A New App for Counting Calories

The toughest part of counting calories can be figuring out how many are actually on your plate. But what if your Android or iPhone could do it for you?A smartphone app called PlateMate, developed by former Harvard engineering students and currently in the works, may soon allow you to snap a picture of your food and quickly get a good estimate of its calorie count. Other tools count calories by letting users input the foods they eat, or sending photos out to a nutritionist. A social networking app called Meal Snap allows users to get nutritional breakdowns by taking pictures of their food, though the calorie estimates often fall within a broad range. PlateMate uses a different system of social networking to quickly crunch data and estimate calories, as an article in today’s Boston Globe explains:… Read more

Adobe to Kill Mobile Flash, Focus on HTML5

Adobe announced Wednesday that it is killing Flash for mobile devices and will instead focus its efforts on HTML5 for mobile developers.In a blog post on the company’s Web site, Danny Winokur, Adobe’s vice president and general manager of interactive development, said, “We will no longer continue to develop Flash Player in the browser to work with new mobile device configurations.” He said the company will increase investment in HTML5 and innovate with Flash for advanced gaming and premium video… Read more

Apple and Android Note-Taking Apps Make Paper a Memory

Like a lot of people in the ’80s, I bought a microcassette recorder to capture great ideas the way Michael Keaton’s character did in “Night Shift.” (“Idea to eliminate garbage: edible paper.”) My recorder quickly gathered dust because it was much easier to retrieve ideas and reminders from good old inedible paper.So when I first saw apps like Evernote (free on Apple and Android), PhatPad ($5 for iPad) and Notability ($1 for iPad) for note-taking and organizing, they struck me as software versions of those old recorders: places where ideas go to die… Read More

The Most Valuable Digital Consumers

These days, Social/Local/Mobile seems to be driving much of the conversation about online opportunities. But at the end of the day, there is only one constant common denominator across the Web: the consumer. An understanding of this consumer and how they are influenced by social, mobile and local experiences online is vital to big brands looking to reach them on the Web. Nielsen and NM Incite, a Nielsen/McKinsey company, illustrate some findings that highlight digital consumer behaviors and consumption patterns that can help brand advertisers understand their most valuable customers and how they’re engaging across social, local and mobile…Read More

Making the iBio for Apple’s Genius

After Steve Jobs anointed Walter Isaacson as his authorized biographer in 2009, he took Mr. Isaacson to see the Mountain View, Calif., house in which he had lived as a boy. He pointed out its “clean design” and “awesome little features.” He praised the developer, Joseph Eichler, who built more than 11,000 homes in California subdivisions, for making an affordable product on a mass-market scale. And he showed Mr. Isaacson the stockade fence built 50 years earlier by his father, Paul Jobs.

“He loved doing things right,” Mr. Jobs said. “He even cared about the look of the parts you couldn’t see.”

Mr. Jobs, the brilliant and protean creator whose inventions so utterly transformed the allure of technology, turned those childhood lessons into an all-purpose theory of intelligent design. He gave Mr. Isaacson a chance to play by the same rules. His story calls for a book that is clear, elegant and concise enough to qualify as an iBio. Mr. Isaacson’s “Steve Jobs” does its solid best to hit that target.

As a biographer of Albert Einstein and Benjamin Franklin, Mr. Isaacson knows how to explicate and celebrate genius: revered, long-dead genius. But he wrote “Steve Jobs” as its subject was mortally ill, and that is a more painful and delicate challenge. (He had access to members of the Jobs family at a difficult time.) Mr. Jobs promised not to look over Mr. Isaacson’s shoulder, and not to meddle with anything but the book’s cover. (Boy, does it look great.) And he expressed approval that the book would not be entirely flattering. But his legacy was at stake. And there were awkward questions to be asked. At the end of the volume, Mr. Jobs answers the question “What drove me?” by discussing himself in the past tense.
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