food

It is not uncommon for kitchen appliances that do one thing well to do another, similar thing just as well. Often that secondary functionality becomes your primary use for the product (think grinding spices in a coffee grinder).

You may not think it makes any sense to use a blender as a scale, but that's exactly what DeLonghi has done--incorporate a scale into a food processor. The DFP950 12-Cup Food Processor combines two similar kitchen gadgets with a third--not altogether unlikely--kitchen essential. Featuring a tare function, you can add exactly the amount of ingredients you need directly in your … Read more

SAN FRANCISCO--With the restaurant rating and recommendation business being pretty well locked up (by Yelp, OpenTable, Foursquare, etc.), the new game in town is apparently recommendations on individual dishes. Got a hankering for tom kha gai soup? You can check out Spork (live) or TopDish (invite-only beta) to find the best restaurant nearby that serves that particular dish; both companies are presenting in the low-rent "launch pad" sideshow of the Launch conference here.

These two services collect user reviews--ratings and pictures--of dishes to help you make the life-critical decision of where to find the best of whatever you're looking for, or if you're sitting at a restaurant, which dish to order. Both sites let you profile your tastes to help decide for you what you're more likely to like.

Spork is a bit more social at the moment. It connects to your Facebook network to prioritize food ratings from your friends. An upcoming feature will let you gift a dish to a friend via a PayPal credit for the cost of the dish. A future network update may work the credit through restaurants directly.

Co-founder Dan Cheung told me he's also considering adding a "reverse Groupon" feature to the service: If enough users like a restaurant's dish, Spork may ask the restaurant to create a coupon for it, to stimulate demand just a little bit more.

TopDish is a bit newer, still in closed beta. Its recommendations are network-wide, for the time being, and the mobile app isn't out yet. The model is largely the same as Spork's, but co-founder Salil Pandit told me his service's secret sauce will be communication with restaurants: If you run an eatery, you'll be able to see how all your individual dishes rate. This will be a free service for a while, although the value to a restaurant could obviously be quite high. "We just want to help start a conversation," Pandit told me.

The increasing granularity of data in new Web services is an important trend to watch. Highly-specific recommendation databases don't work unless there's enough volume of users and data feeding into them. Without that, you get a lot of empty records and unsatisfied users. But with everyone getting with the program of recommending things to friends, checking in, and Tweeting or Facebooking their every move, it's not surprising that companies like these (and some others, launching tomorrow at this conference) are tying to make sense of these little tidbits of opinion.

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It seems like everyone wants a piece of the restaurant industry. I don't know why. It's a brutal business with low margins, high employee turnover, no way to reach all your customers at once, and generally stressed-out business owners. At least existing inefficiencies make for creative solutions and some good start-up ideas. OpenTable proved that you can improve the simple act of booking a table. Grubhub is trying to bring the same concept to deliveries and takeout. And now Storific is trying to streamline the function of the waiter.

Storific turns your iPhone (other platforms in development) into an order-taking waitbot. You step into your restaurant and as you're seated you get a code for your table. You put that into the app, and then you can see the establishment's menu on your phone, pick things you want, and have those orders delivered to the kitchen. You can also ping the system to send over water, a salt shaker, and so on.

It may appear that this business is about making things better for diners, by making it easier to send orders in. It may also look like it's good for waiters since it makes them more efficient (they can come by to chat up customers and don't have to come back to take an order unless the diner wants that) and thus could improve their tips. But the real benefit of this app is bottom-line financial. It brings impulse buying to restaurant dining. Want another order of fries? Press the button. A second mousse, rapidement? Click.… Read more

According to a survey of users on goal-setting Web site 43 Things, the most popular New Year's resolution for 2011 is to lose weight. (This is Jasmine's utter lack of surprise.) Indeed, many of the top resolutions year after year are health-related. Drink less, get fit, quit smoking, manage stress, be happy, and run a marathon all continually rank high on the list.

Luckily, there is plenty of technology available to help you reach any of those goals. Of course, it would be irresponsible of me to attempt to cover it all in one article; after all, carpal … Read more

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