Mario Sundar’s Top of Mind

How many times have you made your new year resolutions to track your eating habits with a food journal and then given up after a week (or two). I started tracking my diet with a slew of iphone apps and then given up.

But, looks like the new Daily Burn Food Scanner (iphone app) will help many a food tracker by making that process so much easier. Here's what it does (via Tim Ferris' blog):

DailyBurn’s FoodScanner is the first and only application that uses the iPhone’s camera to scan the UPC codes of foods and link them with full nutritional information (calories, macronutrients, etc.).

I just tried the app after dinner and it works like a charm. Speaking of automating the process of tracking our habits, this week also sees the release of Fitbit (which tracks our fitness and sleep patterns). TechCrunch has more details:

So what does Fitbit do? The sleek little device clips onto your clothing and tracks your movement, sleep and calorie burn throughout the day and night. Fitbit, which costs $99, uses the information it gathers about your movement to help you determine how much exercise you’ve been getting and how many calories you’ve burnt. It can also tell you how many steps you have taken and how well you’ve slept, all based on its internal motion detector.

Read more on TC here - http://bit.ly/128qUG

So, now there's no excuse for you to quit tracking your health. And, you may want to add these gadgets to your holiday shopping list.

The guy's like 24 and just released a super-duper-unconventional hip-hop album following his cult mixtape ("A Kid named Cudi").

Having listened to the album non-stop for the past few weeks, I was glad that many of my conclusions about Cudi were true:

1. He's the Obama of Hip-Hop:

The album's not your typical hip-hop release but instead fuses different sounds and (wait for it...) features singing (much like his contributions on Kanye's 808 album - another unconventional hip-hop release).

There’s all different types of music now in this day and age coming up. I’ve seen a lot of things, I’m 25, it’s not like the 70’s when genres were separate and things weren’t being fused together.

With me, my fans are versatile and they’re gonna go pick up Raekwon’s album and probably Jay’s album, and then they’re gonna pick up mine and then if the Killers drop an album they might pick that up too. My fans have an eclectic ear, we like all things and the generation we came up in we have a wide variety of taste.

He belongs to a different generation of hip-hop musician and that can only be good as the genre matures and evolves. Cudi much like his mentor Kanye West ("Jesus Walks", "Hey Mama") are more comfortable talking about universal, mainstream middle class themes like loss of a loved parent, pursuit of happiness, the american dream, etc. than rapping about drugs, sex and misogyny (http://bit.ly/YEQHe)

2. He's a story-teller

His album's not just a bunch of songs thrown together, and I remember telling my friend that "Man on the Moon" is all about how he gets to the Moon (a metaphor for his overnight fame) and the next album's probably what happens now that he's there. Looks like there could be a trilogy in the works:

Well I think that it’s important to have a plan and to not just go in the studio and be like, “oh I’m gonna make these 10 albums!” Sometimes you have to sit back and strategically think out the process. Those are always the good albums; the well thought out joints.

Once End of Day drops it’s the beginning of the tale of the man on the moon and I think people are gonna be lost in it and intrigued by the second and third installment of Man on the Moon. That’s what I’m trying to do, I want people to really get into the story and be with it.

3. He's cool like Johnny Depp:

One of the reasons I think Depp's one of the finest actors of the generation (besides the fact that he's the only one who can work across genres - drama, comedy, musical, etc.) is that he could care less about what you thought about his choices and he intentionally doesn't pander to his fans.

Cudi's likewise.

People need to stop being so judgmental and let me make what I want to make. People say, “he’s making too much of this, too much of that, he’s too pop, this is not this, this is not that.” Exactly. It’s not supposed to be like that or like something you’ve heard, it’s meant to confuse and it’s meant to be out there in its own world and its own space next to nothing.

The day that people stop being critics and just see things for the way they are the world will be a lot happier.

Amen to that. Read the entire article here - http://bit.ly/vj0sw

This is a pretty neat approximation. Take the %s and plug it into Mint.com or any other personal finance budgeting solution you have.

If Cameron Crowe were to direct "Michael Clayton", this is how it'd look. Clooney returns to his sauve avatar with a twist - a Clark Gable for our times. Nice trailer!

He's back!

While many exec interviews may come off as spin, it's refreshing to see El Jobso retain his "reality distortion field" and share some reasons on much debated questions around Apple products launched today. See below (emphasis mine).

Q. You put a camcorder on the iPod Nano. Why not on the iPod Touch?

A. Originally, we weren’t exactly sure how to market the Touch. Was it an iPhone without the phone? Was it a pocket computer? What happened was, what customers told us was, they started to see it as a game machine. Because a lot of the games were free on the store. Customers started to tell us, “You don’t know what you’ve got here — it’s a great game machine, with the multitouch screen, the accelerometer, and so on.”

We started to market it that way, and it just took off. And now what we really see is it’s the lowest-cost way to the App Store, and that’s the big draw. So what we were focused on is just reducing the price to $199. We don’t need to add new stuff — we need to get the price down where everyone can afford it.

Q. Has your opinion of e-readers changed?

A. I’m sure there will always be dedicated devices, and they may have a few advantages in doing just one thing. But I think the general-purpose devices will win the day because I think people just probably aren’t willing to pay for a dedicated device. You notice Amazon never says how much they sell; usually if they sell a lot of something, you want to tell everybody.

We don’t see that it’s a really big market at this point.

I’m not sure that Amazon, as an example, really cares that much about being in the hardware business. [nice!] If I were Amazon, I’d love selling stuff where I didn’t have to have a warehouse, didn’t need UPS.

So glad to see him back; in his elements, raring to go and messing with competitors minds!

Love the concept of "innocent bystanders" turning into dancers - maintains the surprise element.

BTW, this happened almost a week ago.

Looks like European companies are innovating in the augmented reality space. Bummed that this hasn't yet found its way into the iPhone 3GS. Revolutionary tech now just seems evolutionary.

I'm also curious how image recognition technology layered with social networking (Facebook / Twitter) and professional networking (LinkedIn) profiles could change human interactions. That may be far more unreachable at this moment though.

Embedded above is the documentary "Manoj", based on Hari's alter-ego. Hari will be performing at the Purple Onion tonight.

Details (via SFist)

COMEDY: Seattle comedian Hari Kondabolu speaks truth to power with confrontational and personal material, along the same lines as his comedic heroes Lenny Bruce and Richard Pryor, according to the Seattle Times. KayDee Kersten, Chris Garcia, and Dhaya Lakshminarayanan also perform.

6, 8, and 10 p.m. // The Purple Onion (140 Columbus Ave) // $20-40

And, here's Aziz Ansari's hyper-energetic NSFW talkin' alter-ego RAAANDY documentary (Part 1) from the Apatow movie "Funny People" - http://bit.ly/14fDU3

Follow Aziz on Twitter - http://twitter.com/azizansari