Liz Gannes

Recent Posts by Liz Gannes

Dieting App MyFitnessPal Aims for Global Growth

MyFitnessPal just raised $18 million. What’s the first plan of business? Go international.

MyFitnessPal in Danish and Russian

Along with a design refresh, the maker of the popular health-tracking dieting service has now localized its iOS and Android apps and message boards in six languages: Swedish, Danish, Norwegian, Dutch, Russian and Italian.

Fewer than 10 percent of MyFitnessPal’s 40 million registered users hail from outside its core countries: the U.S., the U.K., Australia and Canada. And that makes sense; all four are English speaking.

The app’s value comes, in large part, from its database of 3 million food items, many of which are added by its own users. Dieters search MyFitnessPal’s database in order to record their daily caloric intakes. Extending that function to six new countries was hardly an easy matter.

As MyFitnessPal’s international operations head Jakob Nordenhof Jønck described the challenge, it wasn’t always straightforward to translate food terms, and different countries use different units of measure and different food labeling systems.

“You can’t really build the food database artificially,” Jønck said. “We want to have organic growth internationally, just as we did in the U.S.”

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Another gadget you don’t really need. Will not work once you get it home. New model out in 4 weeks. Battery life is too short to be of any use.

— From the fact sheet for a fake product entitled Useless Plasticbox 1.2 (an actual empty plastic box) placed in L.A.-area Best Buy stores by an artist called Plastic Jesus