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The Photobucket site is a bit of a local Denver phenomenon. Started by Alex Welch who graduated from CSU at about the perfect time to launch a tech startup in Colorado. Photobucket is not nearly as well known among the tech crowd as Flickr and yet Photobucket beats Flickr in a variety of metrics (page visits, for example). Most folks in Denver have some connection to Photobucket through a friend-of-a-friend and people love swapping stories about how great and down-to-earth the guys are regardless of the amazing success of their company.

Slime Sandwich - Denver Game Company

Slime Sandwich is their next venture - an online, social, role playing game that will make money on subscriber fees. I found out about them because they kept coming up on the Colorado PHP News Aggregator that I set up - they're posting lots of jobs with a variety of skills. I created a channel for Slime Sandwich (which requires manual curation, but presents trend data that makes the manual activity worth it).

I look forward to watching the progress of slime sandwich over the next few years. According to a quick search they've got $1 million of seed funding on January 10th, though it's not 100% clear to me what the source of that funding was. They also can probably fund the company for a while based on profits that some of the founders made on previous projects. My guess is that it will take more than $1M to get their game online and start building the community for it so it will be interesting to see how they spend their money and build their business.

This hearty ragout is perfect for a cold fall or winter day, and delicious served over mashed potatoes.

Chicken Ragout Ingredients

• 4 boneless, skinless chicken breast halves, cut into 1 inch cubes
• 1/4 cup all purpose flour
• Kosher salt and black pepper to taste
• 2 tbsp unsalted butter
• 1/3 cup smoked bacon, thickly sliced and diced 1/2 inch wide
• 1/4 pounds brown or white button mushrooms, quartered
• 1 cup pearl onions, whole and peeled
• 1/2 cup dry white wine
• 1/2 tsp fresh thyme leaves or substitute 1/8 tsp dried
• 1.5 cups chicken or beef broth
• 1 tbsp unsalted butter, chilled

Chicken Ragout Instructions

1. Combine the flour with the salt and pepper to season. Add the chicken to the flour and toss to coat. Shake off the excess and set aside.
2. Heat a pan large enough to hold all the ingredients over medium high heat. When the pan is hot add the butter and when the butter has melted and is foaming add the chicken cubes. Brown the chicken on all sides, reducing the heat if the bottom of the pan starts to brown too quickly (which should take 4-6 minutes).
3. Remove the chicken with a slotted spoon and hold in a warm place. Pour off all the excess grease and add the bacon. Cook until the bacon has rendered some of its fat and is starting to crisp. Add the mushrooms and onions and toss to coat with the bacon fat. Cook until the mushrooms are a light golden brown and the onions have started to color.
4. Deglaze the pan with the white wine and cook over high heat until the wine is completely reduced, scraping the bottom of the pan with a wooden spoon.

I'm always curious about technology products and product launches, but an interesting thing happened recently with the launch of the latest Google Phone (i.e. the Nexus One).

Release date prediction market on Hubdub

I created a Google Nexus One Release Date market on Hubdub. Hubdub is a play-money prediction market system, a wisdom-of-the-crowds tool to help gather ideas about the outcome of a specific event. The market was created on December 15th and almost immediately it was showing a 94% likelihood of release in the first quarter of 2010.

When will the Google Phone (Nexus One) be available to consumers

Hubdub lets people make predictions on a question and when they do so they choose whether that prediction will be public or private. In the case of this market there is currently over $18,000 of play-money at stake and just over $3,300 of those positions are public. So 80% of the play-money is hidden, but the effect of those positions is totally public. While hiding their identity is possible the world still can quite easily see the sentiments of the people involved: early 2010!

You may be wondering what's going on with IKEA in Colorado. I know I am. I was in Los Angeles for Thanksgiving this year and visited an IKEA out there and was reminded how nice it is to have high quality, reasonably priced household items within driving distance.

According to this article in the Denver Business Journal

"This is a very complicated project, and will take some time," said Joseph Roth, spokesman for IKEA Group’s U.S. headquarters near Philadelphia. "There’s still no time frame for groundbreaking or opening, but we are committed to the project and moving forward."

Once a construction timetable is fixed, the store will take 18 months to build, according to Roth.

Greg and I have been obsessed with tasty and healthy sweet potatoes lately, and have incorporated it into the unlikeliest of places...like breakfast pancakes!

Sweet Potato Pancake ingredients

• 2/3 cup flour
• pinch salt
• 1/4 teaspoon baking soda
• 1/4 teaspoon baking powder
• 1.5 cups milk
• 1 egg
• 1 large sweet potato mashed
• 1 tablespoon sugar
• 1 teaspoon vanilla
• pinch of favorite spices (nutmeg, cinnamon, cardamom)

Sweet Potato Pancake process

Peel and cut up your sweet potato and put in pot of boiling water until soft. While the potato is cooking, mix dry ingredients and add them to the wet ingredients. Finally, mix mashed potatoes into mixture and stir briefly. Use plett pan or regular skillet. Buen provecho!

It's hard to judge the proper ratio of ingredients because sweet potato sizes can vary. The consistency should be just like your favorite pancake batter.