We from EveryCook are building an open source computerized cooking device. At 29c3 I presented the idea of digital cooking and people gave me an awesome feedback. Now, 2 years later the industry giants have realised that connecting computers and kitchen devices can do awesome things. But do they create open standards? Of course not! They create little black boxes speaking strange languages that you can't integrate in an ecosystem that wasn't designed by the manufacturers themselves. We still want an open ecosystem for free exchange of information about food and recipes. We came closer to our goal. Let me tell you...
There are bluetooth thermometers for meat. Can I use them with my computer? Nope, because they only talk to one dedicated app. There are cooking devices with touch screen, built-in recipes and sometimes even networking capabilities. But do we know how to talk to them? We seem to be the only ones believing in the power of open standards. EveryCook is open source since the beginnings. Because we look at the large picture. We want to use ALL available data for cooking. Even data from WWF about sustainability or data from scientific research about nutrients. And we want to show how we treat this data. We want our database open for all useful input. As we do for our Hardware. If you see a weak part in our designs you can tell us and we'll change it if needed. I will tell you what we learned making 4 generations of digital cooking devices. And I would like to explain you why we believe that there should be open standards for cooking software. What is now done "in the market" is that many companies develop many, many apps and some kitchen devices and none of them is made to interact with it's neighbors. Why? "because my data is my data!" and "my hardware design is mine!" Isn't that a huge waste of resources? Everyone re-inventing the wheel and then adding some little special sauce to claim the whole thing as "unique". Having all data about food available is not a need, it is a human right. Having additional data on how to prepare food in machine readable form is a nice extra. Having both together in a database is the technically best solution because of the many synergies. Let's form the future of digital cooking before someone else does!
Speakers: Alexis