Augment your foraging - technology that helps you find a free feed

While this application is not about to lead me to a feast of wild strawberries in downtown Sydney just yet, is is a fantastic example of how technology can be used to bring us closer to our natural world rather than take us further away.

Mashing up crowd sourcing and citizen science principles, Boskoi feels like exactly the sort of approach that could help get a screen focused generation back in touch with the world around them. Imagine using AR tech for this and other crowd sourced/citizen science created ways to explore the urban environment, rather than to win a car (no offense MINI Getaway... i love that idea as well)

Here's more details on the application courtesy of The Pop-Up City


Augmented Foraging With Boskoi

By Joop de Boer | Published: Thursday November 4, 2010

Everywhere in the world you can find plenty of remarkable fruits, vegetables, mushrooms and herbs in the wild. Not only in the forests of Africa, but also in metropolitan areas around the world an enormous variety of edible species can be found. Boskoi is a new open source project that aims to unlock the collective knowledge about these edible species and their location. Boskoi is a tool to explore and map the ‘edible landscape’ wherever you are while using your mobile phone.

The app enables users to submit own findings and post these to the map. Additions to Boskoi will be reviewed by an editorial board, considering toxicity, pollution and endangered or rare species. Findings can be reported on the website or through the beta app for Android phones. The team has set up some rules though to respect nature, ownership and health: (1) be friendly (ask permission if ownership is unclear), (2) be generous (how much do you really need? Leave most for others), (3) be alert (beware of toxicity and do not tread on other plants when picking), and (4) be careful (only add locations that are robust and can survive limited foraging).

Boskoi is a project by the Amsterdam-based foragers of Urban Edibles, initiated by research and design collective FoAM and supported by Urbanibalism and Pollinize. The app is based on Ushahidi, an open source platform for mobile phones that people in crisis situations use to report what happens. The app was built for the post-election crisis in Kenya in 2008. Ushahidi was also used to map the catastrophe in Haiti and the oil slick in the Gulf of Mexico. For Boskoi “report an incident” is changed to “report a find”. The app aims to highlight what is growing and living in our daily environment as it stresses the quality of the eco system close to the city. The makers of the app found out that the diversity of plants in The Netherlands is higher in the urban than in rural areas. The idea of Boskoi is to develop new networks between people and their living environment through ‘augmented foraging’.

In several countries online mapping networks regarding freely available fruits and vegetables are already running, for instance the Urbana-Champaign Fruit Map. To combine the data collected by all of these ‘sidewalk harvesting’ projects, the initiators of Boskoi are planning to create a ‘Forage Markup Language’ in order to make the knowledge available to everyone. Another future innovation could be a culinary plug-in with special recipes.

SUPERCOOK!

Thanks mashable for this highlight of MEGACOOL cooking site, Supercook... i totally agreee with the post on the final cracking of an idea that long held great promise.

Name: Supercook

Quick Pitch: Supercook finds recipes based precisely on the ingredients you already have. Unique search technology, “virtual” kitchen concept, and customized suggestions.

Genius Idea: Supercook finally executes on a concept that I have heard floated around for years: tasty recipes based off the items you already have. Supercook asks what’s in your kitchen and then uses that information to provide dozens, if not hundreds, of unique dishes that you probably would never have thought of on your own.

Adding ingredients to the supercook system is easy, and you don’t even have to register. The niftiest feature is the tag cloud of common items it pops up to make adding new ingredients easy. As you add items, the system automatically begins to suggest recipes based on those grocery items.

The recipes are aggregated from several recipe websites, including AllRecipe and RecipeZaar. The system even suggests yummy dishes to make that require one or two additional items, allowing you to discover more new foods.

One of my favorite features of Supercook though is the suggested shopping list. Based off the items you tell the system are in your kitchen, Supercook will provide a suggested list of additional items to buy to build amazing food delights.

Overall, Supercook is very simple, but that’s what makes it so easy to use. It doesn’t take long and it turns recipe hunting from a painful chore to an enjoyable adventure.

Beerenberg embraces transparency

I'd never heard of them before, but this sort of openness from Beerenberg is certainly going to attract my shopping dollars from now on (whenever i buy jam that is, which i don't, so sorry guys. But hey, if i did i would and at least you've got me talking about jam.... serious tanget sorry). Anyway, Not only have they made inroads (albeit not the most advanced) into social media spaces with Facebook, Youtube and Flickr presences featuring prominently on the company's site (are providing a 'real' face to the company which i love), but they have also made a huge leap in addressing what i can assume is the basis of many of the social conversations occurring around their brand and products i.e. what the hell am i actually eating here?

Their Provenance Pathway tool allows people visiting the site to enter either a barcode, or expiry date from a jar of jam to get trace "... the origin of each jar's main ingredients, the day it was made, and even who made it. We've done this because we're proud that our products deliver the true taste of the farm to your table."









Great stuff and something i think that makes a great leap in the category from talking about issues, products etc (which a lot of companies are still yet to do), to actually doing something tangible i.e. show you the sources of ingredients in a specific product, rather than just talking about some neblous, happy farmer somewhere.

Hats off and i'm feeling like some toast...

unsnobbycoffee

Thanks again to AdAge

McDonald’s in Seattle has developed a site where users can stage an intervention for friends who are addicted to snobby iced coffees (specifically going up against Starbucks) to promote their new ranges of iced coffees.... Sounds a bit like last year's dare strategy??  

www.unsnobbycoffee.com

Casestudy: http://adage.com/brightcove/lineup.php?lineup=1266084202

They also have a game called Hot Shot Pinball:

Using QR codes to check food safety in store

Ever wonder how where your Dairy Farmers milk really comes from? In Japan, QR codes affixed to produce allow the curious shopper to check everything from a fruit or vegetable’s farm of origin to the soil composition it was grown in. Thanks to NGT and psfk for this post.

Homegrown Evolution points us to an interesting adaptation of QR bar codes in Japan. Bar codes are being affixed to produce that give a detailed history of the item’s origin. When scanned with a QR enabled cell phone, the code will tell the story of the fruits and veggies - where they came from, and how they were grown.

Wireless Watch Japan reports:

“Prefectural authorities and the JA Ibaraki Prefecture Central Union of Agricultural Cooperative cooperating with other farming and agricultural associations are adding QR code labels right at the point of origin. In the supermarket, consumers use camera equipped cell phones to scan the QR code on the label. The code links to a mobile website detailing origin, soil composition, organic fertilizer content percentage (as opposed to chemical), use of pesticides and herbicides and even the name of the farm it was grown on. Consumers can also access the same information over the Ibaraki Agricultural Produce Net website by inputting a numbered code on each label.”