Health-and-fitness-tracking devices have become all the rage lately. But one fitness-tech CEO dares to say many of them aren’t much more than glorified accelerometers, adding a note of skepticism to the excitement surrounding these gadgets. Andy Smith, CEO of IAC-owned DailyBurn, says that the benefit of fitness-tracking tools goes away after the first few weeks, and users ultimately fall into the same activity — or inactivity — patterns as before. “They do help a small subset of people,” Smith said. “You find that there are type-A personalities that like to track everything, and that’s great. For others, it might give them a little jump start. But the value proposition of those devices after the first few weeks goes way down.” DailyBurn is a fitness-data-tracking company that is now focusing on fitness content. The company pivoted partly because data-tracking wasn’t all that effective, Smith said. Last week, Nike introduced a $150 lightweight Read More

Losing weight is on a lot of people’s minds post-New Year, so this is a perfect time to revisit tips and tricks about how to use Apple technologies to help you get healthier in 2012. Music, food and activity monitoring all contribute to a healthier you, and can be tracked on your Mac or iPhone. Whatever music source you use, get in the groove during your workouts. My favorite right now is Pandora radio, since I find variety an excellent motivator when working out. A good set of Bluetooth headphones is also probably a wise investment, since they prevent cords from getting caught during activity. My favorite right now is the Jabra Sport. Not only does it do audio and voice, but it also does FM so I can tune into the TV audio at the gym. I also recommend Yurbuds. You send Yurbuds a picture of your ear and they match Read More

...#App of the Day: Meal Snap - calorie counting app that uses your camera http://t.co/s8wBsVh #tech... Read More

In this continuing series, we round up some of our favorite new applications for smartphones each month, specifically for iPhone and Android devices. This spring edition is one of the longest lists yet - there have been a number of incredible new launches to highlight this past month. (And yes, we know it's May already, these things take time). As a bonus just for this month, we've added a section for new iPad and Honeycomb apps, too. As always, feel free to share your favorite apps in the comments! Fring: Not new, but a new release for both iPhone, Android and Nokia lets users make free group video calls with up to four friends. (Free, multiple app stores) Trapcall: Available for iPhone, Android and BlackBerry, this call screening/call recording/call blocking app lets you see who's calling, even when the number is blocked, plus blacklist callers, record calls and more. Ethical questions Read More

...Apps AppSafari Top 25 Categories Store Giveaway Submit Help Meal Snap - Calorie Counting Magic Zoom User Reviews TweetShare Meal Snap is a new... Read More

Meal Snap is aptly named. Take a photo of your food, and the app tells you what it is and estimates the calories in your meal. Calorie counting is sensible in theory, but precisely measuring every morsel is a hassle at best and at worst, impractical and ridiculous. I’m not claiming to be a nutritional or behavioral expert, but honestly, how many people do you know who faithfully record the contents of every meal? However, a new app seeks to solve this problem of inconvenience with an amusing solution to innate human laziness. Called Meal Snap, its concept is simple: take a picture of your food, and the app will report exactly what you’ve been eating. Meal Snap lets you take pictures of the meals you eat, and then magically tells you what food was in your meal. Oh yeah, we give you a rough estimate of the calories you ate Read More

Counting calories isn’t fun, which you’ll know if you’ve tried it. But a cool new iPhone app released just last week actually manages to make the exercise entertaining and light, while still keeping it informative. Meal Snap analyzes pictures of food you take with your iPhone’s camera, and returns an approximate calorie count for each item. The app represents somewhat of a departure for DailyBurn, the company behind its creation. DailyBurn, which was acquired by IAC  in 2010, is a social network that focuses on fitness and diet tracking, with an emphasis on community involvement and granular detail. Meal Snap, however, represents a slightly different approach, and one which DailyBurn CEO Andy Smith thinks will be easier to swallow for customers the company’s other products may have had more trouble reaching. Smith says Meal Snap is part of an effort to create “fun, engaging products that help with behavioral change,” and DailyBurn has Read More

Browsing the App Store this weekend?  If so, here are ten applications released recently.  Enjoy! One hundred retro-gaming classics from Atari, however to get them all you’ll need to make a fair few in-app purchases.  You do get Pong for free, though.  Free. An organizer which uses a visual mapping system to plan events, tasks and appointments.  $1.99/£1.19. A tennis app with training by former champion Jimmy Connors, featuring more than an hour of video content, a journal and other tips to improve your game.  $9.99/£5.99. Consolidate your photo streams into one app, follow friends, share and save pictures.  Free. Take pictures of your food and the app will tell you how many calories it contains!  You can also track your daily intake and share everything via Twitter, Facebook and Foursquare.  $2.99/£1.79. Who doesn’t have a secret desire to throw axes at their friends?  This app makes that dream come true Read More

Tell your cheese to say "cheese!" Meal Snap takes photos of your food, then tells you how many calories it contains. Want to lose weight? Forget fad diets: eat fewer calories. Ah, but easier said than done, right? Counting calories is not only a hassle, it's downright difficult for certain types of meals. Enter DailyBurn's Meal Snap ($2.99), an ingeniously clever--if not entirely perfect--app that takes a photo of the food on your plate, then delivers an estimated calorie count. Sounds pretty amazing, right? And it is, though there are limits to the app's accuracy. In my quick and informal tests, Meal Snap easily identified a small pile of strawberries, and correctly estimated the calories at 38-57. But it took a couple minutes for it to process and present the info. Next, I gathered an egg, an orange, a banana, and a small container of yogurt. This time I entered the Read More

Greg Kumparak is the Mobile Editor at Techcrunch. Greg has been writing for the TechCrunch network since May of 2008. Greg was born just outside of San Jose, and now lives in the East Bay of California. → Learn More Wow. If this app had been pitched to us on the 1st, I would have been sure it was an April Fool’s joke. Coming in a few days later, however, it seems almost genius. Given that my job of sitting in front of a computer and blasting out gadget news isn’t exactly an active one, I’ve gotta be fairly careful to avoid packin’ on the pounds. At one point this entailed keeping a fairly detailed journal of meal calorie counts tediously pulled ingredient by ingredient from a time-wrecking databases. As you can probably tell from my unenthusiastic tone and use of words like “tedious” and “time-wrecking”, that didn’t last too long. Read More