This weekend, I met with Darcy, Jenn, PJ and Victoria at Momofuku Milk Bar to have a long overdue reunion and visit our fellow FCI graduate Christina.  While eating some of Christina’s creations (volcano, pork bun, blue cheese polenta, cinnamon bun and an assortment of soft serves) Darcy, Jenn, PJ and Victoria all agreed to start contributing to Chocolate Cubed!  They all bring very different passions to the team, which you will see expressed through their desserts, cakes, cookies and all their recipes.  Our goal of this site it to help motivate us to bake more as well as to share our ideas with the community, while learning from it at the same time.  

Over the next few weeks we will be writing bios of each of the chefs and then introducing them to you one by one.   I hope you are as excited as I am.

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Whenever I look at the statistics for this site, I am always surprised by the amount of traffic I get from queries that include the word “chocolate” or “recipe”.  I shouldn’t be surprised because I have done some work in search engine optimization and the fact that the word “chocolate” is in every page title and is part of every URL makes the search engines think this site is all about chocolate.

So, instead of fighting to rank on other topics and inflating my bounce rate because I don’t talk enough about chocolate goodies, I have decided to convert this into a baking blog.  I have asked some of my fellow classmates from pastry school to help contribute and hope to begin this week.  For those of you that actually want to hear me rant about other stuff, I am going to launch jordansalvit.com over the next week as well.

I am very excited about this change and hope you are too!  Yay for more pastries and chocolate goodies!

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This morning’s NYTimes business section had an article by Janet Rae-Dupree about the people and companies trying to get tax credits for innovation, because innovation creates jobs.  I wholeheartedly agree and want to mention a couple of examples.  Yahoo!, Google, Intel, Apple and Pfizer are just a few of the many examples of companies that created hundreds of thousands of jobs by innovating.  Google’s success generated almost 20,000 jobs according to WikiHow and that is not including all the peripheral Google-related jobs.  The SEM business took a whole new twist when Google launched adwords and its auction model.  SEO is now a full-time job for many people and that is because search engines now drive businesses.  

Joseph Stiglitz was quoted in the article as saying all our bailouts are focusing on the past, not the future.  Will throwing money at corporations for innovation work?  or should the government be investing in small businesses?  I am not sure either will work effectively.  This is a little farfetched, but what about making all college graduates publish at least 1 academic paper before graduating?  This would show them the power of creating new ideas and the validity of peer review.  I am not sure it would create jobs, but it would certainly make our society one of thinkers and creators, two ingredients for innovation.

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Since President-Elect Obama was voted into office in November, I have seen people counting the days till January 20th, 2009, Inauguration Day.  There is a hope that on the 20th the world will change.  The economy will be better.  U.S. relations with the world powers will be better.  Everything will be better because President G W Bush will be out of office.  This  seems ludicrous to me.  Is this a result of the marketing genius that got Obama elected?  Is “Change We Can Believe In” going to be a let down?  I am hopeful that Obama will change the way government operates, but it cannot happen within the first 100 days.  

This got me thinking about marketing an unproven product.  Setting expectations too high could cause a huge backlash that could ruin a company or product.  Nowadays with twitter and ratings sites like yelp, a set of unhappy customers all responding to good marketing is hard to bounce back from.  Any tips to manage those expectations from the start without losing market share?  What about ways of fixing a fiasco?

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