chefsurfing

If it's for a product, I say start with the name that most clearly communicates what it is that the product helps with / problem it solves. Think "Can Opener". That's the kind of name you want for your brand or product to start. Even the big brands started out more specific... McDondald's was "McDonald's Hamburgers" for a very long time before removing the Hamburgers. Apple was "Apple Computers Inc" a long time as well.

When you are small you have to be more specific because you have a lower number of impressions ( chances to talk to your potential customers ) and you need to make sure you are sending the right message. The big brands can afford to put their message in more places, so they can be more abstract. Small brands don't have that luxury.

JTG also emphasizes active literacy (writing, speaking) versus passive literacy (reading, listening). One without the other is as a table with half it's legs.

Hi Mz,

I think the true test is to go to an educational institution and observe first hand what is happening. Is it a or b and to what extent either of the two:

a) Education that helps people leverage their innate curiosity to become free and intelligent individuals capable of independent investigation and thought.

b) Schooling that trains people to be obedient to authority, conform to standards of thought and behavior, distrustful of their own abilities and reliant upon experts.

The evidence I have seen shows the state ( any state, anywhere ) to be delivering to children today much more of b than a. JTG lived this for 30 years as a distinguished and awarded public school teacher in NYC. If you look at the incentives of those in power and actively controlling the government and it's apparatus, it is easy to understand why it would be this way and not get too judgmental about it. Lets imagine that you are a general in battle, which would you prefer: Obedient soldiers who follow orders or free-thinkers with their own agenda?

http://www.cantrip.org/againstschool.html

The ad hominem attacks and annoyed tone of your argument betray a disintrest in any argument that does not match your established view. I invite you to consider new ideas.

"crank": An eccentric person, esp. one obsessed by a particular subject or theory.

John Taylor Gatto is an education crank who has dedicated his life to improving education and fighting schooling. I think we would do well to have more such cranks among us.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/John_Taylor_Gatto

Fatbird, you suggest that we "reliably detect the optimum education environment for each student, and 2) give it to them".

Replace the word education in your statement with the word training and you have a good definition of what exists in schools around the world today.

"The secret of American schooling is that it doesn’t teach the way children learn, and it isn’t supposed to; school was engineered to serve a concealed command economy and a deliberately re-stratified social order." - John Taylor Gatto http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=30fxRwkBbHc

Great article. Unfortunately the vast majority of the so-called education to which people around the world are exposed is not education, it's merely schooling. For those interested in the difference I suggest reading John Taylor Gatto's books. Also most important is to reflect on your own experiences of education vs. schooling. I myself have found that the two are absolutely antithetical.

"The Underground History of American Education" available free online: http://mhkeehn.tripod.com/ughoae.pdf

Radio piece w/ JTG on YouTube: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZKci3_cmlqI

Great feedback Andrew. I think we need to change the design and make it more clear, however we do request that every completed "order" receive a review and comment from the customer. We also allow chefs to receive written endorsements as well which are publicly displayed on the site.

The chefs are sorted by reviews, endorsements and other quality-ensuring factors so that the first chefs you see are those we know most about and know deliver great service.

Gracias Senor Gluck!

Great suggestion, thank you Marquis! To everyone in California, we do have a few chefs signed up in San Francisco [1] and Oakland [2] although we've only just started to promote the site in the USA.

[1] https://chefsurfing.com/en/chefs/united-states-of-america/ca... [2] https://chefsurfing.com/en/chefs/united-states-of-america/ca...

This is no typo. To date we have only booked 169 chef services. We are focused on delivering bookings for the chefs however due to the open nature of our platform we have no way of knowing how many bookings a chef actually receives as a benefit of being on ChefSurfing.com ( we link directly to their own external site if they have one ) and it is very likely that once a chef and customer have contact with each other they maintain this relationship without Chef Surfing being involved.

Some of the chefs we are close with have called us after working a job they received via Chef Surfing and told us about how the customer would like to do more business together and asked us "if that's ok". That's not just ok with us, it's our goal ( getting the chefs more work and higher pay ).

This is true. The grey zone in which "Closed door restaurants" operate in Buenos Aires, for example, requires only that the chefs have catering licenses issued by local government fairly liberally.

Chef Surfing is a startup born in Buenos Aires and inspired by the independent chef movement of Argentina and South America. Our favorite purta cerrada Cocina Sunae [1] by chef Christina Sunae serves the best south-east asian food available in Buenos Aires. I highly recommend this place to tourists, expats and local Argentines!

[1] http://www.cocinasunae.com/

It really depends on the chef and city you are living in. In Santiago, Chile service prices start at 10,000 pesos ( ~20 USD ) per guest. If the size of your party is larger the price can be lower however that is generally the starting price. One chef in Santiago ( Chef Nancy Bavestrello [1] ) delivers meal packages at a lower price if the order volume is higher.

[1] https://chefsurfing.com/en/chefs/chile/region-metropolitana-...

Thanks for the writeup Anna. Founder of Chef Surfing Eric Knudtson, please A.M.A.

Boosted Boards - Electric Longboard Skateboard I rode on one for 5 minutes and instantly wanted to pay for it on the spot.

The Baffler and N+1 http://thebaffler.com/ http://nplusonemag.com/

Thanks for the write-up Naysawn! It was great to meet you in Santiago.

My suggestion is to focus yourself on doing the activities in your life that you find virtuous. Make a list of three things you decide are valuable and pursue them. Focus on them and do them one at a time. Trust me, this will work. You complain that people are not free, well Bob Marley said: "none but ourselves can free our own minds" and while I don't agree with all of his statements, this one I find to be true. So my suggestion is to focus on freeing yourself first. Lead by example and the negativity will fall away into the background.

Ideas on virtue: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Virtue

Well done! Also you deserve a big thanks from Filepicker.io - this is great inbound marketing for them.

"Visualize data, not code. Dynamic behavior, not static structure."

Yes! This reminds me of what Rich Hickey has been enlightening the world about as well [1]. Bravo Bret! Thank you for writing and sharing these ideas.

[1] http://www.infoq.com/presentations/Value-Values

Thanks for writing this Ben Kaufman! I gained by you sharing your experience.

I read a quote recently that "most startups get interesting around 18 months". I think you guys are giving up too soon. Workfu has enormous potential. Either way, kudos for making it as far as you have.

I pitched "sysadmin as a service" to a sysadmin friend and he was totally against it. He said we don't need more sysadmins, we need better developers who understand sysadmin fundamentals and know how to build stable systems. How about taking both and synthesize them? Sysadmin-as-a-service + training and education service. Hire the consultant for the bandaid fix of the immediate problem and to train and help educate the internal team on the sysadmin fundamentals they are missing.

Link to Kickstarter project: http://www.kickstarter.com/projects/tohl/tohl-elevating-infr...

Could you build a well-designed and easy to use interface which taps into the wealth of information and knowledge available on Archive.org? Would it be kosher according to their terms of use? I can imagine this would be a great project or who knows, a startup even.

Backlift seems like a great tool thank you for taking this step! I was setup in 5 minutes. The writing on the setup docs is straightforward so I think I could pass your link on to "less techy" friends and they would be able to be up and running quickly. The general docs are also well written. I am curious and have two questions: 1. Is the data stored in CouchDB, Mongo or other? and 2. The docs mention "eventually... deploying production websites used by millions." Please can you tell us the eventual date? Also I would like local development but I think I can guess that you guys will not prioritize this as your target users might not make it through the conversion funnel of getting the software setup on their own computers. All-in-all, bravo, I think you are on to something great here.

In my opinion it's more of a bad sign that they are so desperate and not focused on generating passionate users who are gaining some inherent value within the system itself. I don't have any hard evidence but anecdotally I can say I know perhaps 100 people in my life who love Stack Overflow but I know nobody who really loves Quora. Personally I think they are blowing it due to impatience.

Does not seem like a minor thing to me and worthy wanting to leave the system. Emailing them worked for me last week. This behavior reminds me of an early ( now-defunct ) social network which upon a person's registration would attempt a login to their email ( hotmail etc ) using the password ( not encrypted ) that the person used to register on the social network. Upon gaining access to the person's email the system would copy all the email addresses from the archive and begin spamming those users with invitations to the social network. As many naive people do use the same password for many services this attack would often succeed.

Quora ( among others ) seem to be taking advantage of our current naive attitudes about social networking, privacy and sharing. It might seem extreem to compare the email hack to these sharing hacks right now, but I think in time we will come to see that these two infringements have more in common than not.

Gratuitous plug for the Freedom Box Project: http://freedomboxfoundation.org/

It seems to me there is only one good response to this type of corporate behavior: remove yourself from the equation. ou are free to quit and have them remove your data from the system. I did this last week and I feel much better now. To Quora's credit it only took 24 hours to be removed from the system. If you consider it abuse, staying in an abusive relationship is just plain stupid :)

The writing on your blog and site seems distant to me. I would like to read a short narrative on the problems Mobify addresses, the origins and inspiration of the solution, how the solution was developed and tested and what results have been gained. IMHO This story should include the real people involved including engineers, managers, clients, customers and hockey-stick graphs ( you're in Canada after all... ) This seems like a great initiative. Way to go!

PS Check out item #10 on this list, I think it's what you are missing: http://googlesystem.blogspot.com/2008/03/googles-design-guid...

This is an excellent distribution hack! By choosing this vertical they can gain traction among early adopters and 'digital influencers'. Way to go Smore! Bravo! Whoever in/out of your company that came up with the idea to focus on this vertical... do what that guy/gal says for a while.