Kelly Abbott

Alexandria Brewing

kga245 — Sat, 18 May 2013 17:12:58 +0000

The Labels for my New Venture. One must spoil his vices.

Fresh and Easy Taking the Fight to the Streets

kga245 — Sat, 02 Feb 2013 05:54:00 +0000

Steph forwarded this to me tonight. We love Fresh and Easy. We’d hate to see it fold. And we’re glad they’re communicating this to us directly even though we read the news too. Especially because we’re informed. We want them to say at least something. And this something, as little as it is, ain’t nothing.

Dear Stephanie,

Thank you for being a Friend of Fresh & Easy. We wanted to reach out to you to address numerous news and online reports about the future of our stores.

Our parent company Tesco is conducting a strategic review of Fresh & Easy – they’re looking at all options to find the best outcome for the neighborhood market that you – and we – have come to love. While we don’t know exactly what that outcome will be, or if Tesco will continue to own the company, we’re confident that Fresh & Easy can continue to be your favorite market.

We want to assure you: we don’t have plans to close stores. We’re still committed to providing delicious, wholesome and affordable food every day. We’re still Fresh & Easy; open for business with everything that you enjoy about our store, with even more exciting things to come. That’s why we’re going to keep on fighting the good food fight.

Now, more than ever, we appreciate your energy in our stores and being able to share a smile with you. We look forward to seeing you soon and thank you for your continued support.

The Fresh & Easy Team

You might also like ... to know how online recommendations work

kga245 — Thu, 31 Jan 2013 05:33:32 +0000

Reblogged from GigaOM:

To the untrained eye, all the suggestions we're inundated with online might seem essentially the same. After all, there's no big difference between "you might like," "your friends liked" and "other people who bought this also bought," right? Actually, there is, and the right approach to making recommendations can make or break a web business.

The trick to doing recommendations right, according to…

Silicon Valley's most important document ever

kga245 — Thu, 31 Jan 2013 05:24:36 +0000

Reblogged from GigaOM:

Netflix (s NFLX) has long been famous for giving its employees unlimited vacation time. Netflix CEO Reed Hastings justified this move in a slide deck he first published online in 2009, which also outlines the company's approach towards hiring (no "brilliant jerks," please) as well as firing (only keep the people that you'd fight for if they wanted to leave).

The Demographics of Ingress

kga245 — Wed, 30 Jan 2013 23:30:13 +0000

Reblogged from Simulacrum:

This is based on a non-scientific sample of 1,572 players of Ingress, Google's augmented reality game. The survey was posted to Reddit, Google Plus, Twitter, and IRC. From there it passed through informal networks, so hopefully respondents were dispersed enough to make the results meaningful.

The game is dominated by liberal Anglophone men. The average Ingress player is 30.5 years old, male (91%), non-religious (64%), and speaks English as their first language (60%).

Bistro Salad – AKA Eggs and Bacon Salad

kga245 — Mon, 28 Jan 2013 18:42:50 +0000

It bears repeating: pork is goooood. That’s why I can smoke a pork shoulder on a Saturday afternoon — knowing that I won’t finish it until midnight — and savor it for the rest of the week. Anyone who has been lucky enough to stop by on a day I’m smoking knows, this is labor of love. I’ve been learning a ton about cooking through my barbecue since about May last year. Much of that knowledge has transferred into some daring-do in the Kitchen as well. But this weekend, I went back to the old standby, pulled pork which resulted in four pounds of gorgeous meat that will “save for later” really nicely. Pulled pork is great for a number of reasons. 1 – it’s cheap. 2 – it’s tasty as all get-out. 3 – it’s so easy to do right if you’re willing to put in the time. I highly recommend popping over to Meathead’s site and reading all about how to get your pulled pork perfect. What follows is a recipe for a Bristro Salad. I had my first Bistro Salad at a local restaurant “Cafe Chloe” which is a close replica for what you’ll see below. The big differences being that they use arugula which I use romaine. They also use pancetta – large, whole chunks of the gorgeous stuff – instead of fried pulled pork in my recipe.

Bistro Salad – AKA “The Eggs and Bacon Salad” or “The Salad Substitute for a Country Breakfast”

After reading Born to Run a few years ago, I’ve always wanted to start my day with a salad. Though until I discovered this Bistro Salad from Cafe Chloe, I never had the nerve. Why eat a salad for breakfast? 1 – it’s good for you. 2 – it’s actually really tasty. Especially if you make a Bistro Salad. Here’s how.

Recipe serves 2 hungry adults

Ingredients

One whole Romain head. Washed. Chopped into bite-sized chunks.
Two or three or four eggs. Depends how many eggs you usually eat with your breakfast. I like two. My wife likes one.
1/8 cup Champaign or white wine based dressing.
Couple of handfuls of croutons.
2 cups sautéed previously smoked pulled pork

Instructions for Smoking the Pulled Pork

Do it low and slow. Follow the smoking instructions from Meathead. Then proceed.

Instructions for Sautéing the Pulled Pork

When I have leftover pulled pork, I like to fry it for Carnitas. Which is a wonderful concoction. For this recipe, I’ve used bacon and bacon tips and pancetta — all of which have a salted pork flavor to them which is good. But when I fry pulled pork, the results are much mellower and don’t make your lips pucker as much. I grab about two handfuls of leftover pulled pork which should be just the pulled pork naked off the grill (i.e. no sauces or seasoning added in the post-production of pulling your pork) and fry it in a pan. I’ve added oil before the frying. Don’t over heat. Just get the oil popping and then reduce the heat to a medium to medium-high temperature. What you’re hoping to acheive is to give your pork a slight crispyness and browning of the outside. Once that’s done, remove from heat and strain the excess fat. Set aside. You’ll want these bad boys to cool down before adding them to the salad.

Instructions for Poaching the Eggs

Next poach your eggs. Poaching eggs is a great alternative to fried eggs. I have come to prefer my eggs this way. Once you get the hang of it, it’s really easy to do. Get your water boiling. DON’T ADD SALT. I’ve been told you can add vinegar, but I find that uneccessary. Just get some water boiling and then reduce to just below a simmer. Eggs will cook below boiling temperature of 212 degrees. So what poaching does is cook your eggs in non-violent water. If you let it go just below a simmer, the water moves slightly around the egg without causing so much movement it tears it appart. So, how to poach an egg? Crack it and gently pour the contents into the hot water. Swirl it gently once or twice to bathe it fully. It may sink to the bottom. No worries. Just let her alone for a bit. You can swirl with a slotted spoon a couple of times. After a couple of minutes you’ll lift the egg out of the water with the slotted soon. You should see no translucent bits to your egg whites. The soonest you accomplish that, take the egg out. Let the excess water drip back in the pan. Place the egg on top of your salad. If you cut into it, it should be runny and the egg whites should be fluffy, not snotty.

Instructions for Assembling the Salad

Get the chopped romain tossed in the dressing first. Split it into two large bowls.
Add the croutons.
Add the pork.
Add the eggs on top.

Instructions for Eating the Salad

The poached eggs should be pierced and then swirled in with your bites. It’s like an extra dressing. To get the perfect bite, stab some lettuce, then stab some pork, then stab a crouton and then swirl it all with some egg yolk. Mmmm baby. That’s the stuff.

Pictures

Frying pulled pork in a pan

Fresh chopped romaine lettuce

Croutons

Girard’s Champagne Dressing

Eggs for poaching

Poaching an egg

Bistro Salad – the Finished Product

Our Favorite Oscar Photos

kga245 — Tue, 28 Feb 2012 15:30:59 +0000

Viola On TV

The 84th Annual Oscars were Sunday night. Like the Grammy’s and the Super Bowl before them 3ones followed the action via Realtidbits. What’s that mean? You’ll have to see for yourself the live action by visiting the live photo gallery we set up for the event. It’s one part chatroom and one part image gallery 100% addictive. Visit to see more photos constantly streaming in from the Web tagged #Oscars and talk about them.

What follows are a few photos from the stream that got our attention. We pulled from thousands and the criteria were simple: lots of social shares. That is, if we noticed an image was getting a lot of buzz, we included it here. Enjoy!

Everybody Loves Tina

Man of the Evening - The French Rejoice

The Big Winners

Red Swan

Gwenneth Made Many a Best Dressed List

Behind the Scenes

Kim and Miley, Party People

Angelina - Bowlegs

Statue of Angelina

RealTidbits in the Wild

kga245 — Fri, 17 Feb 2012 17:21:13 +0000

Photo of a Cardinal a user uploaded

Comments
You’re going to laugh at this site, but it’s a really great example of a community that’s obsessed with content.

http://sportsmansparadiseonline.com/Live_Minnesota_Trail_Cam.html

It’s a live deer cam that shows a feeding station. Users are checking in daily and leaving tons of comments. They’re also taking screenshots of special moments they see on the deer camp and posting them for posterity. To date, they have over 5000 comments. Each post averages 4 or 5 replies and the same number of likes. I’d say a quarter of the posts have images in them too, which is well above the overall average. Fascinating community.

DowJones Local Media Group pushed us live on a few of their sites and this one is a good example. They don’t get a ton of traffic, but they’re really excited to be pulling tweets into their comments stream which was honestly what sold them on the product. Seems simple, but when you can demonstrate how much user generated commentary there really is around one’s content, you’ve done a great service.

http://www.seacoastonline.com/

Learn more about our realtime comments product here.

Forums
ESPN is our largest customer. We’ve been live for almost a year now and as we head into March Madness, one of their peaks periods of traffic. Our forums will feature prominently in their strategy to get users to spend more time on ESPN.com.

http://espn.go.com/community/forums

The sheer complexity of how they’ve deployed the forums is too much to describe in this post but we are excited to be deploying our newest feature – user generated polls – just before March Madness. JetJaw provides the polls to us so we have them to thank for supporting us there.

Learn more about our realtime forums product here.

Galleries
We’ve revamped the Galleries product to be a little more engaging. Thanks to Arktan and StreamSentiment, we were able to put together the following demos of the Super Bowl, Grammy’s and the upcoming Oscars. By combining our Galleries product with our Comments product and feeding social media photos into the gallery, we’re able to create a pretty neat “before, during and after” experience of a large social media presence designed entirely around engaging photos.

Super Bowl: http://realtidbits.com/demo/superbowl/
Grammy’s: http://realtidbits.com/demo/grammys/
Oscars: http://realtidbits.com/demo/oscars/

Learn more about our realtime galleries product here.

The Grammy's Most Popular Photos

kga245 — Mon, 13 Feb 2012 18:33:20 +0000

If you love pop music and pop culture, you probably made an effort to tune into the Grammy Awards last night. If you’re a fan of social media too then you probably found a way to follow the event on Twitter. This year’s Grammy’s went beyond all-access with backstage exclusives, interviews and extra, live video feeds. This year, the Grammy’s embraced the panorama that social media provides, embracing Twitter and Instagram to feed its audience photos for sharing.

We captured the images over at our Grammy’s photo gallery (which is still streaming live shares) throughout the week and, of course, last night during the show. You can see a rough cut of the image gallery in action here.

What are the lessons learned?

Photos tell a story that can get repeated endlessly.
Fans love backstage, behind-the-scenes access.
Fans will help you promote your wares.
Fashion loves fans and fans love fashion.
Bring your own photographer (like Lady Gaga did).
Very few of the “Official” photos shared actually came from the Grammy’s web site (they came from Twitter and Instagram).
Get your photo taken with cute kids.
and win.

Below are some of the top photos shared on social media. Enjoy.

Grammy’s Official Photos

Here’s the official Grammy’s Twitter feed photo grid. And here are the top most shared photos:

Final Touches to the Red Carpet

Where your favorite stars are sitting

Fergie Backstage Walkby

Fan's photo from the seats

Image from the rafters at the Staples Center

Taylor Swift Backstage with Her Two Grammy's

Foo Fighters

Ryan Tedder (one of Adele's producers) Backstage

Lady Gaga

Have a look at @gagadaily’s photo grid to get her official press photos, such as they are

Gaga with Neil Patrick Harris

Gaga with Katy Perry

Gaga with Paul McCartney

Gaga with Kelly Rowland

The following photos are getting shared a lot, but we don’t know who took them originally. FYI.

Gaga with Tony Bennett

Gaga with Neil Patrick Harris (this time with smooches)

Gaga in Versace

Rhianna

Rhianna and Katy Perry

Rhianna Red Carpet Sexy Pose

Adele

Adele's Seat Reserved

Adele in Burberry

Before the Grammy’s

@davidguetta's MIX.R "promo" with Chris Brown during rehearsals

Kelly Osborne with Ellen's Kids

Join us for a Realtime #grammys Viewing Party

kga245 — Sun, 12 Feb 2012 15:43:28 +0000

Realtime Social Media Photo Gallery Following #Grammys Tagged Photos

We’re repeating our Super Bowl party with a realtime photo gallery experience for the 54th Grammy Awards on Sunday night. Here’s a link to see what photos have the social web abuzz before, during and after the Grammy’s:

http://realtidbits.com/demo/grammys/

Showtime is at 5:00 PM PST on Sunday.

What’s in the Gallery?

We designed it for live events where the world is watching. Watch as photos and videos stream in. Participate by adding your own commentary. It’s a side-by-side gallery with comments, both in realtime.

What’s new in this version?

We widened the net: we’re no longer limiting our feed to the photos on location. We take photos from everywhere.

We have flexible layouts: if you have a small screen, you’ll see just 4 columns. If you have a wide screen, you’ll see as many as 6. The screen adjusts smartly.

What’s next?

The Oscars!

Big thanks!

We couldn’t do this without Arktan or Echo.

Zoomed in View of a #Grammys Tagged Photo

Social Sign-on

Photo Stream Side by Side with Realtime Chat

The #Grammys Gallery