Okay, I promised to write mostly about the publishing industry and probably this post is not related to it too much (even though I did find it on http://www.publishersweekly.com/ which is the main portal for the industry news), but I just had to mention it!:)

So there is this BigOven cooking app which, with an archive of more than 250,000 recipes available on almost any device has been downloaded 8 million times!!! Not bad for a cooking book in my opinion! So why is this cooking app interesting in terms of emarketing?

The app follows a Freemium model that we recently discussed during the class…Basically the app is for free. However, if you want an ad-free version or more functionality, such as e.g. nutritional information for each recipe, you have to pay 20$ per year.

The app has really cool functionalities! Just to mention a few of those… “Use Up Leftovers” section helps you pick three or more items from the fridge to see what can be made with whatever is on hand. Perfect for students, isn’t it?! Once a recipe is chosen, the ingredients and instructions are displayed . Ingredient lists populate a shopping list with one touch. The shopping list auto-sorts by grocery aisle, and places a checkbox next to each item so you can check off each as you shop. How awesome is that 😀

What’s also worth mentioning is there are many ways in which users can add and share their own content. There are three options. The first one is basic- you just  type in any recipe using a provided template. The second allows you to take a photo of a typed or hand-written recipe and upload it to BigOven which can be highly attractive to mums, young girls who love reading those hand-written recipes.The free version lets you do this thrice, while the paid version welcomes as many as you can snap (So the Freemium model feature once again). The third, and most “risky”option allows a person to navigate to any food website and import a recipe right from that page. Copyright infringement you say? Not really…When BigOven recognizes that a site is copyright protected, it still imports the recipe, but makes it available only to that user… I am not sure how they manage to do that, but seems to be working!

So dear everyone! If you don’t know what to cook for dinner tonight, go ahead and download this app! ( Probably I’m going to do the same)

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