Give Your Calories is a new app from Action Against Hunger that allows you to “donate” your calories to help end world hunger.

“Clean your plate! There are kids starving in Africa!”

I had a teacher in elementary school who was fond of yelling that whenever we didn’t eat our vegetables during lunchtime, and it never made much sense to me. It wasn’t like she was going to wrap up my leftovers and ship them to malnourished children in third-world countries! But as I got older, I realized that what she really meant is that we should appreciate what we have.

Now, there’s an app for that. (Come on, are you really surprised?)

Give Your Calories is a new app that allows you to donate your calories to people who actually need them. The concept is simple: take a picture of your food, and the app uses image recognition and a barcode scanner to calculate the calories you’ll be consuming. Then, it converts those calories into a donation amount, which you can choose to give via PayPal to the charity Action Against Hunger. You can manually add any snack or meal you photograph that isn’t recognized.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EjIHG2VBJ5g

The app recommends a donation of $1 for snacks that contain fewer than 200 calories, $2 for snacks up to 300 calories, and $5 for snacks up to 400 calories. For every 100 calories you consume past 400, the app adds another dollar.

Action Against Hunger has an A grade from CharityWatch and has four stars from Charity Navigator. They have 4,600+ field staff workers in over 40 countries around the world. Your donations go toward programs to treat and prevent malnutrition, provide access to safe water, respond to emergencies, provide long-time solutions to farmers in struggling communities, and more.

Give Your Calories is also a way to open your eyes about the foods you eat. Often, we don’t realize how many calories we’re eating, So, if you’re struggling with a diet or trying to eat healthier foods, Give Your Calories is a great options. You might think twice about ordering dessert if you have to not only pay for it, but also donate money!

To date, nearly 200,000 calories have been “donated” world-wide. You can get Give Your Calories now for iPhone, and Action Against Hunger is working on an Android version as well.

Image [via]

Allison Boyer is the Online Education Coordinator for NMX University, where you can learn more about blogging, podcasting, web TV, and social business. She also runs the food blog The PinterTest Kitchen with her mom and sister.

Appy Couple is a wedding app that allows you to connect with your guests to invite them to events and easily distribute details about the big day.

Planning upcoming nuptials? Check out the Appy Couple wedding app. This is an all-in-one solution for sharing all of your wedding info with your guests. Instead of signing up for several services (I hate that, don’t you?), you can take care of everything with one single wedding app.

To get started, simply register for an account at appycouple.com and choose a design that fits your style. There’s a one-time fee of $28 to sign up, but this price gives you access to all of the designs available, allows you to add an unlimited number of guests, and more. Once the app launches premium accounts, you’ll also be upgraded automatically instead of having to pay a higher fee in the future.

So what can you do with Appy Couple?

When you sign up, you’ll first be prompted to create a wedding website and mobile site at the same time by uploading details about your story. How did you meet? When did you know it was love? What was the proposal like? Who’s in the bridal party? Add as many details as you want.

Next, you can upload all the information your guests need about your wedding day and other events, like the engagement party or rehearsal dinner. Give guests suggestions on where to stay, what to wear, and everything else they need to get involved. Once you invite guests via the app, they’ll see information for just the wedding day or for other events as well; you get to control each person’s access to details based on what they’re invited to attend.

Guests can also upload pictures of their own to help tell your story. You have ultimate say on what is shared publicly, but it’s a great way to add to your albums even if you and your husband (or wife)-to-be don’t take a lot of pictures. Guests can also interact with one another by starting conversations and adding comments. There are even mini games and virtual toast options. It’s like a mini social network just for your big day.

There are countless other features also available through Appy Couple.

• Allow your guests to digitally RSVP.
• Display your up-to-date gift registry.
• List meal options and dress code.
• Include directions to your venue.
• Poll your guests when you’re making a wedding decision.
• Help your guests find child care.
• Show the weather prediction for the big day.

Appy Couple works on just about any connected device out there. There are iOS and Android apps for download, and guests without smart phones and tablets can visit your website as well. Additionally, you have the option to connect with Twitter and Facebook for sharing news, and guests can get updates via email if they so choose.

You can also kick things up a notch and order print invitation that match your Appy Couple site, and on the day of your wedding, guests can continue uploading pictures and comments that you’ll be able to keep forever. It’s definitely an upgrade to putting disposable cameras on the tables (no one uses them anyway!), and it makes sharing all of the information for your wedding so much easier. The price tag on this wedding tool is definitely worth it, with all of the great features, and I’m looking forward to seeing what other features they plan to integrate with future premium accounts.

Image [via]

Allison Boyer is the Online Education Coordinator for NMX University, where you can learn more about blogging, podcasting, web TV, and social business. She also runs the food blog The PinterTest Kitchen with her mom and sister.

Cleverbug, makers of a new app called Cleverbug Cards, launched a movement for Mother’s Day this year called – we love this – No Mom Left Behind.

They’re giving anyone who downloads the app a free printed card to send your mom for Mother’s Day. We’ve looked at Cleverbug before (they were just birthday cards then), and the thing we love is that they’re super personalized! Essentially, you connect your Facebook account and the app will determine your relationship with the card recipient (Mom!) and then let you personalize it with photos of the two of you (Spring Break at Yellowstone in 1998, anyone?) and a sweet message.

It’s a fun, thoughtful idea that basically allows you keep your spot as son- or daughter-of-the-year, and the card designs are really adorable.

Download Cleverbug at the Apple App Store, and claim your free card today!

Big Top Ballet, bringing gaming to an underserved demographic, women and girls that want to play a cool trippy game!

Ever since Apple made it possible for indie developers to sell their own games through the App Store five years ago, the Game Industry has undergone enormous disruption. Then followed Google Play, Amazon’s App Store, the Chrome Web Store, Facebook Games, etc. The list is growing for independent distribution. With this democratization of game publishing comes much competition, hence the number of apps and games available for smartphones and to play for free on-line. Large studios are beginning to feel the fierce burn of this market disruption and scaling back by reducing staff and adapting with new models.

As a female gamepreneur, this disruption couldn’t have happened for me at a better time. I always wanted to get into game development but to be honest, creating art for some shoot up war game was a huge turn off. I had become a new mom in 2007 and had just enough time to familiarize myself to mobile development and come up with a game concept I was really excited about bringing to an underserved demographic, women and girls that wanted a cool trippy game title. Some of the best games come out of the writers passion for a certain theme. Personally my passion for dance, electronic music and nouveau cirque was the impetus for Big Top Ballet the video game. It’s an alternative indie title that we’ve released to multiple platforms and we’re now working to scale with new content and a variety of mini games.

With this new found creative freedom in publishing and distributing games globally, comes challenges I hadn’t expected. Our first mini game within the title features trippy electronic music by Ill-Esha and spinning ‘Paper Ballerinas’ that the player must dress by dragging costumes and touching white tabs to attach costume pieces like tutus, masks and wings. Pretty tame, or so I thought. The Entertainment Software Ratings Board is the body that governs ratings for different games on all app stores. It’s voluntary to have your video game rated by the ESRB and as an indie developer for Big Top Ballet it hasn’t been a barrier for us to distribute the title on Apple’s App Store, Mac App Store, Google Play or Facebook Games. It’s that extra step that I haven’t taken at this early stage given that our game content is still growing.

This spring we were invited by Chillingo to release Big Top Ballet to their 100 Percent Indie app store for Android game”s available on Samsung mobile devices. We’re so pumped to be part of 100 Percent Indie. The experience and the support has been awesome. If you’re an indie game developer distributing to Android, I highly recommend it since 100 Percent Indie is available in countries like China where Google Play is not. Also China is now becoming the World’s biggest market for mobile iOS and Android apps. The numbers are staggering for the growing adoption of Android devices.

Big Top Ballet achieved Top 10 rankings, #1 in China and #4 in the US on the Mac App Store for Mac Music Games, we’ve been on the iOS App Store for a year without any issue. You can imagine my surprise when releasing to Samsung’s App Store to learn during the game review process that Big Top Ballet’s content was deemed unethical in certain countries. Which countries? Why? ‘Short skirts’ unethical specifically in Iran, China, Japan and the Phillippines. Okay Iran, women aren’t even free to dance in this country ( like that’s ethical?), so I decided to remove Big Top Ballet from distribution in Iran. But they’re tutus!  The 100 Percent Indie team was awesome at advocating our case given that these were ‘Paper Ballerinas’ and the short skirts were ‘tutus’ being attached to an already dressed ‘paper ballerina’ dolls. Not to mention the title was already being distributed in China on Apple’s App Store for iOS. Clearly this was just an over cautious quick assessment by the review team.

Apparently not. Over the past week I began to receive buyer feedback from what were designated as ‘Global Arab’ countries that Big Top Ballet’s ‘Content is unethical’. WTF? Seriously? Oh yah Saudi Arabia, women can’t even vote or run for office. As I roll my eyes, really?  What part is unethical? The music? The visuals, the fact that a woman is the game’s designer? So I asked simply and respectfully the buyers directly as a part of discovery. Keep in mind I have a copy of the Qu’ran and even read it from time to time. Interesting enough, one of these same buyers then gave a 5 star rating with ‘Great!’ as their review. Maybe they  had to rethink what in Big Top Ballet was actually in conflict with their values and morals? Maybe the title is different and cool, so it’s an impulse judgement? Who knows? The reality is that as the title grows with new content, if this feedback continues in different countries, I am not going to argue, I’m going to remove Big Top Ballet from sale in those countries, just as I did with Iran.

If I’ve gained all this new freedom to create and release a video game in my own voice, I’m not about to compromise artistic integrity as a woman and game developer by designing burkas for ‘paper ballerinas’ to appease the Middle East. I wonder though, had I not asked, ‘Can you please comment what content in the game is unethical and based on what philosophy? ‘, then would they have re-evaluated their position? It’s a big world and you can’t please all your critics. I have to admit I would have been flattered if ‘unethical’ was instead replaced by ‘subversive’ because there’s nothing more rebellious to the Middle East than women creating their own art and dancing freely.

Elizabeth Boylan is the Chief Creative Officer of Big Top Ballet Inc. and Partner of VectorBloom Technologies mobile development firm based out of Whistler, British Columbia. She is a mother to a young daughter and works closely with her husband and programmer, John Borchert. When she isn’t working on Big Top Ballet her favorite past times are swimming, hiking, playing tennis and snowboarding Whistler peaks. You can follow news for Big Top Ballet on Twitter, Instagram, YouTube and Facebook.

Back in 1997, just about every pre-teen girl (and lots of guys too) had a Tamagotchi or at least one of the knock-off brands of electronic pets. I was obsessed with mine until my parents made me get rid of it. Apparently, it’s really annoying to light sleepers when your pixelated cat is beep-meowing for food at three in the morning!

Now, you can relive the glory days of the mid-90s as the proud owner of a Tamagotchi once again. Tamagotchi L.i.f.e. is a new app available on iOS and Android that allows you to take care of a virtual pet just like you did in the good old days. The app is free, though there is an ad-free paid version available as well.

Tamagotchi L.i.f.e. has two modes. First, you can play the more modern, sleek looking version which has full color and a high resolution. If you’re really feeling nostalgic, though, you can instead play in the old-school black-and-white mode, where you’ll care for an 8-bit pet that looks exactly like the pet you had 15 years ago. The game allows you to collect pets and earn stars, and, like the original, you can play with your pets to increase happiness (and pass the time when you’re bored).

As you raise your pets, you can also share them on Facebook via the Tamagotchi L.i.f.e. app. I would expect to see even more social integration in future updates to the app.

L.i.f.e. stands for Love Is Fun Everywhere, which is part of a bigger campaign for Tamagotchi. The company has a “hometown heroes” program, which allows you to nominate people in your community who are making a difference in the world. This program launched in November 2012, and the first winner was Carole Pearson of The Dawg Squad. She received $5,000 for The Dawg Squad, an all-volunteer organization in Los Angeles that rescues sick and at-risk pooches and places them in foster homes until they can be adopted.

Every two months, a new Hometown Hero is chosen by Tamagotchi, and you can nominate someone from your own community here. So if you feel guilty about wasting time playing with your digital dog, you can at least know that proceeds are going toward a good cause!

Image [via]

Allison Boyer is the Online Education Coordinator for NMX University, where you can learn more about blogging, podcasting, web TV, and social business. She also runs the food blog The PinterTest Kitchen with her mom and sister.

I give a big thumbs up to any tool that makes it easier for me to find new wines to sip. If you’re an oenophile like me, check out Swirl It, a new iPhone app to help you pick out wines at your favorite restaurants and bars.

On the “Our Story” page on Swirl It’s website, its team is referred to as “a bunch of boozers on a mission.” Co-founders Brittany Hawkins and Nic Werner built Swirl It to combat a common problem in the wine world: in order to discover new wines, you typically have to drink a lot of bad bottles. Instead of purchasing a bottle or paying a premium for wine by the glass, the next time you’re out to eat, you can use Swirl It for personal wine recommendations based on availability and your personal tastes.

The more you use this app, the more it will “learn” about your palate and the better recommendations it will make. This isn’t an app that simply makes recommendations based on what the experts think is good. It helps you choose wines that you’ll like, based on what is on the menu wherever you are. As you try different wines, the app will start to understand what flavors you enjoy and it will give you hints on what you should look for when ordering wine. That way, you can make smarter wine choices even if you’re at a location not yet found in the app or choosing wine at the supermarket or liquor store.

Swirl It also allows you to track the wines you taste so that when you do find a vintage you like, you won’t forget it in the morning no matter how many glasses you drink the night before. When you try a wine, you can give it a thumbs-up “swirled” rating or a thumbs-down “spat” rating. Then, share your finding with friends or follow what they’re tasting to get recommendations from people you know.

Right now, Swirl It is only available on iPhone, so I guess I’ll have to wait until it comes to Android to really put this app through the ringer and enjoy using it myself. But from what I’ve seen online and on my friend’s iPhone, I’m definitely excited for this app. It’s completely free, so download it it today if you have an iPhone and start finding some tasty sips in your local neighborhood.

Image [via]

Allison Boyer is the Online Education Coordinator for NMX University, where you can learn more about blogging, podcasting, web TV, and social business. She also runs the food blog The PinterTest Kitchen with her mom and sister.

Recently released Thoughtful app lets you encourage your future self!

Behind most of our actions lie the desire to feel better. By thinking positive or helpful thoughts, you can change how you feel – and now there’s an app for that, too. Thoughtful app is a colorful and inspirational tool aimed at anyone who wants to experience more well-being, wealth and love in life.

Let’s say you’re meeting a friend, and the friend is running late. She’s almost always late. You could be thinking: “She is SO disrespectful, wasting my time like this”, “I hate when she’s late”, “She is ALWAYS late”. Most likely, thoughts like these will increase your irritation and put you in a resentful mood, but this is not your only option! You also have the power to pick thoughts that will make you feel better. You could be thinking: “How nice to get a couple of minutes to myself”, or “I wonder what great stuff she’s up to that she’ll share with me when she gets here” or “I hope she’s taking her time, getting here safely” or even “I really appreciate her taking the time to meet with me today”. According to research by the Institute of HeartMath, not only is appreciation and gratitude good for your health, but strong positive feelings like appreciation can also boost your energy, cognitive abilities and immune system. A series of positive thoughts would get you into a loving state of mind before your friend arrives, and will improve your day overall.

When Swedish designer Anna Sköld learned how to direct her own thoughts, she wanted to share her experience with more people. She and her partner Stefan developed the Thoughtful app for iPhone with the intention of making it easier to pick uplifting, soothing and powerful thoughts.

“A thought that we think may be considered both accurate and realistic – but that doesn’t mean that thinking it will get us any closer to what we want”, explains Sköld. “We are never powerless when it comes to how we feel. I think more people would leverage their own power and enjoy what they have and do more if they only knew how to do it… The thoughts you think often affect your mood the most. That’s why we built in the function of scheduling reminders. To make it easier to repeat a thought”.

Thoughtful app is constructed around 18 pickers with carefully selected fragments of thoughts that you can combine into various types of complete positive thoughts. With the help of background patterns, typefaces, shapes and colors, the user can design their own affirmations, or design a “Thought Card” to print or use as a lock screen on their phone so that the thought can be seen and internalized on a regular basis. It is also possible to share thoughts via Twitter, Facebook and Instagram, all directly through the app itself.

As Sköld points out, ”In the social media there is a great interest in words of wisdom. We want to encourage people to think for themselves and to see the value of their own personal thoughts”.

With Thoughtful, you can explore which types of thoughts make you feel better, and if a stock thought doesn’t entirely resonate with you, you can edit it or even write your own unique thought in the app. Sköld adds, “Many people are picky about what they eat, what they wear, and what they do. With Thoughtful we’re just encouraging people to be pickier about what they think as well.”

Thoughtful app is available for $1.99 at the iTunes Store.

Andrew Garde Joia is a freelance writer, business consultant, and web design professional. Actively involved in the New York Startup Technology scene, he is a regular volunteer with Ultralight Startups NYC and is the Managing Director for Customer Relations at Bedphones – The Headphones Designed for Sleep. To find out more about Andrew, visit his About.Me.

Whether you’re a food blogger or simply someone who enjoys finding recipes online, My Recipe Magic is a new tool worth checking out.

Designed by the ladies from popular blog Six Sisters’ Stuff, My Recipe Magic allows you to find recipes from top food bloggers and organize them so you’re ready to go with the perfect meal plan every time. For food bloggers, this is also a great chance to drive traffic and even make a little money.

After signing up for My Recipe Magic, you can upload recipes from your own blog or search by keyword for recipes others have uploaded. You can also search by ingredient, which is a great tool if you have an ingredient you want to use before it goes bad. If you just want to browse, you can also click on “Today’s Recipes” to see what’s recently been uploaded.

Each recipe comes complete with nutritional information, which is calculated automatically by the platform when recipes are uploaded. You can “favorite” recipes, as well as leave comments. Once you’ve found a recipe you like, you can add it a cookbook or to a menu. Cookbooks are for large collections of like recipes (sort of like a Pinterest board), while the menu section allows you to create a one-time-use list of recipes you intend to make.

Cookbooks are great for organizing recipes that you want to save for later. You can create as many cookbooks as you want, and when you find a recipe you like, you can add it to as many cookbooks as you want by checking the boxes that apply and hitting the save button. It’s pretty convenient when you have a recipe that could go in your soup cookbook, but also makes sense in your vegetarian cookbook.

Menus are for planning a specific meal. Once you add all the recipes you intend to make for the meal, you can look at the overall nutritional information. Another great features is the ability to print off a shopping list for the meal, which is especially helpful if you’re planning for a party.

The “Future Magic” section of My Recipe Magic includes information about all of the features they’re hoping to implement soon, including cookbook printing and recipe rating. I’m especially excited to see the future “What Can I Make” section, where you’ll be able to list the ingredients you have and see what recipes you can make without having to go to the store. I use this feature often on other websites, like Supercook, so it will be nice to have this feature on My Recipe Magic as well. They’re also working on a rewards program, which will give you redeemable points whenever you use the site.

And if you’re a food blogger? When you upload, you can choose show the complete recipe on My Recipe Magic or you can show partial directions and lead users back to your own site to get the complete recipe. When people view your recipes, you’ll also make money, so by uploading more recipes, you can both drive traffic and monetize your content. It’s a great way to build your brand, especially as a new food blogger.

I’m loving My Recipe Magic so far, especially with the cute chef mascot. Interested in learning more? My Recipe Magic has a great training video here to help you get started.

Image [via]

Allison Boyer is the Online Education Coordinator for NMX University, where you can learn more about blogging, podcasting, web TV, and social business. She also runs the food blog The PinterTest Kitchen with her mom and sister.

Disclosure: My Recipe Magic was an NMX 2013 exhibitor.

Want to keep a diary but don’t know what to write?  There’s an app for that!  Introducing Grid Diary, a new app for keeping a diary. It asks you questions to inspire your inner journalist.

Keeping a diary is a great way to document your life. By writing down your story, it often feels as though you’re writing yourself into history, capturing a piece of yourself for the sake of posterity with the added accouterment of your very own literary quips and flourishes.

For most, however, deciding what to write often proves to be an insurmountable obstacle, not to mention the pain of carrying around your journal and writing implements. For those of us that know we should keep a journal, but struggle to fill those blank pages, the clever folks over at Sumi Interactive Studio have developed another gem that is just what we need.

Grid Diary (currently on sale for only 99¢ at the AppleStore) is a new way to approach journaling. Instead of having to worry about what to write, Grid Diary will prompt you with questions about your day, and your answers get logged into your very own interactive cloud-based journal. Pick questions you want to answer from Grid Diary’s question library, or write your own personalized questions about your family or job, your exercise routines or your daily inspirations – it’s up to you! And with Grid Diary’s reminder settings, you will get into the habit of keeping a journal in no time.

Grid Diary’s great features include:

• Question format diary
• Questions library for your daily inspirations
• Personalizable questions
• Calendar view
• Portrait and landscape mode
• Full text search
• Reminder and notifications
• Passcode lock
• Sync data (via iCloud)
• Export in text or PDF format
• Share with Email

And according to Sumi Interactive, you can look forward to iPad and Mac support, photo attachements, full backup and restore options, and Evernote and Dropbox integration – all coming soon.

With Grid Diary, even in the cloud, your data is secure and private. So, what are you waiting for? Check out Grid Diary today, and tell us what you think!

Learn more [via]

Andrew Garde Joia is a freelance writer, business consultant, and web design professional. Actively involved in the New York Startup Technology scene, he is a regular volunteer with Ultralight Startups NYC and is the Managing Director for Customer Relations at Bedphones – The Headphones Designed for Sleep. To find out more about Andrew, visit his About.Me.