food

Bluerun Ventures, an investment firm best known for its early stake in PayPal and now focused on backing new mobile companies, is the lead investor in a $3 million Series A funding round for Foodspotting, an iPhone and Android app that hopes to be "like a Pandora for food" according to its CEO and co-founder Alexa Andrzejewski.

The rest of the funding round, which was announced Monday, consists of contributions from existing angel investors (the company raised a $750,000 round last summer). Foodspotting, a location-based application that lets users contribute photos of what they're eating at … Read more

If you like Yelp, but you're after much more granular information on food and drink, then Spork is just what what you need to fulfill your craving. This iPhone app (and its companion Web site) lets you simply enter a food or drink item and then populates a list of options nearby, many of them with ratings and comments by other Spork users to help you determine which restaurant has the best al pastor taco or cupcake (for example). You can also rate and recommend dishes yourself as well as add them to a "to do" list, … Read more

McDonald's has disclosed that one of its customer databases was hacked but insists that no financial information was stolen in the breach.

The fast food chain reported yesterday that the hacker was able to grab e-mail addresses, mailing addresses, phone numbers, birthdates, and other customer information of people who signed up online for special promotions. In a statement e-mailed to CNET, the company said that no credit card numbers, Social Security numbers, or other sensitive financial data were compromised.

McDonald's said it was informed of the breach by one of its business partners, Arc Worldwide, which had collected … Read more

I have a weird love/hate relationship with Yelp. On the one hand, when I'm traveling, it helps me find a good burger joint or girls-who-love-balding-nerds fetish club. But some users can be unfair, rating a good restaurant just one star because another diner brought along a crying baby.

I, however, usually just want to know how good the food is, and that's where an ambitious new iPhone app called Chewsy comes in.

Launching today, Chewsy is something of a micro-Yelp. Chewsy lets users rate food. And not just in general terms. What makes Chewsy awesome is that it lets diners rate individual menu items.

The app asks the question, "What's good here?" But it also answers it by presenting dish reviews from other users. Menu items can be ranked from highest rated to lowest rated at a restaurant, give a rating and review for each individual dish, and show you the highest-rated items within a certain distance.

Like everything else coming to the iPhone these days, it has some game elements. There are achievements that can be unlocked by doing certain things, like trying five different burgers a week, or eating in three different cities in a month. The beta doesn't say what unlocks them, but it should be interesting. … Read more

The big Apple iPhone news this week involved a new app approved in the iTunes App Store called Skyfire Web Browser (link will open iTunes). This new Web browser's claim to fame is that it can display Flash content by using an interesting workaround. The browser sends Flash content to its own server, converts it to HTML5, then streams the content back to your iPhone. Jessica Dolcourt wrote about Skyfire's shaky launch here.

Apparently, within 5 hours, Skyfire's servers were overloaded (imagine that!) as people swarmed to a new way to view Flash on the iPhone. To be honest, I haven't run into many problems with not having Flash, but I definitely hope that Apple and Adobe or someone can come to an agreement so any smartphone user can get ALL the Web content available.

As of right now, Skyfire is still available at the iTunes App Store, but I have to wonder how it could not know there would be an onslaught of traffic and prepare accordingly. It also makes me wonder if it's really worth the trouble.

What do you think? Are you content waiting for developers to convert everything to HTML5 (if that's even possible)? Should Apple just throw caution to the wind and make it so Flash works (and open the platform to those alleged dangers)? Let me know in the comments!

This week, get cooking with chefs from the Food Network and play a fun arcade baseball game.… Read more

It takes time to find your way about the kitchen. We start off at a young age making peanut-butter-and-jelly sandwiches and then progress from there. Before you know it, we graduate to mac and cheese and then with this introduction to the stovetop, the world becomes the limit. Riding tandem to this development is a constantly growing knowledge of kitchen equipment. As we learn what we can do, we learn what our gear can (and cannot) do. When it comes to food processors, it doesn't take long to figure out that the big bowl is sometimes just too big.… Read more

Some kitchen appliances tend to get used quite frequently, whereas others are destined for the back of the cupboard. It's no secret what makes for a popular kitchen gadget: versatility and convenience. When it comes to these factors, few pieces of gear provide more benefit than a food processor does.

The VillaWare Food Processor supplies 500 watts of power and offers a range of attachments for ease of use and the ability to tackle most any chopping, slicing or cutting task. The 12-cup work bowl provides ample room and is easily fitted with one of the three slicing discs … Read more

Yesterday I celebrated my birthday with way too much pizza and cake. Much as I enjoyed myself, the bulging belly I'm staring at today is a reminder that it's time to drop a few pounds.

I know from past experience that apps can make this a whole lot easier. After all, weight loss is nothing more than math: you just need to burn more calories than you consume. And apps take the guesswork out of it by tracking your caloric intake, deducting calories burned during exercise, and so on.

I've rounded up four winners. Take a look:… Read more

And just like that, we have an update to a device that could change how we live--or at least how we shop at the local Safeway.

Meet the SmartShopper 301, a grocery list organizer you talk to. When you're out of a certain much-needed item, like, say, whiskey, you walk over to the small, wall-mounted device and tell it, "Hey, you, wall-mounted list taker, listen up! I'm out of whiskey again!" It then automatically adds "whiskey" to your grocery list.

The battery-operated SmartShopper supports multiple listings of each object. For example, my list would … Read more