: http://www.foodista.com/labs/ingredomatic.cgi?q=apple+pie

Comment on Party Pictures by Sam

Sam — Tue, 10 Nov 2009 10:41:04 +0000

Pictures looking great guys!