User:Better Calorie/sandbox

Bon'App, Inc. is a social enterprise in Cambridge, MA founded by Laurent Adamowicz, a 2011 Senior Fellow of the Advanced Leadership Initiative at Harvard University. The mission of Bon'App is to empower communities to achieve healthier lifestyles through personalized nutrition guidance. Bon'App is an open platform that includes applications for Apple mobile devices, Android phones, and a website. The application is a calorie counter that tells users what's in their food with a simple language of calories, sugar, salt, and "bad fat" (the sum of saturated fat and trans fat).

History
Bon'App, Inc. is a mission-driven C corporation that was incorporated in Delaware on May 15, 2010. Bon'App, the trademark, was filed with the United States Patent and Trademark Office (USPTO) on May 15, 2010, published on June 14, 2011, and registered on November 29, 2011. Bon'App is an internationally protected trademark.

The concept of Bon'App emerged in 2009 when Laurent Adamowicz, a serial entrepreneur and former food industry executive, dreamed of a "food-sniffing phone" while writing a thesis on the socio-cultural anthropology of food at Columbia University in the City of New York. The app's first release came out as a pilot at the end of October 2011. The 5th release of the beta version on iTunes came out in March of 2012.

The Company
A for-profit social enterprise, Bon'App, Inc. has grown to a team of full-time and part-time employees and approximately 60 students from MIT, Boston University, and Harvard University working as Data Input Associates to gather restaurant menu data for Bon'App's proprietary database of food items and ingredients. The team moved to the Harvard Innovation Lab on the Harvard Business School campus in September 2011.

The Bon'App board of advisors includes:
 * Rosabeth Moss Kanter, the Ernest L. Arbuckle Professor of Business Administration at Harvard Business School, Chair and Director of the Advanced Leadership Initiative of Harvard University.
 * Dr. George L. Blackburn, the S. Daniel Abraham Associate Professor of Nutrition and Associate Director of the Division of Nutrition at Harvard Medical School; Chief of the Nutritional/Metabolism Laboratory, Director of the Center for the Study of Nutrition Medicine at the Beth Israel Deaconess Medical Center.
 * Barry Bloom, Harvard University Distinguished Service Professor and the Joan L. and Julius H. Jacobson Professor of Public Health; former Dean of the Harvard School of Public Health.
 * Frank Moss, former Director, MIT Media Lab; Professor of the Practice of Media Arts and Sciences; the Jerome B. Wiesner Professor of Media Technology.
 * Ted A. Mayer, former Assistant Vice President of Harvard University Hospitality and Dining Services.
 * Daniel Isenberg, Professor of Management Practice at Babson Global, Director of Babson Entrepreneurship Ecosystem Project (BEEP).

Product
Boston Innovation says, "Bon'App is a free app for the iPhone [and Android] that will tell you in plain language what your food contains and how healthy it is for you, based on your own food preferences, food allergies, and dietary goals." The app is voice-activated, which makes it easy to enter the food you are eating by simply saying “banana” and choosing from the list of results to log the banana into your food journal. The Bon'App database of over 140,000 food items and over 105,000 U.S. restaurant locations makes it easy to find almost any food.

The main function of the app is to identify what's in the food in terms of calories and key nutrients.

Bon'App achieves this through the concept of a battery to show food's impact on a user's daily goal of nutrients. Batteries for Calories, Sugar, Salt, and "Bad Fat" (the sum of saturated fat and trans fat) deplete as users enter food to indicate they are nearing their personal daily limits as recommended by the USDA. Each day, these batteries start green at 100%, turn yellow as users consume during the day, and then red to warn them that they are approaching their daily limits. Going over a daily limit causes the batteries to turn gray and then black, depending on the amount of excess.

Mobile app users can search for restaurant items by either the user's current location (through the embedded GPS of the phone) or by entering a zip code or street address and viewing a customizable radius. Results are displayed in both a list and an interactive map. Bon’App also allows users to perform a multi-profile search with other Bon'App users through the "Dine with Friends" function. The results are derived from a combination of the health profiles of all the users who want to eat together.

An Open Platform The application allows a user to designate a health practitioner (doctor, dietitian,nutritionist, or health coach) and receive health profile goals in real-time from his or her health provider. For privacy, the mobile application uses a secure Internet connection to send and receive messages. Bon'App also records past consumption in the form of a food diary or journal that can be accessed by both user and user-designated health practitioner.

Software Architecture Bon'App employs open source license code as the coding base. To support the launch of the Bon'App platform beta pilot, the initial software programming was subcontracted in an effort to establish a base version of the application. For the Apple platform, the speech-recognition feature uses Dragon Mobile SDK, licensed by Nuance Communications.