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05.19.09 Mobile Tech Is Bringing Cooking To The Future  By Barry Welford
The Cellphone is hardly a toy in the kitchen according to the NY Times. One high-tech cooking tool, however, has transformed the kitchen lives of many Americans: the cellphone. It has become the kitchen tool of choice for chefs and home cooks. They use it to keep grocery lists, find recipes, photograph their handiwork, look up the names of French cheeses, set timers for steak and soft-boiled eggs, and convert European or English measurements to American ones. Although restaurant chefs have often resisted new technologies, cellphones have now crossed the technology barrier from the office into the kitchen. Chris Cosentino, the chef at Incanto restaurant in San Francisco, says his iPhone has greatly simplified the math in his cooking. He said that he sees multifunction devices like the iPhone as the real technological revolution for chefs.
For amateur cooks, new cellphone software helps control the chaos of planning, shopping and cooking dinner at the end of the day. You can always use software from BigOven.com, a Web site with about 167,000 recipes. BigOven has a free iPhone application, searchable by ingredient, by rating, and by course. This has been downloaded more than a million times since it was released in October. Of course there is a question of how much of the recipe and ingredients can easily be seen on a small cellphone screen. Here you may possibly need Recipes reduced to their Twitter essence. In other words all compressed into 140 characters and spaces. Maureen Evans is the person who thought of this approach. You can now follow her tweeted recipes at twitter.com/cookbook. They are now followed by more than 13,000 people. Evans is now fielding numerous calls from cookbook agents and the media. While Evans loves her stacks of cookbooks with "verbose top-heavy instruction from celebrity cooks that tell you how every minute of the process is supposed to look and smell and feel," she also sees a place for "just a small amount of assistance to get dinner on the table after a long day at work." Having such information readily available on a cellphone clearly meets a real need for many people. Meals on the go just got even more portable. Comments About the Author: Barry Welford, President of SMM Strategic Marketing Montreal works with business owners and senior management on Internet Marketing strategy and action plans to grow their companies. He is a moderator at the Cre8asite Forums and writes on current issues on the Internet and on the Mobile Web in three blogs, BPWrap, StayGoLinks and The Other Bloke's Blog. | |||||||
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