(Originally published on May 25, 2010 on Huffington Post)

An interview With Snaptic Founder/CEO Steve Brown

“I wish for everyone to help create a strong sustainable movement to educate every child about food, inspire families to cook again and empower people everywhere to fight obesity”

-Chef Jamie Oliver, TED Prize Wish Talk

This is the story of what happens when you mix Jamie Oliver’s Food Revolution, a TED talk (ideas worth spreading), and two very geeky, health-conscious tech entrepreneurs who want to change the world and have a plan to leverage Android to make it happen.

TED talks surface remarkable stories, and gear to inspire in 18 minutes or less. This past year, Chef Jamie Oliver’s TED Prize Wish talk about his personal attempt at a food revolution and its incredible importance towards saving lives, profoundly impacted Android-focused Snaptic co-founders Steve Brown and Andreas Schobel. In fact it motivated them to invest in developers who can create technology that blends both mobile phones and human motion.

Android’s Reach?

There are 100,000 android activations per day, which suggests Google’s Android phone growth is greater than Apple’s iPhone growth. Last quarter, Apple reported sales of 8.75 million iPhones, which is 97,222 units per day.

Snaptic?

Snaptic is a platform for notetaking and geo-tagging, it currently has 3 million active installations on Android phones.

But, Snaptic, Android, & Jamie Oliver’s Food Revolution?

I asked Steve bluntly, “How are you making sense of Jamie Oliver’s revolution with your technology?”

Steve’s answer was smart and simple:

“When it comes to our health, it’s the little things we do every day that add up to the big issues like chronic disease that Jamie Oliver talks about. While we can be notoriously undisciplined about diet and exercise, the smartphones we carry in our pockets can be very persistent.

Sometimes all it takes is a little nudge, combined with some support and feedback, to get us going in the right direction, and I think smartphones can help deliver that.”

Steve and Andreas decided to take advantage of their reach to the Andriod market and built upon Jamie Oliver’s inspired message, investing in a contest to inspire developers to create “self improvement” apps.

Steve & Andreas

Steve and Andreas have been working in the field of technology and health care for more than 10 years. Steve was formerly the CEO of the Health Hero Network. They share the fundamental belief that traditional health care is dysfunctional, ineffective, and largely out of touch with today’s needs. As a result of their entrepreneurial efforts in the mobile space, they believe that mobile apps can be a major tool in destabilizing traditional health care for social good.

How Mobile Apps Will Destabilize Traditional Healthcare

As Steve explained, self-improvement applications represent a bright future. Getting information into people’s hands, so they know how to manage their health, as it relates to diet and exercise was a just step. Smart phones and mobile apps are game-changers. Self-improvement technology has existed for decades, but it’s come at the cost of expensive home gym equipment and monthly spend on Weight Watchers and other dieting programs.

Counting on Entrepreneurs & Innovators to Save Lives

With the clusterf#$& that is health care reform, today, smart, engaging mobile apps can be developed quickly by teams or individuals, marketed, and in the hands of any interested mobile phone user. These apps don’t have to be as expensive as the popular Fitbit, in fact they can be less expensive than a traditional pedometer, but entirely as, if not more, effective.

What makes mobile apps smart is the ability to engage with an individual’s motion (where are they going, what are they doing), and then monitor and track feedback, and even provide connections to the real world users and community.

The App Store Movement Brings Barriers Down

Apple and Android’s app stores have nimbly circumvented the walls that the carriers (At&T, Verizon, etc.) had long erected, preventing innovation and profit on their platforms. As a result, there are no longer hardware or distribution barriers.

A Contest, Competitors, & a TED Prize

Steve and Andreas decided to take advantage of their reach to the Andriod market, building upon Jamie Oliver’s inspired TED message and launced an incredibly creative contest “Move Your App” with the winner going to TED Global 2010.

The Competitors

There are 246 developers registered for the contest; most are independent Android developers, a few teams, and there are some established Android software companies participating.

The Judges

• Mårten Mickos, CEO of Eucalyptus Former CEO of MySQL
• Juan Enriquez, Excel Venture Management
• Amy Novogratz, TED Prize Director
• Cory Ondrejka, Co-founder of Second Life
• Pam Omidyar, HopeLab
• George Zachary, Charles River Ventures
• Jamis MacNiven, Buck’s of Woodside
• Esther Dyson, Investor, EDventure Holdings
• Neil IzenbergM.D., Founder / CEO, KidsHealth

Bios:

Steve Brown, CEO and co-founder @brown2020
Andreas Schobel, CTO and co-founder @aschobel

Steve Brown is CEO of Snaptic Inc, the leading developer of note-taking and geo-tagging applications for the Android smartphone with nearly 3,000,000 active installs. Snaptic develops a cloud-based personal content management system modeled on the way the brain works, and Snaptic “smart notes” technology has been incorporated into apps from many of the top developers on Android.

As founder and former CEO of Health Hero Network, the health monitoring pioneer acquired by Robert Bosch in 2007, Steve led the development and commercialization of Health Buddy. He currently serves on the board of Agile Sports, the leading video coaching platform used by sports teams. Steve’s innovations have resulted in over 70 US patents and numerous industry awards. He graduated with a BS in Physics from Stanford in 1991.

With thanks to Rebecca Reeve @rsquared

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(Republished from Carsonified’s Think Vitamin)

Beautiful profile illustrations by Kyle Steed

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• Conversation
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All of these exciting interactions have led to an explosion in tech culture camaraderie, which brings me to the story of “Design Swap,” a new experiment dreamed up and piped out by designers Trent Walton, Austin, TX, and Yaron Schoen, NY, NY. Read the rest of this entry »

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(Republished from Carsonified’s Think Vitamin Blog)

photo by Scott Beale / Laughing Squid

”How many of you are happy?” —Ryan Sarver

More than 100,000 registered applications have been built leveraging Twitter’s API, so when Ryan Sarver, director of Twitter’s platform, looks out at a packed house of developers at Chirp it’s a risky question to ask.

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So, really, how many of you are happy? Run Ryan! Run! Read the rest of this entry »

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(Republished from Carsonified’s Think Vitamin)

A fan of irony, an odd news item grabbed my attention, “The University of Wisconsin at Green Bay is swapping Arial for Century Gothic for their email system. It is believed that students will save ink when they print their emails.

Readers politely posted that this is yet another reason to switch to “Garamond” and debate ensued, and then this guy sketched popular fonts on a wall and measured the ink left in the pen!

Web fonts, cheeky controversy, and constant innovation abound online and offline! Candidly speaking, web fonts, became a hell of a lot more interesting over the past year with Typekit’s release. In fact, Typekit has proven itself a web design game-changer both in business and in rendered page.

Matt Hamm recently upgraded to Typekit on his site www.matthamm.com. Discovered via @dribbble on Matts’ page

Read the rest of this entry »

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(Republished from Carsonified’s Think Vitamin Blog)

Author Note: Spencer Fry has offered up 5 Carbonmade “Whoo!” Accounts. To be entered to win one, follow instructions at the bottom of this article.

Back in 2009, around the time when the global economy broke, a lot of creatives found themselves out of work. It became increasingly important to have a strong online presence, even if the medium was more of an offline commodity (sculpture, painting, illustration, poster design, etc.).

A well-designed and much under-the-radar portfolio app, Carbonmade, experienced a surge of growth as a result of these conditions and the creative collaboration and vision of the three co-founders: Spencer Fry, Dave Gorum, and Jason Nelson. Read the rest of this entry »

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