Homeland Security has said it has “no reason to doubt” statements by Apple, Amazon and Supermicro denying allegations made in a Bloomberg report published earlier this week.

It’s the first statement so far from the U.S. government on the report, casting doubt on the findings. Homeland Security’s statement echos near-identical comments from the U.K.’s National Cyber Security Center.

Bloomberg said, citing more than a dozen sources, that China installed tiny chips on motherboards built by Supermicro, which companies across the U.S. tech industry — including Amazon and Apple — have used to power servers in their datacenters. The chip can reportedly compromise data on the server, allowing China to spy on some of the world’s most wealthy and powerful companies.

Apple, Amazon and Supermicro later published statements on their websites. Bloomberg said it’s sticking by its story. And yet, this latest twist isn’t likely to leave anyone less confused, days after the story was first published.

Homeland Security protects the nation’s cyber defenses from both domestic and foreign threats. It’s rare for the government to issue a statement on an apparent threat which, according to Bloomberg, is a classified matter that’s been under federal investigation for three years.

The reality is that days after this story broke, it seems many of the smartest, technically minded, rational cybersecurity experts still don’t know who to believe — Bloomberg, or everyone else.

And until someone gets their hands on these apparent chips, don’t expect that to change any time soon.

Source: Tech Crunch

If investors at some of the biggest technology companies are right, the next big restaurant chain could have no kitchens of its own.

These venture capitalists think the same forces that have transformed transportation, media, retail and logistics will also work their way through prepared food businesses.

Investors are pouring millions into the creation of a network of shared kitchens, storage facilities, and pickup counters that established chains and new food entrepreneurs can access to cut down on overhead and quickly spin up new concepts in fast food and casual dining.

Powering all of this is a food delivery market that could grow from $35 billion to a $365 billion industry by 2030, according to a report from UBS’s research group, the “Evidence Lab”.

“We’ve had conversations with the biggest and fastest growing restaurant brands in the country and even some of the casual brands,” said Jim Collins, a serial entrepreneur, restauranteur, and the chief executive of the food-service startup, Kitchen United. “In every board room for every major restaurant brand in the country… the number one conversation surrounds the topic of how are we going to address [off-premise diners].”

Collins’ company just raised $10 million in a funding round led by GV, the investment arm of Google parent company, Alphabet. But Alphabet’s investment team is far from the only group investing in the restaurant infrastructure as a service business.

Perhaps the best capitalized company focusing on distributed kitchens is CloudKitchens, one of two subsidiaries owned by the holding company City Storage Solutions.

Cloud Kitchens and its sister company Cloud Retail are the two arms of the new venture from Uber co-founder and former chief executive, Travis Kalanick, which was formed with a $150 million investment.

As we reported at the time, Travis announced that he would be starting a new fund with the riches he made from Uber shares sold in its most recent major secondary round. Kalanick said his 10100, or “ten one hundred”, fund would be geared toward “large-scale job creation,” with investments in real estate, e-commerce, and “emerging innovation in India and China.”

If anyone is aware of the massive market potential for leveraging on-demand services, it’s Kalanick. Especially since he was one of the architects of the infrastructure that has made it possible.

Other deep pocketed companies have also stepped into the fray. Late last year Acre Venture Partners, the investment arm formed by The Campbell Soup Co., participated in a $13 million investment for Pilotworks, another distributed kitchen operator based in Brooklyn.

Meanwhile, Kitchen United has been busy putting together a deep bench of executive talent culled from some of the largest and most successful American fast food restaurant chains.

Former Taco Bell Chief Development Officer, Meredith Sandland, joined the company earlier this year as its chief operating officer, while former McDonald’s executive Atul Sood, who oversaw the burger giant’s relationship with online delivery services, has come aboard as Kitchen United’s Chief Business Officer.

The millions of dollars spicing up this new business model investors are serving up could be considered the second iteration of a food startup wave.

An earlier generation of prepared food startups crashed and burned while trying to spin up just this type of vision with investments in their own infrastructure. New York celebrity chef David Chang, the owner and creator of the city’s famous Momofuku restaurants (and Milk Bar, and Ma Peche), was an investor in Maple, a new delivery-only food startup that raised $25 million before it was shut down and its technology was absorbed into the European, delivery service, Deliveroo.

Ando, which Chang founded, was another attempt at creating a business with a single storefront for takeout and a massive reliance on delivery services to do the heavy lifting of entering new neighborhoods and markets. That company wound up getting acquired by UberEats after raising $7 million in venture funding.

Those losses are slight compared to the woes of investors in companies like Munchery, ($125.4 million) Sprig, ($56.7 million) and SpoonRocket ($13 million). Sprig and Spoonrocket are now defunct, and Munchery had to pull back from markets in Los Angeles, New York, and Seattle as it fights for survival. The company also reportedly was looking at recapitalizing earlier in the year at a greatly reduced valuation.

What gives companies like Kitchen United, Pilotworks and Cloud Kitchens hope is that they’re not required to actually create the next big successful concept in fast food or casual dining. They just have to enable it.

Kitchen United just opened a 12,000 square foot facility in Pasadena for just that purpose — and has plans to open more locations in West Los Angeles; Jersey City, N.J.; Atlanta; Columbus, Ohio; Phoenix; Seattle and Denver. Its competitor, Pilotworks, already has operations in Brooklyn, Chicago, Dallas, and Providence, R.I.

While the two companies have similar visions, they’re currently pursuing different initial customers. Pilotworks has pitched itself as a recipe for success for new food entrepreneurs. Kitchen United, by comparison is giving successful local, regional, and national brands a way to expand their footprint without investing in real estate.

“One of the directions that the company was thinking of going was toward the restaurant industry and the second was in the food service entrepreneurial sector,” said Collins. “Would it be a company that served restaurants with their expansions? Now, we’re in deep discussions with all kinds of restaurants.”

Smaller national fast food chains like Shake Shack, or fast casual chains like Dennys and Shoney’s could be customers, said Collins. So could local companies that are trying to expand their regional footprint. Los Angeles’ famous Canter’s Deli is a Kitchen United customer (and an early adopter of a number of new restaurant innovations) and so is The Lost Cuban Kitchen, an Iowa-based Cuban restaurant that’s expanding to Los Angeles.

Kitchen United is looking to create kitchen centers that can house between 10-20 restaurants in converted warehouses, big box retail and light industrial locations.

Using demographic data and “demand mapping” for specific cuisines, Kitchen United said that it can provide optimal locations and site the right restaurant to meet consumer demand. The company is also pitching labor management, menu management and delivery tools to help streamline the process of getting a new location up and running.

“In all of the facilities, all of the restaurants have their own four-walled space,” says Collins. “There’s shared infrastructure outside of that.”

Some of that infrastructure is taking food deliveries and an ability to serve as a central hub for local supplier, according to Collins. “One of the things that we’re going to be launching relatively soon here in Pasadena, is actually in-service days where local supplier and purveyors can come in and meet with seven restaurants at once.”

It’s also possible that restaurants in the Kitchen United spaces could take advantage of restaurant technologies being developed by one of the startup’s sister companies through Cali Group, a holding company for a number of different e-sports, retail, and food technology startups.

The Pasadena-based kitchen company was founded by Harry Tsao, an investor in food technology (and a part owner of the Golden State Warriors and the Los Angeles Football Club) through his fund Avista Investments; and John Miller, a serial entrepreneur who founded the Cali Group.

In fact, Kitchen United operates as a Cali Group portfolio company alongside Miso Robotics, the developer of the burger flipping robot, Flippy; Caliburger, an In-n-Out clone first developed by Miller in Shanghai and brought back to the U.S.; and FunWall, a display technology for online gaming in retail settings.

“Kitchen United’s data-driven approach to flexible kitchen spaces unlocks critical value for national, regional, and local restaurant chains looking to expand into new markets,” said Adam Ghobarah, general partner at GV, and a new director on the Kitchen United board. “The founding team’s experience in scaling — in addition to diverse exposure to national chains, regional brands, regional franchises, and small upstart eateries — puts Kitchen United in a strong position to accelerate food innovation.”

GV’s Ghobarah actually sees the investment of a piece with other bets that Alphabet’s venture capital arm has made around the food industry.

The firm is a backer of the fully automated hamburger preparation company, Creator, which has raised roughly $28 million to develop its hamburger making robot (if Securities and Exchange Commission filings can be believed). And it has backed the containerized farming startup, Bowery Farming, with a $20 million investment.

Ghobarah sees an entirely new food distribution ecosystem built up around facilities where Bowery’s farms are colocated with Kitchen United’s restaurants to reduce logistical hurdles and create new hubs.

“As urban farming like Bowery scales up… that becomes more and more realistic,” Ghobarah said. “The other thing that really stands out when you have flexible locations … all of the thousands of people who want to own a restaurant now have access. It’s not really all regional chains and national chains… With a satellite location like this… [a restaurant]… can break even at one third of the order volume.”

 

Source: Tech Crunch

In what might be the most ridiculous stunt ever pulled in the art world, a Banksy piece has, in a sense, self-destructed. Right in front of an audience of would-be buyers.

A framed canvas version of Banksy’s Girl with Balloon was set to be auctioned at Sothebys in London. As the auction came to a close with a final bid of £860,000 (a little over $1.1 million), the print’s frame began… beeping. Then, whirring. Seconds later, the canvas slid through the bottom of the frame, now almost entirely shredded.

The anonymous artist has long expressed a dislike of art galleries reselling their works, down to creating a piece featuring an audience of bidders battling over a print that reads, simply, “I can’t believe you morons actually buy this shit”. This seems to be Banksy’s latest way of expressing their discontent.

Of course, it’s easy to argue that the whole thing makes the piece even more desirable, because, well… art. If people with mountains of cash are buying art to have a ridiculously rare conversation piece that they hope others recognize, this one just rocketed up the list. It’s now that piece. Or technically those pieces, I guess.

Curiously, the canvas didn’t make it all the way through the shredder — did it jam, or was that intentional? By leaving about 1/3 of the print in the frame, the shredded bits are left attached and dangling… thus preventing them from splitting the pile of shreds into 50 more auctions with everyone vying for a slice.

So how did it all work? Writer Zoe Smith shared a video on Twitter this morning that she notes appeared briefly on Banksy’s Instagram before being pulled down (Update: it’s now back up! See below). It shows what looks to be the inside of the frame (which, in hindsight, seems comically large), shredder and all:

Update — here’s the video, as reposted by Banksy:

In the same video, it’s claimed that this was all put in process “a few years ago”. It appears that the “shredder” is a series of X-acto style blades which the canvas was raked over.

Meanwhile, a news post on Artsy suggests that the shred could’ve been triggered by someone in the audience with “a device in his hand”.

But what about power? In a video of the piece being removed post-shreddage, there doesn’t seem to be any wires behind the frame, nor anything plugged in. The piece itself is detailed as having been given to its previous owner by Banksy in 2006. Both the speakers in the frame and the motors of the shredder would require a power source. Keeping a battery ready and waiting for 12 years seems… unlikely.

The Sotheby’s listing for the piece notes that it was “Authenticated by Pest Control”. Pest Control is Banksy’s “handling service”, which will go out to verify supposed Banksy pieces to try to make sure no one drops a pile of cash on a one-of-a-kind Borksy. Perhaps part of the verification process involved double checking everything within the frame.

Some folks on Twitter, meanwhile, theorize that the original print could still be hidden within the frame, with what emerged having been shredded and rolled up in the frame long ago. That video Banksy posted showing the blades within the frame makes that seem unlikely… but could it be pranks all the way down?

Banksy posted a too-perfect still of the shred in process, with the caption “Going, going, gone…”

(Top image left via Sothebys; Top image right via Banksy on Instagram)

Update: There are conflicting reports of the final bid. Some say £953,829 (around $1.25 million), others £860,000 (around $1.1 million). Banksy’s video above indicates that it was at £860,000 when the hammer dropped, so we’ve updated the post and headline accordingly. The final exact amount will vary due to auction house fees.

Source: Tech Crunch

A few day after making the latest version of Windows 10 available to users, Microsoft has suspended the update, citing multiple reports of user data loss.

“We have paused the rollout of the Windows 10 October 2018 Update (version 1809) for all users as we investigate isolated reports of users missing some files after updating,” the company writes on its support site.

The company opened up the latest version of the desktop/laptop operating system as part of its big Surface event earlier this week. While it hasn’t officially started pushing the update, some users who’ve downloaded the OS refresh have begun reporting the deletion of documents, photos and other info on a variety of different forums.

The company appears to still be investigating precisely what’s going on here — and how widespread the issue is. Plans to begin pushing it to users early next week are likely delayed until the company gets to the root of the issue. Meantime, if you were planning to install the update, it’s probably best to just wait this one out. 

Source: Tech Crunch

Editor’s note: This post was done in partnership with Wirecutter. When readers choose to buy Wirecutter’s independently chosen editorial picks, Wirecutter and TechCrunch may earn affiliate commissions.

The best apps and online services are helpful tools that seamlessly integrate into everyday life. We’ve gathered some of our recommendations that can help with tracking your work, improving on sleep, and taking a mental break.

Budgeting 

We researched nearly 50 options and tested six in order to conclude that  You Need a Budget (YNAB) is the only budgeting app worth spending money on. It’s easy to set up, walks you through budgeting and saving, and can sync with your credit cards and banks.

You’ll be able to view month-to-month spending trends and get concise feedback that actually helps with sticking to your various budgets. We like that YNAB’s financial guidance delves deep and that it outlines a zero-sum budgeting model which leaves money allocation specifics up to you.

 

Time-Tracking and Invoicing

If you freelance or run a small business, Harvest is a helpful time-tracking tool that can also manage projects and create and send simplified invoices. It has an intuitive interface, and integrates with apps like Basecamp and Google Drive. Through interactive reports, you’ll be able to get a better sense of how your time and resources are being spent and you’ll be able to do so while working in other project management apps. Whenever you begin or continue work on a project, you can record expenses and track time on the Web or on the Harvest mobile app.

Harvest also allows you to monitor time-tracking records of team members and generate invoices through Stripe, the Web, PayPal or PDF. For another time-tracking service that’s just as easy to set up and accommodates more clients, we recommend FreshBooks. Its invoices are more customizable and can be sent through more payment services.

Sleep-Tracking App

SleepScore is an effective and intuitive sleep-tracking app that offers detailed recommendations on how to improve sleep. It’s the only sleep-tracking app that we tested that can help outlining and conquering sleep goals. It has a smart alarm which can be set to wake you up at any prefered interval and it gathers sleep-stage data that’s far more thorough than most competitors.

Its free version will track your sleep for seven days and provide general sleep advice. We think its paid tier is worth the investment, especially if you can benefit from tracking your sleep data long-term, and from following tips for improvement. We like that its sleep trends analysis is easy to understand and navigating setup and settings is a breeze.

Meditation App

For people who are on the go and could use a bit of help focusing or relaxing, we recommend Headspace (iOS and Android). It offers a broad variety of meditations and the most useful and best guided sessions for beginners. You can search meditations by topic, organized them in packs, and adjust the duration of a session.

With segments between three and 20 minutes, you can take advantage of structured courses—which are similar to in-person classes—or do short meditations when all you need is a few minutes of quiet time. Its design and interface are inviting and its library of courses are outlined in a way that helps beginners learn and progress beyond the basics. Headspace also offers advanced session levels and overall the best educational curriculum of any meditation app we tested.

Online Therapy Service

Amwell is the best online therapy service for those who want a therapist but have run into challenges finding one or making appointments. It’s secure and accredited by the American Telemedicine Association which ensures that your sessions are private and that your information is safe—if you’d like to, you can even opt out of showing your face during a video session. With about 600 therapists, you have a better shot at finding one to fit specific needs, and many more therapists to choose from compared to competitor platforms.

Amwell accepts insurance, but if you have to pay out-of-pocket, you can rest well in knowing that the service’s costs align with the top competition. Aside from therapists, there are also doctors and specialists on the platform who your therapist can refer you to. We like the overall video experience which feels like a traditional in-person session, and the prerecordings that walk you through the process before it starts.

These picks may have been updated by Wirecutter. When readers choose to buy Wirecutter’s independently chosen editorial picks, Wirecutter and TechCrunch may earn affiliate commissions.

Source: Tech Crunch

On Tuesday, Tencent Music Entertainment filed for an IPO in the US that is expected to value it in the $25-30 billion range, on par with Spotify’s IPO in April. The filing highlights just how different its social interaction and digital goods business is from the subscription models of leading music streaming services in Western countries.

That divergence suggests an opportunity for Spotify or one of its rivals to gain a competitive advantage.

Tencent Music is no small player: As the music arm of Chinese digital media giant Tencent, its four apps have several hundred million monthly active users, $1.3 billion in revenue for the first half of 2018, and roughly 75 percent market share in China’s rapidly growing music streaming market. Unlike Spotify and Apple Music, however, almost none of its users pay for the service, and those who do are mostly not paying in the form of a streaming subscription.

Its SEC filing shows that 70 percent of revenue is from the 4.2 percent of its overall users who pay to give virtual gifts to other users (and music stars) who sing karaoke or live stream a concert and/or who paid for access to premium tools for karaoke; the other 30 percent is the combination of streaming subscriptions, music downloads, and ad revenue.

At its heart, Tencent Music is an interactive media company. Its business isn’t merely providing music, it’s getting people to engage around music. Given its parent company Tencent has become the leading force in global gaming—with control of League of Legends maker Riot Games and Clash of Clans maker Supercell, plus a 40 percent stake in Fortnite creator Epic Games, and role as the top mobile games publisher in China—its team is well-versed in the dynamics of in-game purchasing.

At first glance, the fact that Tencent Music has a lower subscriber rate than its Western rivals (3.6 percent of users paying for a subscription or digital downloads vs. 46 percent paying for a premium subscription on Spotify) is shocking given it has the key ingredient they each crave: exclusive content. Whereas subscription video streaming services like Netflix, Hulu, and Amazon Prime Video have anchored themselves in exclusive ownership of must-see shows in order to attract subscribers, the music streaming platforms suffer from commodity content. Spotify, Apple Music, Amazon Music, YouTube Music, Pandora, iHeartRadio, Deezer… they all have the same core library of music licensed from the major labels. There’s no reason for any consumer to pay for more than one music streaming subscription in the way they do for video streaming services.

In China, however, Tencent Music has exclusive rights to the most popular Western music from the major labels. The natural strategy to leverage this asset would be to charge a subscription to access it. But the reality is that piracy is still enough of a challenge in China that access to that music isn’t truly “exclusive.” Plus while incomes are rising, there’s extraordinary variance in what price point the population can afford for a music subscription. As a result, Tencent Music can’t rely on a subscription for exclusive content; it sublicenses that content to other Chinese music services as an additional revenue stream instead.

“Online music services in China have experienced intense competition with limited ability to differentiate by content due to the widespread piracy.” Tencent Music, SEC Form F-1

This puts it in a position like that of the Western music streaming services—fighting to differentiate and build a moat against competitors—but unlike them it has successfully done so. By integrating live streams and social functionality as core to the user experience, it’s gaining exclusive content in another form (user-generated content) and the network effects of a social media platform.

Some elements of this are distinct to Tencent’s core market—the broader popularity of karaoke, for instance—but the strategy of gaining competitive advantage through interactive and live content is one Spotify and its rivals would be wise to pursue more aggressively. It is unlikely that the major record labels will agree to any meaningful degree of exclusivity for one of the big streaming services here, and so these platforms need to make unique experiences core to their offering.

Online social activities like singing with friends or singing a karaoke duet with a favorite musician do in fact have a solid base of participants around the world: San Francisco-based startup Smule (backed by Shasta Ventures and Tencent itself) has 50 million monthly active users on its apps for that very purpose. There is a large minority of people who care a lot about singing songs as a social experience, both with friends and strangers.

Spotify and Apple Music have experimented with video, messaging, and social streams (of what friends are listening to). But these have been bonus features and none of them were so integrated into the core product offering as to create serious switching costs that would stop a user from jumping to the other.

The ability to give tips or buy digital goods makes it easier to monetize a platform’s most engaged and enthusiastic users. This is the business model of the mobile gaming sector: A minority percentage of users get emotionally invested enough to pay real money for digital goods that enhance their experience, currency to tip other members of the community, or access to additional gameplay.

As the leading music platform, it is surprising that Spotify hasn’t created a pathway for superfans of music to engage deeper with artists or each other. Spotify makes referrals to buy concert tickets or merchandise —a very traditional sense of what the music fan wants—but hasn’t deepened the online music experience for the segment of its user base that would happily pay more for music-related experiences online (whether in the form of tipping, digital goods, special digital access to live shows, etc.) or for deeper exposure to the process (and people) behind their favorite songs.

Tencent Music has an advantage in creating social music experiences because it is part of the same company that owns the country’s leading social apps and is integrated into them. It has been able to build off the social graph of WeChat and QQ rather than building a siloed social network for music. Even Spotify’s main corporate rivals, Apple Music and Amazon Music, aren’t attached to leading social platforms. (Another competitor, YouTube Music, is tied to YouTube but the video service’s social features are secondary aspects of the product compared to the primary role of social interaction on Facebook, Instagram, and WhatsApp).

Spotify could build out more interactive products itself or could buy social-music startups like Smule, but Tencent Music’s success also suggests the benefits of a deal that’s sometimes speculated about by VCs and music industry observers: a Facebook acquisition of Spotify. As one, the leading social media company and the leading music streaming company could build out more valuable video live streaming, group music sharing, karaoke, and other social interactions around music that tap Facebook’s 2 billion users to use Spotify as their default streaming service and lock existing Spotify subscribers into the service that integrates with their go-to social apps.

Deeper social functionality doesn’t seem to be the path Spotify is prioritizing, though. It has removed several social features over the years and is anchoring itself in professional content distribution (rather than user-generated content creation), becoming the new pipes for professional musicians to put their songs out to the world (and likely aiming to disrupt the role of labels and publishers more than they will publicly admit). To that point, the company’s acquisitions—of startups like Loudr, Mediachain, and Soundtrap—have focused on content analytics, content recommendation, royalty tracking, and tools for professional creators.

This is the same race its more deep-pocketed competitors are running, however, and it doesn’t lock consumers into the platform like the network effects of a social app or the exclusivity of a mobile game do. It recently began opening its platform for musicians to add their songs directly—something Tencent Music has allowed for years—but this seems less like a move to a YouTube or SoundCloud-style user-generated content platform and more like a chess move in the game of eventually displacing labels. Ultimately, though, building out more social interaction around music will be critical to it in escaping the race with Apple Music and the rest by achieving more defensibility.

Source: Tech Crunch

For a lot of consumers, Pokemon Go wasn’t their first exposure to augmented reality, it was the dog selfie lens inside Snapchat.

In the past few years, consumer use hasn’t evolved too heavily when it comes to what people are actually using AR for even though technical capabilities have taken some giant leaps. Snap was an early leader but now the industry is much more crowded with Apple, Google, Facebook and others all staffing up extensive teams focused on smartphone-based AR capabilities.

At our one-day TC Sessions: AR/VR event in LA on October 18, we’ll be chatting with Eitan Pilipski, the VP of Snap’s Camera Platform, a role that would seem to be pretty central to the long-term vision of a company that has long referred to itself as “a camera company.”

Snap has been throwing some updates to their developer tools as of late especially for their Lens Studio product which gives developers access to tools to create AR masks and experiences. There’s a lot of room to grow, and it will be interesting to see how much depth Snap can pull from these short experiences and whether it sees “lenses” evolving to bring users more straight-forward utility in the near-term.

The company hasn’t had the easiest bout as a public company lately, but it’s clear that it sees computer vision and augmented reality as key parts of the larger vision it hopes to achieve. At our LA event we’ll look to dive deeper into how they’re approaching these technologies and what it can bring consumers beyond a little added enjoyment.

As a special offer to TechCrunch readers, save 35% on $149 General Admission tickets when you use this link or code TCFAN. Student tickets are just $45 and can be booked here.

Source: Tech Crunch

Reelgood, a startup aimed at helping cord cutters find their next binge, is out today with its biggest update yet. The company has been developing its streaming guide over the past year to solve the issues around discovery that exist when consumers drop traditional pay TV in favor of streaming services like Netflix, Hulu, HBO, Prime Video, and others.

The company first launched as a website in the summer of 2017 before expanding to mobile last fall. During that time, it’s grown to over a million monthly active users who now check in with Reelgood to find something new to watch.

With today’s update to its iOS app, Reelgood is adding a number of features, including personalized recommendations, curated selections, alerts for shows and movies you’re tracking, advanced search and filtering, and the ability to track content over 50 more streaming services, among other things.

As discovery is Reelgood’s focus, the updated app now offers two new types of recommendations.

One is Reelgood’s own take on “Because You Watched” – a type of viewing suggestion you’ll find today on individual services, like Netflix. But those are more limited because they’ll only suggest other shows or movies they offer themselves. Reelgood’s recommendations will instead span all the services you have access to, offering a more universal set of suggestions.

This feature is tied to Reelgood’s watch history, where you track which shows and movies you’ve seen. That means you have to use Reelgood as your tracking app as well, in order for this feature to work.

The app’s other new way of offering recommendations is less personalized – in fact, it’s random. Because sometimes serendipity is a better way to find something, a feature called “Reelgood Roulette” lets you shake your device while on the Discover tab to get a non-personalized, random suggestion.

Reelgood credits Netflix Roulette, created by Andrew Sampson, as the basis for this addition. In fact, it acquired the rights to the software last year, and then updated it to support more streaming services.

The app also now offers more powerful search and filtering capabilities involving Rotten Tomatoes, IMDb scores, plus cast and crew listings. This allows you to query up things like “Meryl Streep’s top-rated movies” or “drama series with an IMDb rating of at least 8.0 that came out in the last 3 years,” for example.

Reelgood’s search and filtering mechanisms have always been the place where it excels, but it’s less useful as a simple tracker. For that, I prefer TV Time, which lets you quickly mark entire seasons or series as “Watched” and offers discussion boards for each episode where you can post photos and memes and chat with other fans.

TV Time, however, hasn’t been as useful for making recommendations – its suggestions have been off-the-mark when I’ve tried it in the past, often leaning too heavily on network’s back catalogs than pushing me to more current or trending content. It makes me wish I could combine the two apps into one for the best of both worlds – tracking and recommendations.

The updated Reelgood app also doubles down on its own curation capabilities by offering editorial collections. For example: 2018 Emmy Nominees, IMDb’s Top 250 Movies, Original Picks, Dark Comedies, British Humour, and more. This can be a good way to find something to watch when you’re really stumped.

And as you discover new shows and movies you want to see, you can set alerts so you’ll be notified when they hit one of the streaming services you’re subscribed to, similar the tracking feature on Roku OS.

Finally, Reelgood’s update includes the addition of 50+ streaming services – that means there’s now support for more niche services like IndieFlix, FilmStruck, Shudder, Fandor, Crunchyroll, Mubi, AcornTV and Starz, among others.

“Reelgood 4.0 is the culmination of all we’ve learned about how people watch and the increasingly fragmented streaming world,” said Eli Chamberlin, Reelgood’s head of product and design. “Our aim with this release was to take all the streaming content out there, and display it in the most meaningful way possible so that people can get the most out of their existing streaming services without wasting countless hours browsing.”

The new app is rolling out to iOS today on the App Store.

 

Source: Tech Crunch