Is What I Crave Connected to My Heritage, Where I Live or Both?

It always seems to take over a month for those post holidays sugar and fatty food cravings to disappear. I’ve noticed that those cravings are often more prevalent during certain times of the year and when I visit certain parts of the world, and it’s not just because those “cravings” are the only things that locals eat.

I currently live in northern California and have lived in 10 countries, including more than my fair share of cold-weathered cities. There’s no question that colder climates can make you crave heartier dishes and hotter temperature foods, even though Brits argued that soups and curries helped them cool down in India during the colonial years.

Since living on the west coast, I crave more sushi than when I lived in Boston. When I visit northern European cities, I crave more red meat even if there’s fish or chicken on the menu and the weather is warm.

Culture contributes to those cravings and may explain why my Italian-born friends prefer a crisp Sauvignon Blanc over a buttery Chardonnay and how I developed such a tight bond with South African biltong that it’s hard to convince natives that I wasn’t raised there.  

That said, there are some dishes I crave that feel like they’re “part” of who I am, such as squash, kobasa, duck, and toast for starters. Call it comfort food but I wonder, is it a craving for “comfort” or is it connected to heritage, where generations of eating certain things gets passed on, embedded in our DNA if you will?  

When my grandfather sat down for lunch, his staple to-go plate included cold meats, pickles and onions. My grandmother would add a bowl of onions to the table since he added onions to more dishes than I’d care to admit.

Observing this behavior was subliminal at best, yet here I am years later craving many of the same things my grandfather ate, and have noticed a “craving” increase of some of his favorite dishes as I get older.

There are examples of this across the globe, such as the thousands of banana varieties in Africa alone, not to mention vegetables and fruits not that plentiful in the west like guava and okra. Whatever we have an abundance of, we eat, another reason I’m thrilled the holidays are over.

When we lived in Florida, oranges were a regular sighting in our kitchen as was coconut juice when I hung my hat in Kenya. I lived on curries in London and ate French fries with peanut butter sauce in Amsterdam.    

But, how much of our cravings are connected to other factors such as our body chemistry and general health?

Rest assured, there are lots of foods that make me feel better, such as fruits and vegetables. And, when I eat healthier, my body chemistry changes as do my cravings. When I used to juice regularly, I’d find alcohol and low-alkaline foods hard to stomach. Our bodies adapt just as our ancestor’s bodies adapted to different kinds of foods as a result of changes in climate, food availability and the economy. (Think The Depression).

Many doctors and health experts may argue that our cravings have nothing to do with heritage whatsoever. There’s certainly no shortage of doctor-blessed diets that promise to reduce your cravings, decrease your “bad” cholesterol and add years to your life.

D'Adamo suggests that the human blood type is key to the body's ability to differentiate self from non-self. Lectins in foods, he asserts, react differently with each ABO blood type and to a lesser extent with an individual's secretor status.

One source suggests that orange juice is bad for my blood type whereas grapefruit juice and I should shine. The truth is that while I like both, I prefer grapefruit juice and “feel” healthier drinking it.  

One of the noted symptoms of adrenal fatigue, a condition where your adrenal glands become “tired”, is a craving of salty, fatty, and high protein food such as meat and cheese. Some blood type diets observe that Type O’s don’t find dairy products and grains as ‘body-friendly.”  It makes you wonder what percentage of people from northern Europe are Type O’s versus those who hail from Africa or Asia?

 

Chinese Medicine for Maximum Immunity by Elias & Kethum suggest that I should add more “cool foods” to my diet and avoid red vegetables such as tomatoes and red peppers which can make you feel more “irritable & off-balance” and bitter foods and beverages, which are considered more ‘healing.’ They focus on five elemental types: wood, fire, earth, metal, and water. After doing a questionnaire, they recommend certain foods based on your results and tell you to avoid others, with the goal of getting your body into balance and harmony.  

 

Albeit not new, Dr. Barnet Meltzer has written about something he refers to as “food swings”, the reactions in your mind and body to what you eat, a link between your diet and your emotional and physical well-being. Female friends have admitted that they may eat more at times when they knowingly don’t want to attract men into their lives.

Those who have tried the Atkins Diet know that it makes you forget about carbs after the first week and soon, its promise to drop the pounds becomes a reality, for a price that is and not necessarily a healthy one.

A highly alkaline and juice diet made me enjoy raw foods in a way I never thought was possible. Being a vegetarian for awhile made me despise the smell of meat for a few years and Rosedale’s diet argues that Leptin, a hormone produced by fat cells, tells the brain when to eat, how much to eat and when to stop eating.

The time of day you eat is also a factor. When I returned from Italy several years ago, I craved pasta in the mornings and it wasn’t until I avoided carbs until late afternoon that those sharp cravings disappeared.

The Telegraph’s Science Correspondent Richard Alleyne unveiled research in 2009 that examined how the time of day you eat affects how much weight you put on; eating high fat foods during the day led to a 20 per cent weight gain.

This is just the beginning of an exploration of how cravings are connected to heritage, location, time and health. If you have ever documented your cravings and have insights to share, let’s evolve the conversation. Over to you, health afficiandos, doctors, researchers, experts and those who are as genuinely curious as I am about this topic, to offer your opinions and data.

 

D Dive into Media: Where Big Media Meets Digital Explosion...

How we tell stories is not linear, so what will emerge to transform storytelling in the face of new media? How much value -- real or perceived -- does vinyl have today when digital is winning because of convenience? As digital video continues to explode and the quality gets better and better, will the cable bundle last?

These were a few of the questions the D: Dive Into Media event explored in late January in Laguna Niguel, California, a fascinating event focused on the future of media. Says host Peter Kafka on opinions versus behavior:

"Nearly everyone is convinced that the TV industry is ripe for massive disruption, brought on by some combination of free Web video and pay video services like Netflix. But the pay TV business is behaving as though it has all the leverage in the world... buying big bundles of programming, at ever increasing rates, and forcing customers to buy all of it if they want to watch TV."

 

He also points to the fact that Hulu is generating more than $400 million a year only five years after its launch and that even Twitter is in the big media game now, "hoping that they can help TV programmers and movie makers attract new eyeballs."

 

 From ESPN's John Skipper, Warner Music Group's Edgar Bronfman Jr., Clear Channel's Bob Pittman and Viacom's Philippe Dauman to Martha Stewart, the New Yorker's David Remnick, Twitter's Dick Costolo and singer, songwriter Neil Young, we heard their views and where they were taking their businesses -- and why.

News Corp talked about the growth of the Hispanic market segment and their plans to roll out a Spanish language channel. Chase Carey seemed to think that the cable bundle will still be the way people access information in the next five years in some way or another although it will look "very different in 20 years."

From news and entertainment, we moved to e-reading, where Coliloquy, whose tagline is: Reading and Writing. Reimagined, took the stage. On a mission to push the boundaries of how we think about narrative and storytelling, they allow you to customize books on the fly, even a romance novel designed with a woman's desires in mind. Hearing Lisa Rutherford read saucy erotica excerpts at a technology and media conference was enlightening to say the least.

Songify had an interesting app that turns everyone into a singer, even if you're not actually singing. Co-founders Prerna Gupta and Parag Chordia entertained the crowd using their voices -- one trained and one not, demonstrating how their technology transforms an off-key tune into something enjoyable.

Vevo's Rio D. Caraeff discussed the increasingly blurred lines of content, which he believes should be everywhere. It's certainly true that as the Internet continues to transforms things, consumers will come to expect their favorite content showing up wherever they are, whether it be on their mobile device, tablet, TV or PC.

"We're in the 'audience business,' says Caraeff, who thinks there's a lot of value in aggregation. "We're not trying to take anything away from the artist or get in the way of their value with fans," he adds. "We just want to be everywhere artists want to work."

It wasn't dissimilar to what Martha Stewart and her president Lisa Gersh echoed on stage. "It's all about where our customers need access and where they want to view content," said Martha. Adds Lisa, "We try to think about television as video." They're looking at a bunch of prime time formats and of course, the web.

 

 

 

Martha says that the viewer has changed and it's continuing to change at 'lightening speed.' "As soon as there's something better, people jump to it. Look at the rapid adoption of the iPad," she says. The same thing is happening with television. In addition to being everywhere their customers expect "trustworthy reliable" content, the other two C's they are focusing their attention on is commerce and community, areas they don't necessarily think are being done "well" today.

The most unlikely guest at the event was Neil Young who is on a mission to bring people back to high quality audio, the depth and texture that makes up 95% of what is missing from a song you hear on an iPod or other device. Apparently, Jobs and Young were talking about how to raise the bar on audio quality before he died. Said Neil to the audience, "Steve Jobs is a pioneer in digital media yet when he went home at night, he listened to vinyl." 

 

It was hard not to be teary-eyed at that moment. "When you get to the depth of 100% of the 'music value,' you get to the 'soul' of the music. That's what I'm trying to do and want to do," he says. He referred to the 'soul' value of music as the 'emotional value and how much "emotion" is lost in digital.

Then, he brought us back to the sad memory of what we lost, "You have to know that if Steve Jobs lived long enough, he would make that a reality."

Neil Young shouting to the world that digital is degrading music isn't a bad thing -- it's a reality and many in the current generation may never have heard or understood the 'soul of music' (that other 95%) that Neil talks about.

 

 

 

We've been listening to it just long enough to perhaps forget about the depth and texture we heard twenty years ago when we listened to the same song on vinyl. It's just that the convenience of having terabytes of music on an external hard drive and thousands of song on a small pocket-sized device that we can access in the middle of rural Africa is hard to pass up.

Frankly, I still have an old fashioned record player and it's not tucked away in an attic or my garage -- it's in my living room a few feet away from my flat screen TV, which sits on a rustic wooden cabinet with tons of components that are hooked up to an iPod, one of the five I own. While I care about that depth of sound and have high quality speakers scattered throughout the house, pushing a playlist is all I have time for most of the time.

And yet, every holiday at a bare minimum, the turntable goes on and all the vinyl comes out -- the old 1930s and '40s tunes my grandparents listened to and my collection of Blues and '70s play loudly through the house, extending onto the balcony for the neighbors to hear.

Sure, digital media is changing entertainment -- it's changing news and feature viewing, it's changing the value and need for smarter aggregation and curation, and it's most certainly changing music, but it doesn't mean we can't and shouldn't have access to both if we want a deeper experience once in awhile.

Photo Credits: Renee Blodgett

 

Top Ten Social Media Blogs

The Social Media Examiner recently chose the top ten social media blogs they suggest following. Reprinted here. 

#1: Social Mouths

Social Mouths, the brainchild of Francisco Rosales, provides deep and honest looks at social media marketing and trends that impact our industry.

The site contains detailed posts with real-world examples, and addresses new and difficult topics.

#2: ViralBlog

ViralBlog provides a daily stream of social media trends and inspiration through case studies and other interesting articles.

The site has excellent content with useful tips and advice.

#3: Jeff Bullas

Jeff Bullas takes a close look at how businesses can get found online through social media.

The site has excellent content with solid social media insights.

#4: Hubze

Hubze has built an audience by focusing on social media trends and tips on social media marketing tactics.

The site contains a nice variety of media, including articles and podcasts.

#5: The Sales Lion

The Sales Lion from Marcus Sheridan is a blog that seeks to build community around inbound marketing, blogging, business and life.

The site fosters strong community with great participation through comments.

#6: Pushing Social

Pushing Social from Stanford Smith provides practical blogging tips and resources from a fresh perspective.

The site contains creative, informative and readable posts with deeper-than-average advice.

#7: Heidi Cohen

Heidi Cohen provides intelligent insights on social media tactics and trends, all while making the complex simple.

The site contains comprehensive and thoughtful content.

#8: MarketingTech Blog

MarketingTech blog provides a technology-focused approach to new media marketing.

The site covers a variety of topics and media, including radio and video.

#9: Likeable Media

Likeable Media keeps readers current on industry trends and new tools while also providing strategies and tactics for using Facebook and social media marketing.

The site contains very current information on new tools and platforms.

#10: SplashMedia

SplashMedia provides interesting takes on strategy, tips and trends, while their SplashCasts offer some great success stories.

The site features great use of a video show as well as diverse postings with good in-depth content. 

Republished from the Social Media Examiner who chose the lucky ten a coule of weeks ago. Congrats to the winners. 

 

TEDxBerkeley’s 2012 Theme “Innovation” Kicks Off Third Year at Zellerbach Hall on Feb 4

Tomorrow, Saturday, February 4, 2012, UC Berkeley will gather world leading thinkers, visionaries, creative pundits, philosophers, academics and doers to host the third TEDx Berkeley Event (a 501c3) at Berkeley’s Zellerbach Hall. It's the second year I've been involved in the event and we're thrilled to have a stellar line-up of speakers once again.

The theme this year is: "Innovation." 15 ground-breaking thinkers, leaders and performers will cover a diverse number of global issues and topics, ranging from health and toxicity, politics in a new media world, robotics, machine learning, and mobile computing to the arts through life-changing film & storytelling, micro-finance, the gift-economy and “magic.”  

Below is a list of the 2012 TEDxBerkeley speakers and performers. Visit the TEDxBerkeley speaker page for their detailed biographies and updates.

• Carl Bass: president and chief executive officer of Autodesk, Inc., the leader in 3D design, engineering and entertainment software. 

• Connie Duckworth: founder of ARZU, Inc., a 501 (c) (3) non-profit organization, and a retired Partner and Managing Director of Goldman, Sachs, & Co., where she was named the first woman sales and trading partner in the firm’s history during her 20 year career.  

• DeCadence: UC Berkeley’s DeCadence (pronounced dee-KAY-dence, with a capital ‘C’) musical group is best known around the Bay Area for their one-of-a-kind quirkiness and lovable eccentricity. 

• David Ewing Duncan: best-selling author of seven books published in 19 languages; he is a journalist and a television, radio and film producer and correspondent. His most recent best-selling book is Experimental Man: What one man’s body reveals about his future, your health, and our toxic world.  

• Dr. Maria Fadiman: a leader who works with the human/environmental aspect of conservation, who was named one of National Geographic’s Emerging Explorers in 2006. 

• Ken Goldberg: an inventor working at the intersection of art, robotics, and social media. At UC Berkeley, Ken teaches and supervises research in Robotics, Automation, and New Media. 

• Charles Holt: speaker & performer, Charles has entertained sold-out audiences around the world, including The John F. Kennedy Center The Turkish-American Association in Ankara, Turkey, and Rikers Island Correctional Facility. He speaks to groups and organizations in order to empower, encourage, and uplift audiences everywhere.

• Gopi Kallayil: does marketing at Google for Google Plus and previously for the Company’s flagship advertising product, AdWords, in the Americas and Asia Pacific and for AdSense, Google’s publisher‐facing product. 

• Jodi Lomask: founder of Capacitor, she has been commissioned to create original works for NASA, TED, SFO, Computers and Structures, the California Academy of Sciences, and the Salvadorian Olympic Gymnastics Team.

• Nipun Mehta: founder of ServiceSpace, an incubator of projects that works at the intersection of volunteerism, technology and gift-economy.

• Tapan Parikh: Assistant Professor at the School of Information at the University of California, Berkeley.

• Neha Sangwan, MD: an Internal Medicine physician, she is also CEO and founder of Intuitive Intelligence, and acts as a corporate communication strategist to empower healthcare practitioners, organizational leaders and corporate employees in their own self-care.  

• Tiffany Shlain: honored by Newsweek as one of the “Women Shaping the 21st Century,” Tiffany is a filmmaker, founder of the Webby Awards, and cofounder of the International Academy of Digital Arts & Sciences.

• Lindsey Stirling: a violinist for 19 years with a range that extends from classical to rock and roll. She became known as Hip Hop violinist from the America’s Got Talent contest.

• Robert Strong: the Comedy Magician has been crisscrossing the world since 1985 entertaining audiences large and small, young and old, formal and casual, and everything in between. Twice voted San Francisco’s ‘Best Comedian’, Robert has appeared in more than 40 different countries, in all 50 states, and twice at the White House. 

Additionally, TEDxBerkeley has collaborated with AppBaker to release an exclusive iPhone app for the event. The app features an interactive schedule, speaker profiles, Twitter wall, and much more. TEDxBerkeley has also partnered with Livestream to provide high-quality live video of the event.

The TEDxBerkeley team includes curators Kevin Gong, a translator who has volunteered for the Global Lives Project; Renee Blodgett, founder of Magic Sauce Media, We Blog the World, a global blog network that covers every culture in the world and Magic Sauce Photography, and Jennifer Barr, VP/Operations at Northern CA Wharton Business School Club; Volunteer and Logistics Coordinator Eleanor Yang; Director of Logistics Navi Ganancial, serial volunteer and social media marketing guru; Director of Sponsorships Linda Xu; Technical Director Rocky Mullin, production volunteer for EG and TEDMED, musician & producer and Speaker Logistics Coordinator David Allen.

Life Can Come From the Negative Side of a Story

From a well know screen writer's view related to the most important and least understood precept in story design:

    "A protagonist and his story can only be as intellectually fascinating and emotionally compelling as the forces of antagonism make them". 

          What will cause a protagonist to become a fully realized, multidimensional, and deeply empathetic character? What will bring his story to Life?

           The answer to both questions lies on the negative side of the story...." -Robert McKee

 

Statf.ly Simplifies Social Monitoring, Engagement, Reporting & Storage

Statf.ly, a social media management and analytics company just added new quick-switch multi-profile management and unlimited reporting. Targeted to brands and agencies managing brands, new features include team collaboration, unlimited report generation with data point annotation, real time search for both Twitter and Facebook and social data storage for up to one year.

Statf.ly enables users to store Twitter and Facebook history, keywords, and report annotations for up to one year, which is valuable for generating more compelling long term analysis, in depth quarterly reports and annual strategy reviews.

UBER Car Service: A Dream App When Flow & Timing Are Critical

For those of you who haven't heard of UBER, and because of the name, think it's some funky, hip device, think again. UBER is a car service that is as simple to use as calling a taxi. Many higher end car services require you to call them well in advance and they're often fairly pricey.

While UBER is definitely more expensive than a taxi (roughly about double in my experience), it's incredibly useful when you need a more formal sedan for business purposes, when it's late and taxis might take too long to get to you or you're in a location where taxis are tough to find.

I ran into the CEO Travis Kalanick recently on my flight to Paris for the LeWeb conference, the annual renowned Internet, social media & technology event held in Europe every December. The news was that while UBER had already been announced in San Francisco and other cities, Paris was to be unveiled that week as their first European location. And so, I had an opportunity to use their newly launched service in the world's most romantic city.

It was a simple free download onto my iPhone. Once you have the app, you can quickly request a car by telling Uber where you are. If you don't have an iPhone or Android app, you can text them your address. Cars typically arrive within 5-10 minutes. In Paris, it ranged from 6 minutes to 18 although most of the time, it was around the 8-10 minute mark and the accuracy of arrival times was spot-on nearly all the time.

As your driver is nearing your location, you can see exactly where he or she is on the map on your phone (the geo-visual element is part of the UBER app and you can see literally where the driver is down to the street corner, providing constant updates of the estimated arrival time). UBER also tells you the name of your driver and includes a photo so when you walk outside of your venue, you can recognize them more easily.

I also tried UBER to the airport and while taxis charge roughly E65-70, UBER costs around E120 for your black sedan, which of course has a bottled water waiting for you in the seat. For a taxi that may cost around E8-10, I found that UBER charged around E20 but bear in mind that the final cost which is automatically charged to your credit card, does include the tip.

That was mid-December. Since then, they were hit by customer complaints on New Year's Eve and write-ups by All Things D and more recently the Huffington Post followed as a result.

They apparently raise prices for major holidays where demand is going to be high, and did so on both New Years and Halloween. According to the D post, 'when prices are about to surge, Uber sends a mass email out to its users, puts up a blog post detailing the pricing changes, and, barring technical issues, users should also get notifications through the app during times that surge pricing is in effect.'

Uber institutes a "surge pricing" system with the idea that they need to keep cars available for the customers who really want them, so as demand grows, prices would too. From UBER's blog about how surge pricing works:

"Without a surge pricing mechanism, there is no way to clear the market. Fixed or capped pricing, and you have the taxi problem on NYE -- no taxis available with people waiting hours to get a ride or left to stagger home through the streets on a long night out. By *raising* the price you *increase* the number of cars on the road and maximize the number of safe convenient rides. Nobody is required to take an Uber, but having a reliable option is what we're shooting for."

My experiences in Paris were nearly flawless but then again, bloggers and press were given credits so we didn't have to face $200 surge pricing rides and because the service was brand new, there was a lot of availability (60 cars on the ground at launch), which meant that I never had to stand in the Paris winter rain waiting for a half an hour for a car that may never come. We've all been in those situations before and they're not pretty.

So, while my experience was great (and btw, all the drivers were professional, courteous & shared useful information; one even brought me to a local place he knew for a crepe), the economics don't make sense for me to use it at home. That's the issue said a VC friend when I asked him what he thought of UBER. "The economics just don't work."

That said, UBER also gives you a sense of empowerment as well as freedom and control. If you're still at a dinner and don't want to disturb the flow of a conversation, you can simply push a button on your phone to see how far away your UBER car is...based on that information, you can either decide to push the button and order or wait for awhile.

For example, I just opened the app to see how many cars were available in San Francisco and was told that a driver was a mere 2 minutes away.

There's no interruption or need to tell your colleague, business contact or the restaurant manager to call you a cab. Most of the time, you haven't a clue when that cab is going to arrive, not to mention the fact that often you're on hold for far longer than you want, with horrible elevator music playing in the background.

I find that most of the time, particularly in foreign cities, the accuracy of when a taxi will arrive isn't great. UBER can be particularly useful in a business meeting where timing and flow is critical. 

I can also see UBER being useful in cities like Los Angeles and Miami where there's more of a "late night" scene and you could share an UBER car with friends to go to your next destination. Other cities where UBER is currently operating is: San Francisco/Palo Alto, New York City, Seattle, Chicago, Boston, Washington DC and as noted, Paris, as of mid-December 2011.

Two other things to note: you can rate the driver immediately after the drive and provide real-time feedback if it didn't go well, which increases the likelihood of the service and quality of the drivers remaining high and improving over time.

Also, in my experience to-date, their customer service has been very responsive. I think if they can get their markets and target audience right and market to them effectively, UBER can be a dream app at just the right (or rather wrong) times.

Here's a link to a video that Bloomberg's Emily Change & Cory Johnson did where they share their own experiences using UBER in San Francisco.

Below is the video of Travis on stage with Loic LeMeur at LeWeb talking about their Paris launch. (note: they also announced $32 million in new funding at the time).

Leonard Nimoy & Steve Wozniak Steal the Stage at DEMO Enterprise Disruption

I'm a long time fan of the DEMO Conferences and events and have been attending for well over a decade (since the start of their events really, but let's not date myself that much shall we?). This past week, they held an evening event called DEMO Enterprise Disruption at San Francisco's Temple Bay & Nightclub at was so well organized that it felt like a shorter version of their twice-a-year launch events. (in the states that is as they're now doing events around the world).

Not only was the event well organized with an agenda, but they had incredible food (soups, burgers, sauteeds and sushi), as well as a sake tasting station, wine, beer and cocktails. Fusion.io sponsored the event, who touts speed speed speed as their main value proposition.

They're a pioneer of a new storage memory platform that significantly improves the processing capabilities within a data center by moving process-critical, or active data closer to the CPU where it is processed. They announced breaking a billion IOPS barrier at the event (see full release here).

Also on the stage were student-run companies such as @teamitt who demoed their job app to motivate employees and @diffbot, who is combining news reading with natural language processing, machine learning and robotics.

Sococo, who develops and sells virtual environments for network-centric individuals to work and play (think: combining all forms of communication for employees to collaborate and more), originally launched at DEMO and returned to the stage to give the audience an update. Team Space is their flagship product.

Below, VentureBeat founder & DEMO producer Matt Marshall moderated a venture capital panel with Dr. Forest Baskett from NEA, Chris Schaepe of Lightspeed Venture Partners and Peter Wagner of Accel Partners.

The biggest highlight of the event however was the fact that they managed to get Star Trek hero Leonard Nimoy (aka Spock) and Steve Wozniak (now Chief Scientist for Fusion.io) on stage at the same time to have a "chat." Nimoy also gave the audience a mini-speech about some of the things he's learned over the years, including admitting to flunking Chemistry.

The more amusing part was Wozniak sharing with him the fact that you can easily download translation apps for your iPhone (among other devices) and the awareness for all of us how far away our "app" world was from his. It sounds like he may actually have a "life." :-) Below is a video short of his talk and here's a link to the follow on chat that Nimoy had with Wozniak.

A Bear's Way of Bringing in 2012!

New Years Greetings!!