User:Tansunnytrip/Sandbox

Overview
Two year old Rouxbe is an independent company from Vancouver, Canada that claims to have developed the first online cooking school for the Internet. The company is a venture between professional cooking school instructors, instructional designers and is produced with the financial participation of Telefilm_Canada - Administrator of The Canada New Media Fund.

Rouxbe currently has approximately 1,000 instructional cooking videos which are presented as multi-part, indexed flash movies. All content appears to be shot in High-definition_video and are mostly mostly from an overhead angle and narrated, step-by-step. Rouxbe has a good deal of competition in the online recipe space to include The Food Network and AllRecipes although there does not seem to be another online cooking school school whose curriculum is entirely provided via HD video. Competitive online cooking schools include 911ChefEric.com, another Vancouver Cananda firm that is unrelated to Rouxbe.

All recipe videos seem to be free while the more involved Cooking School curriculum is for fee. An Annual Membership to Rouxbe costs $99; a Premium Lifetime Membership costs $199. Rouxbe contributes 15 percent of all Membership fees to Rouxbe for Life, which donates to hunger relief agencies that focus on sustainability, in an effort to help solve and raise awareness for the chronic-hunger crisis in developing countries.

In March 2009, blogs reported that Stewart Butterfield, founder of the popular photo sharing site Flickr had invested in Rouxbe. Mr. Butterfield was a co-founder of Flickr before its acquisition by Yahoo! in the spring of 2005. Until July 2008, he oversaw the development of Flickr.com as its General Manager inside Yahoo! where it has grown to one of the largest web sites in the world with over 70 million unique visitors a month.

Competition
The Food Network, All Recipes, Recipe Zaar, Recipe Source, Epicurious

Founders
Dawn Thomas, Joe Girard

Board and Advisors
Joe Girard Stewart_Butterfield Kelly Smith, Curious Office