We’re hiring

Do you want to join the KitchenBug crew?  We’d love to have you with us.

We’re looking for people to join our R&D team; people with a passion for internet application, backed up with proven experience on how to make a website and community work.  Also, it would be great if you had a love for food and cooking.

Let us know - send us an email to info at kitchenbug dot com, with your full CV.  Let us know how you see yourself as part of our team.

Thank you!

Hello 2008!

Last night we said goodbye to 2007, which was a very significant year for KitchenBug. 2008 promises to see the growth of the KitchenBug community, with many events and new features to be announced. The closest one will be opening our site to the public. More on this to come soon.

Here are a couple of recipes for New Year’s, provided by captbunzo:

Apple Wassail
Cran-Raspberry Wassail
Non-Alcoholic Eggnog

We would love it if you could provide all of us with more ideas!

We wish you all a happy New Year, filled with good food and happy times!

TheMarker review

To all you Hebrew readers out there, you can now check out Guy Grimland’s article on KitchenBug, posted at TheMarker (both online and print).

Get it while it’s hot!

There’s a rat in the kitchen

Pixar Studios have always been a personal favorite of mine, and a great inspiration as innovators. Their recent film, Ratatouille, appears to be yet another huge success.

However, this touches us cooks in a very personal way – well, at least I felt so. Watching the film, I couldn’t help but notice the attention to detail as to how a professional kitchen works, and how food fills people’s lives, and even the lives of rats.

When we launched on November, there’s been some debate over our chosen name; the opinions were both pro and con, and my guess is that they’ll stay that way for a while. However, the first thing this film shows us is that having a rat or a bug in the kitchen might lead to good things.

That being said, my good friend Eran came across an interesting stat today on Google Zeitgeist. Recipes have always been top searches anywhere, but it’s interesting to know that in the list of the largest volume of searches for 2007, the #2 most popular recipe search is none other than ratatouille.

Amazing how a hit film can easily boost up a single dish, a staple for any Frenchman, but new to many of us (the least the film did is to show us how to spell it). I made a simple search on KitchenBug, and sure enough found one ratatouille recipe already stored on bibliotecaria’s page.

Does anyone have other, home made versions they can share? We’d love to see them!

New Feature - Automatic Link Detection

We’ve been doing plenty of improvements over the last week since we’ve launched, most of which quite small to be noticed or mentioned.  Today we added a feature that will most definitely make your life easier when adding a link to recipe from another site to your favorites.

Now, when filling in a link to a recipe from another site, KitchenBug helps you fill in the blanks by finding out its title, description note, and image.  You will, most likely, get more than one option, while you can browse through those options by clicking the little red arrows.  If you want this recipe to have no image - simply check the No Image box, and the default image will be selected.  Here’s how it looks now.

But what about all those recipe you’ve already filled in?  No problem!  Simply select them from the recipes page, and hit Edit.   KitchenBug will fetch those images for you from the site and will let you browse between them and select your favorite one.  Just don’t forget to hit Save when you’re done.

Now your recipe selection will look even better.  Let us know what you think, and start collecting!

Thank you for your feedback!

During the past week, we’ve received a warm embrace from our beta users, who were extremely generous (and sometimes critical) with their thoughts and ideas.  We want to thank you all!  It’s wonderful to see how our current version of KitchenBug helps people collect and organize their recipes and share them with other people, but more importantly how it picks on people’s minds and makes them come up with lots of ideas - many of which will come in the very near future.

Very soon, we will roll out new and exciting features, which will make KitchenBug a whole lot better; in the following days, you will see many small posts here, each indicating a change that takes your online recipe collection one step further.  Please let us know whether you find these features valuable, helpful, or useless, and we’ll do our best to hear everyone’s thoughts.  We’re adding a ‘features’ category to our blogs, which will contain all of the posts that involve new features.

More to come very very soon.

We are fully booked

Well – it only took a very short time since we launched and received this great coverage on TechCrunch to max out our open 1,000 user invitation. We are overwhelmed with the response we’ve been having since, and are happy to welcome all of you new users to enjoy and experience KitchenBug. However, we are now closing our doors for a while, and will focus on working with our beta users for our grand opening.

We do, however, accept requests; if you wish to join, just leave your email address on our home page. We will send out invitation batches in a more controlled fashion, and we promise that every request will be answered.

We’d like to thank all of you who have registered, and hope to see you use KitchenBug and share recipes. Also, we hope to get as much feedback as possible and use it for our next rollout.

Also, we’ll be adding more exciting features real soon, so stay tuned!

Day 1

Well, it’s been almost 24 hours since Ouriel Ohayon released this great post on TechCrunch, “and the hits just keep on coming” (in a good way, of course).  We’ve opened KitchenBug to a total of 1,000 registrations, which are nearly all gone!  We are overwhelmed by your response and are looking forward to throwing great features at you over time.

Two wonderful things have happened in the last 24 hours: the first, and probably most important one, is that people are sharing their recipes with the community.  And, of course, this is exactly why we are all here, working hard to give KitchenBug to the world.

Second, we’ve received great feedback from people who are very generous with their thoughts and ideas (thank you John and Ryan!)  We wish to reiterate our plea for feedback, and to assure you all that we take every suggestion into careful consideration.

During the following weeks, you will see us adding more features and taking KitchenBug to the next step.  We’ll keep updating as we go along.

Fly, KitchenBug — fly!

Finally – after months of hard work, lots of passion, too many homemade pizza (seriously), and a constantly receding hairline – KitchenBug is on the air!

We are thrilled to say that our appetizer release is available; we’re receiving requests to join, and will love to see you there. In a matter of a few weeks, we intend to open KitchenBug to the public, and can’t wait to try out those recipes you choose to share.

In the next few weeks, we will roll out new features and improvements to the site, as part of this first evolution of KitchenBug. We will update you through our KitchenBlog on a regular basis.

If there’s anything most important to us (besides cooking) is your feedback. Food, as anyone who loves cooking knows, is all about sharing. We are proud and happy to share KitchenBug with you, and are even more anxious to hear your thoughts and ideas. So be sure to contact us and give us your feedback and suggestions.

Let the wineing and dining begin! Bon Appétit!

Opening night – tomorrow noon

The time draws near. In less than 24 hours we’ll be online with our appetizer release. We are all very excited and hope to hear your feedbacks, reports and suggestions.

See you all soon @ KitchenBug.com!