TV shows Top Chef and America’s Test Kitchen have both launched their own online cooking programs, and we’ve even see the emergence of the first online professional culinary school. Now a San Francisco startup called Feast is taking a tech startup’s approach to the cooking school.

Feast co-founder and CEO David Spinks doesn’t have a cooking background. Instead he’s online community developer that has created or managed the community portals for the LeWeb conferences, Zaarly, u30pro, BlogDash and Scribnia. He even created a meta-community for community managers called, you guessed it, TheCommunityManager. But after he did some consulting work for online learning startup Udemy, helping it develop its community strategy, Spinks got the idea for Feast.

Spinks said he wanted to apply the same online education methods underlying teaching sites like Udemy and Coursera to create a platform for cooking lessons. In addition, Spinks wanted to anchor those classes with a strong community, not only to address the inevitable questions and problems that emerge when trying to prepare a dish, but to keep students interested and engaged.

Spinks added that he didn’t want to create something dull or overly academic either – not the cooking equivalent of a coding course.

“We wanted to take the entertainment value you get on television, but create a format where you can actually learn,” Spinks said. “There is a problem with the Food Network. It’s entertaining you, but they’re not really teaching you how to cook. They’re selling you a lifestyle. We’re actually trying to get you in the kitchen.”

Last fall, Feast launched its first online cooking course, a four-week class designed to teach basic cooking techniques ranging from knife skills to braising. Led by Feast’s in-house chef Jeremy Umansky, the self-paced lessons use detailed text descriptions and photographs along with numerous videos.

It’s in the community discussions, though, that a lot of the real learning goes on, Spinks said. Not only does Umansky engage with students on the boards, but students interact with one another, often solving problems before an instructor get involves, Spinks said. That student interaction also acts a motivator, helping solve one of the key problems of online learning: retention. In self-paced learning programs such as those offered by Coursera, Spinks said, as few as 7 percent of students actually finish the curriculum from beginning to end. Feast’s inaugural class last winter attracted 75 students, and more than half participated up to the very to its conclusion.

The company’s spring semester starts up next week, offering a new kitchen basics class as well as a new course on vegetarian cooking (both $60 for four weeks). Feast has also begun offering a free mini-course on fermentation where you can learn how to make Kimchi, Korean spicy preserved cabbage.

Feast has also managed to attract the attention of Dave McClure’s 500 Startups, which accepted the company into its accelerator’s sixth batch of startups.

Saute pan photo courtesy of Shutterstock user Fedor Kondratenko

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As student debt climbs and new crowdinvestment models proliferate, Pave’s founders say their site enables students and other young people launching careers to connect with more established professionals willing to provide money and mentorship. In return for their investment, backers receive a cut of the student’s future earnings over a predetermined period of time.

“It’s an online funding community where young prospects get to follow careers of passion supported by teams of backers they can meet on the site, who want to put time, money and resources to good use,” said co-founder and CEO Sal Lahoud.

Lahoud said he first started thinking about the model after a friend came to him asking to borrow money to jumpstart a career in design. At first, he said, he thought it would be an uncomfortable arrangement because if things went badly he’d feel bad asking for repayment and if things went well he’d feel as though he should share in the success. But when he proposed an investment model, the friend supported the idea.

Soon after, Lahoud, who previously worked at Goldman Sachs and in other business roles in media and tech, looked into building an online funding community around that kind of relationship. He quickly found two co-founders who shared his interest: Oren Bass, Pave’s chief operating officer, and Justin Mitchell, the company’s CTO and a former Facebooker.

Since the beginning of the year, the company has raised $5 million in seed funding from private investors and said it has created a new kind of legally-binding financial agreement for participants on its site. On Monday, it is launching a pilot program that includes 8 “prospects” and 22 “backers.”

Prospects get money and mentorship

Through Pave, prospects can establish a profile by providing verifiable information, such as their college major and GPA, as well as evidence of their talent or work, such as portfolios. They list the amount they want to raise (from $3,000 to $50,000, but the company says the average is $20,000 to $30,000) and share the story of what they want to pursue and why. For example, one of the pilot’s prospects interested in pursuing film turned to the site to raise $50,000 to produce a script as well as give her some flexibility in building her career. The funding came from six backers, one of which is a film industry veteran who can also provide creative feedback and professional advice.

Once backers (who can search the site by industry and affiliation) identify the prospects they want to support, the different parties negotiate the terms of the agreement with help from the site’s algorithms, which can calculate a prospect’s projected future income. According to the company, under most arrangements, prospects owe their backers 3 to 7 percent of their earnings over 10 years.

Given the rise of crowdfunding platforms, it’s not surprising to see such a model target education and career-building. As my colleague Ryan Kim recently wrote, Kickstarter-like startups are pushing into all kinds of fields – from medicine and science to music and gaming. And, in education, USEED and Smartn.me are two sites that enable students to raise money for specific projects.

A different kind of risk profile for students

But Pave is interesting in that it’s not project-centered and backers don’t just garner goodwill or small in-kind returns, they get a real cut of a prospect’s future earnings. And that increases the risk for parties on both sides.

To protect backers, Pave says it does a credit check on all prospects and shares that credit history with backers. And once a prospect starts earning an income and filing tax returns, backers are owed the agreed upon share and an unpaid amount is treated like any other payment claim.

Pave also acknowledges that the site offers a different kind of risk profile to prospects and students.  While students might owe more to backers if they succeed than they might to a traditional lender, ideally, they also receive more mentorship and ongoing career support. And, if they don’t succeed or earn a lower salary, they don’t owe a lender a lump sum that’s disproportionate to their earnings.

It seems like there could still be room for prospects to ask for money to pursue one path and turn to a different field or for backers to invest money but provide little ongoing support in other material ways, but Lahoud said the platform’s design, community and contract are structured to discourage bad actors. It’s not an arrangement for everyone, but it’s a compelling model that could make more capital accessible to more people.

Image by zimmytws via Shutterstock.

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Today, the company, which is led by Nils Johnson, an early investor in e-commerce startups Warby Parker and Everlane, is expanding to Android. Similarly to Beautylish’s iPhone app, the new Android app gives users full access to its reviews and editorial content but doesn’t yet include the option to purchase products.

As consumers increasingly use their smartphones as in-store shopping guides, as well as for general shopping, Johnson said the overall beauty category is seeing strong growth on mobile, pointing to Sephora  as an example.

By the end of the year, Beautylish’s apps will likely include the ability to purchase goods but for now the site is focused on building user engagement.

“We wanted to start with content – it’s a better daily hook than just commerce,” he said. Currently, the apps let users read product review, watch demonstration videos and get tips from community members.

The new app comes on the heels of the startup’s first e-commerce option, released last month. Since launching the site two years ago, Beautylish has created a strong online community of makeup enthusiasts and artists (the company said it attracts one million monthly unique visitors). Its new e-commerce platform, called Boutiques, gives members the option to buy products from favorite brands on the site.

New York-based Birchbox has made a big name for itself in the beauty e-commerce space with its subscription boxes, but Beautylish clearly wants to challenge it as a way for people to discover and purchase beauty products in the digital age. Both companies focus on product discovery, but while Beautylish leans heavily on user-generated and original content, Birchbox (which isn’t on iOS or Android) provides samples which it hopes entices people to buy full-size versions.

For more on mobile commerce and how smartphones are changing consumer behavior, check out the live stream of GigaOM’s Mobilize conference, which starts today.

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The money will help continue Behance’s momentum as it tries to attract more creative professionals looking to showcase their work. The site highlights more than 2 million creative projects covering categories such as photography, graphic design, animation, fashion, interior design and others. That’s up from 1 million projects just eight months ago. Visitors have viewed the projects more than 1 billion times and “appreciated” them more than 22 million times.  Behance gets more than 30,000 projects a week and uses a curation team to narrow its selections. And more than 10,000 personal websites have been created using Behance’s ProSite portfolio builder tool.

For many years, the company was happy to eschew funding but with the recent growth, it saw an opportunity to take Behance to another level. CEO and co-founder Scott Belsky wrote in a blog post that the team is looking at building more products that can serve creators. Albert Wenger, a partner at USV, wrote that Behance will be enhancing its Prosite offering and developing more tools to support collaboration among creatives and between creatives and their clients.

“We have an exciting product pipeline we want to make happen,” Belsky wrote. “So, for the first time, we debated the option of continuing to bootstrap vs. raising funds. Ultimately, the team wanted to kick things up a notch: We want the resources to do our life’s greatest work in serving the creative community.”

Online channels are proving to be a great way for people to find talent through services like Stack Exchange, Github or Kickstarter. There’s still a lot of opportunity in helping people connect to jobs and organize with other people in their industry. Since its first redesign in March, Behance has seen searches for creators on the site jump by 70 percent.

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There’s only one technology story that matters to most geeks this week, and that’s the departure of Steve Jobs, the iconic CEO of Apple. But there are other icons in the geek community — although their influence may not be quite as widespread as the Apple founder’s, and they may not run multibillion-dollar companies — and one of them has also announced his departure. Rob Malda, also known as CmdrTaco, is stepping aside from the pioneering online community Slashdot, which he founded 14 years ago. Long before Digg came along, or Hacker News, or even Metafilter, the community Malda created was the go-to spot for geeks to talk about the news that mattered to them. That hasn’t gone away; if anything, it has gone mainstream.

As he describes in a Slashdot post about his decision to leave, Malda created the site with friend Jeff “Hemos” Bates when the two were still in college, running it from an old server stuffed under Malda’s desk where he worked as a programmer. Later, the two began to run Slashdot as a business, and went through a bewildering series of corporate owners over the next decade — first they were acquired by Andover, which then merged with VA Linux, which had gone public in a star-studded IPO that saw the stock climb as high as $239, only to crater along with most of the other dot-com bubble stocks. As Malda notes:

Since Slashdot was founded, my business card has read Blockstackers, Andover, Andover.net, VA Linux Systems, VA Software, OSDN, OSTG, SourceForge, and finally Geeknet. My title has changed several times: from my first card which read “Lies and Misinformation”, until today when my title read “Editor-in-Chief of Slashdot.org”.

The turmoil of ownership didn’t stop Slashdot from growing, however, to the point where it had over 5 million visitors a month in 2006. For years before Digg came along, it was the must-read site for anyone interested in Linux and other open-source technologies, but also in the emerging business of mobile communications — long before everyone had a smartphone — and other technologies that are now thought of as mainstream. Slashdot’s “upmod,” a vote for a smart comment or thread, was the dominant geek status symbol, a predecessor to the “digg” vote and the Facebook “like.”

The “Slashdot effect”

Slashdot was also the first to swamp websites with crippling amounts of traffic after a link got posted, a phenomenon that became known as the “Slashdot effect” (later replaced by the Digg effect and the Stumbleupon effect, among others). Werner Vogels — CTO of Amazon, whose cloud-based servers now host a lot of websites — paid tribute to this in a post to Twitter on Thursday about Malda’s departure:

Rob, thanks for slashdot-effect, you put the fear of scaling into everyone – Rob "@CmdrTaco" Malda Resigns From Slashdot wv.ly/qKzQ7b—
Werner Vogels (@Werner) August 25, 2011

Slashdot also created what is still one of the best examples of a self-regulating online community, a status it shares with Metafilter (another site that began as a one-man show in the late 1990s, when it was created by Matt Haughey, who still runs the service). In order to prevent “flamers” and trolls from taking over the system and ruining it for others — something new communities like Google+ are also struggling with — Slashdot developed a pioneering moderation system that awards “karma” points to readers for their behavior on the site, and then selects moderators from that group. In true Slashdot fashion, it then open-sourced the code for this system.

Media and news communities that are focused on one demographic or interest group, like sports or entertainment, are fairly common now. But Slashdot was one of the first to show that the web could sustain something like that by focusing on what was then a relatively narrow niche. Says Malda:

Slashdot has been read by kernel engineers and billionaires. By sys-admins and CEOs. By high school kids and government bureaucrats. But what brings so many of them together is that we are nerds.

The geeks took over the world

In some ways, the decline of Slashdot as a force in the geek world has come about not because the site lost any authority or popularity, but because geeks and tech news and the Internet itself have become such a mainstream thing over the past decade. When Slashdot first began, there weren’t many other places to talk about the newest processor from Intel or the development of web technology like Ajax, or concepts like “virtual reality” — apart from the Usenet newsgroups that were the predecessor to most online geek communities. Now, those kinds of topics are everywhere. As Malda notes in his goodbye post:

The internet has changed dramatically since I started here, and that’s part of my reason for leaving. For me, the Slashdot of today is fused to the Slashdot of the past. This makes it really hard to objectively consider the future of the site.

In the media world, the departure of pioneering blogger Jim Romenesko — who also announced his semi-retirement on Wednesday — falls into much the same category. When Romenesko started a “column” (which was really a blog) reporting snippets of info about the media world and linking to interesting stories and news, it was one of a kind. Now, that same kind of thing occurs everywhere, from mainstream media to news aggregators like Mediagazer. Although they were strange beasts when Romenesko started, blogs have become part of the media firmament.

Twitter has become the news network

And for both Slashdot and Romenesko, of course — and plenty of other pioneering news and technology communities — the real competitor that has taken some of the wind from their sails is Twitter. As news events like the Steve Jobs resignation and the fall of Tripoli show, the service has the ability to become a real-time information network like no other. Instead of relying on aggregators or link-sharing sites, users can become their own aggregators, following those who post unique or valuable content and creating their own real-time news wires on the fly. That’s pretty hard to compete with.

That’s not to say there isn’t value to having a community like Slashdot or Metafilter, of course, because there is. The personal touch, the camaraderie among members, the long debates about whether Vi or Emacs is the best Linux text editor — those things can only occur in a community like Slashdot. But that is a smaller game than it used to be, as Digg has found out. In any case, as I mentioned in my recent post about online music pioneer Michael Robertson, sometimes we need to pay tribute to the pioneers, without whom there would be no land to settle.

Post and thumbnail photos courtesy of Wikimedia Commons

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In my case, I work for a large corporation with some days in the office and other days working at home, but I’ve also done this job while working full-time as a remote employee. As a matter of fact, I’m about to shift back to working from home full-time for three months while our office building is remodeled. While I’ll be discussing full-time community management work in this post, it’s also a great gig for freelancers or consultants.

This isn’t the first time I’ve blogged about being a community manager here on WebWorkerDaily, but it’s been a while since I wrote about community manager careers, so I thought that it was time for a refresh. I did a whole series of posts over a year ago with details about the job, what it takes to be successful, what we do and the dark side of community management. Most or all of that content is still relevant, so I recommend going back and reading that series if you are new to the blog or if you just want a refresher.

Each online community uses slightly different tools, including established environments based in IRC and mailing lists, forums, wikis, complete social networks and more. Because the community that I manage is fairly large with several different audiences, we use a wide variety of tools. Software developer interactions take place mostly on mailing lists, IRC, bug trackers and code repositories; users of the software interact mostly in the forums; we have a wiki for documentation; and we use a few other miscellaneous tools. Regardless of the tools used, I can access and manage the community whether I am in the office, at home or in a coffee shop. This gives me the flexibility to manage the community regardless of where I am physically located.

Community management is a hot career right now, and quite a few companies are looking for community managers or related positions (social media managers, moderators, etc.) Companies like Zappos, Samsung and Wieden + Kennedy have recently hired community managers while other companies like Wikia, EMC and Google are actively looking for people to fill online community positions. I’ve even had several people email me in the past couple of weeks asking me if I knew any experienced community managers who might be interested in their positions.

The best community managers are the ones with several years of experience under their belt and the scars to prove that they’ve been around for long enough to have a good idea of what works and what doesn’t, but we all have to start somewhere. Community management isn’t one of those traditional careers where you get a degree and start work in your chosen field. Most good community managers have a diverse background with good communication skills, organization or project management background, and some specialized experience and a passion for the type of community being managed (hardcore gamers managing gaming communities; people with technical backgrounds managing developer communities, etc.) In fact, many of us transitioned into online community roles out of other related careers.

I occasionally speak to groups of university students about community management careers. If you want more information about the job requirements, salaries, job satisfaction and more, you might also be interested in this presentation about community manager careers that I delivered about a month ago at two local universities.

What are some other interesting careers for remote web workers?

Image by Flickr user luc legay used under the Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike 2.0 Generic license

My full-time corporate gig is as a community manager for an open-source developer community. The community mainly comprises no-nonsense, no-frills people who love some old school tools. The fancy graphical environments in the latest and greatest collaboration web apps just get in the way of power user developers who know every trick in the book to get the most out of tools like IRC and mailing lists. Keep in mind that open source communities tend to have people — from corporate developers to passionate enthusiasts — collaborating across the globe in every time zone to develop software that we use every day. They know a thing or two about collaboration, and they use the tools that work. I had stepped away from hardcore developer communities for a couple of years when I was consulting, and in coming back to these established tools, I’m rediscovering why they are so useful for collaboration.

IRC / Group Chat

The best thing about IRC or Group Chat is that you can set up a place for your team or your project where people can drop in and out to ask questions or just have conversations with other people working on similar projects. It’s kind of like the water cooler, if you want to get even more old school, where people gather to talk about both work and social topics. Because it’s real-time chat, you can get quick feedback even when you don’t know exactly who to talk to because you are reaching out to a group of people with similar interests or similar jobs.

Lately, we’ve also been holding quite a few scheduled meetings in IRC, and it is a great way to get a lot accomplished very quickly. By scheduling it, you make sure that you have the right people available and anyone can participate as long as they can get some type of internet connection. We also make the logs available, and we use MeetBot to capture minutes of the meeting. This allows people to miss the meeting, but still see a full, unfiltered record of the meeting in the logs along with a summary of the meeting from MeetBot if they just want the highlights.

Mailing Lists

By mailing lists I mean both traditional mailing lists, like LISTSERV, or more recent additions like Google Groups. The fact that I love mailing lists is a bit odd, since I hate email. Part of what I love about mailing lists is the control that you have over how you receive the information. Most lists allow you to get every email immediately, or in a daily digest depending on how you prefer to interact with the list, and many of them allow you to turn the email off entirely when you go out on vacation. That way, your email doesn’t pile up, but you can skim through the online archives when you get back to catch up on the big news. Regular email just doesn’t have that flexibility.

The reality is that everyone uses email, and mailing lists are a great way to collaborate with a group of people without accidentally leaving anyone out of the loop. It’s too easy to forget to copy every person on the team when communicating with a group of people. The online archives are also a great way for new members to learn about the project and get a sense for the history of the group, and it gives you a place where you can always look back at the conversations when you forget some important detail.

Don’t get me wrong, I like the new tools, too. I get a tremendous amount of value out of tools like Twitter and the newer collaboration suites that have social networking and plenty of bells and whistles built-in. However, sometimes you just need something quick and cheap that just works. Just because a technology is old doesn’t mean it can’t rock.

What are your favorite “old school” collaboration tools?

Today marks the 20th anniversary of the original release of the Macintosh Portable — the first truly untethered Mac, thanks to its internal battery.

There’s a quote attributed to Steve Jobs: “Do not trust a computer that you cannot lift.” The original compact desktop Macs were offered with an optional carrying case, and some pioneer Mac-users did lug them around, but analogous to the tiny Mac mini today, they couldn’t be considered truly portable due to the necessity of a wall-current umbilical.

The Mac Portable development project was launched in 1986, not long before Steve Jobs’ departure from Apple, and the product was first released for sale on September 20, 1989. It was featured on the cover of the November 1989 edition of MacUser magazine, which called it “by far the most complex piece of machinery devised by sale by Apple computer.”

While it incorporated a laptop-style foldable form factor with a front-mounted carry handle/lockdown lever, the Mac Portable weighed only about a pound less than contemporaneous Mac Compact desktops — a hefty 16 pounds, due partly to it having a robust lead-acid battery. It wasn’t cheap either, selling for a likewise heavyweight $6,500 — or $7,300 with an optional hard drive.

Internally, the Mac Portable had a 16MHz Motorola 68HC000 processor chip, an internal 1.4MB 3.5-inch floppy drive, a 40MB 3.5″ hard drive, and a whopping 1MB of RAM, expandable to 9MB but unfortunately in an oddball 30ns SRAM card (one slot) module format. The monitor screen was a crisp 9.8″ 1-bit active matrix, 640×400, LCD — initially without backlighting — and there was also a video output port for driving an external monitor. The upside of that heavy lead-acid battery was a very respectable five-to-10 hour charge life.

Also included were an ADB port for a keyboard and mouse, DIN-8 serial ports for printer and modem connections, and a DB-25 SCSI connector. An internal modem was optional. An interesting trivia note is that the Portable was the first Mac to ship with a pre-formatted hard drive and a pre-installed operating system.

Apple added a backlight to the Macintosh Portable in February 1991 and also increased the standard RAM to 2MB or 4MB, changed the RAM ceiling to 8MB, and replaced the expensive SRAM chips with less-expensive pseudo-SRAM, although the pseudo-SRAM and backlighting reduced battery life.

The Mac Portable was replaced by the PowerBook models 100, 140, and 170 in October 1991 — the 100 slimmed down to five pounds — launching the modern laptop computer era with a form factor essentially the same as the one still dominant today. However, the Portable gets credit for pioneering the battery-powered Mac concept. Happy Anniversary!

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You won’t have to specify where you’re looking for something any longer, either: My Location is also in the gooey center of this new release. Just point your ‘Berry at http://m.google.com to downoad and artstay peakingsay. I mean: start speaking. Sadly, there’s no Google Mobile love for the Storm yet. Other supported BlackBerrys need OS 4.1 or better for the app; you’ll need 4.2 for voice search.

* translation source

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Photo by semaphoria

This is the third in a series of online community manager posts over the past couple of weeks here on WebWorkerDaily. I’ve already talked about online community manager jobs and what community managers actually do, so I thought that we’d talk about what it takes to be successful as a community manager. There are skills to learn and work habits that are useful for community managers.

Here are just a few of the skills and habits that people have already mentioned in the comments of the previous posts.

Amber Naslund says, “it’s not a 9 to 5 gig, and it’s a hybrid of so many disciplines – communication, business development, online knowledge, customer or client service.”

Joe Manna says, “most successful community managers are those that come from a strong customer service background.”

Lex Friedman says, “If you like to listen and love acting on good ideas (regardless of their source!), you’re probably a good fit for the career path.”

I also have my own list of what it takes to manage an online community.

• Patience to let others participate without dominating the conversation.
• Networking with a wide variety of people and being able to call on the right ones at the right time.
• Communication skills to get your point across clearly and concisely.
• Facilitation to help people keep discussions moving in a positive direction.
• Technical skills and an understanding of how your community software operates can help.
• Marketing to make sure people know about your online community.
• Self Motivation and the ability to work without much supervision.
• Workaholic tendencies in a global environment where the community never sleeps.
• Organization skills to keep track of the many activities without dropping too many balls.

What do you think it takes to be a successful community manager?

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