March2009

We’ve finally decided that ignoring Twitter doesn’t make any sense

I think the best use of this would be an easy way to collect user feedback and just think aloud about things we’re working on. There may also be applications for our mobile version as well.

Follow us on Twitter at twitter.com/foodio54! For example right now we’re running a simulation making recommendations for our most active users on the best scoring restaurants to see what comes out the best. When everything is done we’ll have about 100 million recommendations.

Arby’s is launching a new sandwich called the Roast Burger. It looks like they’re going to market it like its a healthier alternative to going and grabbing a burger, but a quick check of Arbys.com shows that it is excluded from their nutritional information for now. Not that that means anything, but I’d like to see how good or bad the sandwich is for you. But for now we’ll just have to settle for how good it tastes . So if you’d like to go out there and try this sandwich here’s a coupon for a free one.

We’ve been collecting a lot of data and we realized that the recommender system algorithm was originally specialized to work under conditions with less data, so we’ve been experimenting a bit. We’ve collected now just over 138,000 restaurant ratings. We’ve also logged every time we’ve made a prediction, and so we can now compare with a great deal of certainly how well we’re doing.

The old system was on average 0.81 off. This may seem like a lot, however this number would win the $1 million Netflix prize (yes we tried). If you’re unfamiliar with the Netflix Prize, it is a competition to improve Netflix’s recommendation system by 10%, if you can do that you get $1 million. Netflix provides you with 100 million ratings and a pat on the back The system we’ve developed for Foodio54 uses certain pieces … Read More »

Laugh all you want, but I think this woman has a valid point.

Here’s the story. On Februrary 28, at about 2:45 Latreasa Goodman called 911 from a McDonald’s in Fort Pierce, FL to report a “McNugget Emergency.” She actually called 911 three times to complain. The McNugget emergency was that the McDonald’s had run out of chicken nuggets and told Goodman that it was the store policy not to refund her money.

Let’s go over that again, this woman orders a 10 piece order of chicken McNuggets and the store takes her money. They then tell her, oh we’re sorry we don’t have any McNuggets, but we’ll give you something else. Well if she wanted something else she would have ordered it, and she instead asked for a refund. That seems like a perfectly reasonable request, but the McDonald’s employees then … Read More »