DECA

COCONUT CREEK, Fla. (Dec. 3, 2009) – Food For The Poor received $10,000 from Quaker Oats and Goodbite.com, thanks to a popular food blogger and all of the fans who turned up the heat and voted for her oatmeal recipe on You Tube.

Laura Levy, of laurasbestrecipes.com, says she now wants to stoke the fire and fan the flames. The popular food blogger was so excited about what $10,000 could do; she found that she wanted to do more. Because Food For The Poor can feed a child for $36 a year, at least 277 children will be fed with the money from the challenge. Levy wants to raise enough money to feed 500 hungry children.

The children who will be helped with the winnings live in Cap-Haitien, Haiti. Without this money, they wonder day-to-day how they will eat. Levy has become a “Champion” for the organization, and anyone can help her meet her latest goal by visiting www.foodforthepoor.org/lauralevy.

In October, Levy joined the “Awaken Your Senses Challenge” sponsored by Quaker Oats and Goodbite.com. Her scrumptious oatmeal-topping recipe - “Red, White & Berry” – tallied up the most votes among 12 bloggers. Levy won the competition and the grand prize has been granted to Food For The Poor, the largest international relief and development agency in the United States.

Levy chose the charity to receive the winnings, stating on her Facebook page that the organization “was very close to her heart.”

This is the first time Food For The Poor teamed up with a food blogger and participated in an Internet-based challenge.

“Truly, the winners of this challenge are those whom we serve. The children, the families, the elderly we help — we can claim victory for them,” said Robin Mahfood, President/CEO of Food For The Poor. “It is wonderful that Levy chose to represent us in this challenge. We are grateful our organization and the work we do resonated with her, and we feel blessed for that.”

Food For The Poor, the largest international relief and development organization in the United States, does much more than feed millions of hungry poor in 17 countries of the Caribbean and Latin America. This interdenominational Christian ministry provides emergency relief assistance, clean water, medicines, educational materials, homes, support for orphans and the aged, skills training and micro-enterprise development assistance, with more than 96 percent of all donations going directly to programs that help the poor. For more information please visit, http://www.foodforthepoor.org.

Contact:
Aimee Vignola
Public Relations Associate
954.427.2222, ext. 6079
aimeev@foodforthepoor.com

Dear Parents,

We’re pleased to announce the launch of Parents Ask, a new website that brings together leading experts and best-selling authors to share their knowledge and expertise to help families tackle the challenges of modern life.

What makes Parents Ask unique is our original video series featuring panels of experts discussing a wide range of child and parenting issues.  Whether you’re struggling with sleep issues, weighing the pros and cons of circumcision or dealing with a perplexing dilemma at any age or stage, you’ll be able to log on and have easy access to solutions from experts you can trust.  Think of the site as the parenting section of your local bookstore come to life!

Be sure to also check out our Parents Ask blog roll.  Here, our team of editors (all parents themselves!) will be creating original, informative posts and curating the best parenting content on the web.  We believe that our blog will help you navigate the vast online parenting world and discover, in one place, the best information, resources and tools the web has to offer. 

Our Parents Ask community presents you with field-tested expertise, bringing together seasoned parents with those at earlier stages on their parenting journey.  Whatever your child’s age, our community will provide  a safe place to ask your question, and the easiest way to find the answer you’re looking for anytime you’re looking for it.

As parents ourselves, we know that raising kids, raises questions.  We hope that we can become a regular stop for you (in between diaper changes, carpooling, juggling work and family, etc) to find a few much needed answers.

-The Parents Ask team

BusinessWeek’s Jon Fine wrote about DECA’s business model this week. Here’s an excerpt:

The thing about Web video, of course, is that anyone can do it. Shoot it, edit it, distribute it on YouTube and other outlets—done. Assuming, of course, that “distribute” means “put it alongside zillions of similar things.” This is partly why building a Web video business is tough, as even showbiz vets have discovered. Infinite competition and uncertain ad demand for unproven Web properties make the 21st century dream—a hit online video series, or at least one that pulls in steady dollars— all but impossible. Unless you invert aspects of the traditional model, as a two-year-old Santa Monica (Calif.) Web video outfit called Deca does.

In other industry news, here’s what we were reading:

• JetBlue Marketing: YouTube Stars Promote New LAX Route - AdAge
• Fox, iPhone team on ‘Family Guy’ app - Variety
• Studios-Backed Web Video Efforts Stalled for Now; Who’s Left? - paidContent
  

Congratulations to the two DECA properties that are being honored with Streamy Award nominations: Boing Boing TV and Project Lore are both up for “Best Hosted Web Series,” and Xeni Jardin and Alex Albrecht have each been nominated for “Best Web Series Host.”

The Project Lore team has also been nominated for the Streamys Audience Choice Award and is one of ten contenders that represent the most-nominated web series overall. As you might have guessed, the Audience Choice winner will be determined by audience votes. So please support Project Lore by voting for them once a day through March 28.

See you at the Streamys!

More:

• Read about Boing Boing TV
• Read about Project Lore
• Find out more about the Streamy Awards
• Get Streamys event information

When we founded DECA in the summer of 2007, our goal was to create high-quality content that’s of the web, by the web, and for the web. We look at what people care about online and create video and other content that meets their needs.

We’ve spent the last year and a half focused on that task, building a great team and launching several properties that have gotten some great buzz and feedback.

But we haven’t talked much about ourselves or our company so far. We’re launching this blog to share who we are and what we’re working on and thinking about.

Of course, we’ll be posting company news and links to our press releases, but we also hope to make this a space for thoughtful conversations about the future of digital media. We hope you’ll join us.

So, welcome to the DECA blog, and thanks for reading. We’ll be updating about once a week to start, with posts from many different people at the company.

To keep tabs, grab our RSS feed or follow us on Twitter.