As the number of options for watching great content has grown, the ability to search and find that content has lagged behind. An ideal TV guide, from a single remote control (or smartphone), would offer search, sorting and personalization, and suggest the next program we might want to watch. One such possibility is the $100 Caavo Control Center, which enables up to four devices to be plugged in to a single remote control. A second is the Reelgood smartphone-based streaming guide that tracks over 50 streaming services. Read more

According to a new study from Country Financial, a majority of U.S. consumers are sharing their login info for mobile, shopping and streaming accounts, but are not necessarily sharing the tab. The study found that overall, 74 percent of consumers say they share accounts for Airbnb, Amazon Prime, Hulu, Netflix, Spotify and Uber with their family members and friends (and, in some cases, even their exes). However, more than 36 percent of those who freely share their accounts also indicate that they do not share the monthly costs of those accounts with others. Read more

In a 15-page letter on September 26, Snap chief executive Evan Spiegel told employees his plan to achieve full-year profitability in 2019 and refocus the company around new strategies. He admitted that the company’s redesign created many problems and “lost the core of what made Snapchat the fastest way to communicate.” That widely criticized redesign led to Snapchat’s first-ever decline in daily active users last quarter. Spiegel now wants the company to focus on adults, not teens, and messaging, not stories. Read more

As we reported last week, Bloomberg published a story claiming that China had secretly installed microchips on motherboards built by Supermicro that were used in data center servers of companies such as Apple and Amazon. In the first official response from the U.S. government, Homeland Security issued a statement indicating that it has “no reason to doubt” the denials issued by Apple, Amazon and Supermicro in the wake of the report. The Homeland Security statement is similar to comments released by the U.K.’s National Cyber Security Centre. Read more

Canadian company D-Wave Systems launched the Leap Quantum Application Environment, a web portal that aims to offer public access to quantum computing for “any and all developers.” D-Wave R&D executive vice president/chief product officer Alan Baratz says Leap will provide such developers “immediate, free, real time access to a live quantum computer.” Quantum computing, which is expected to dramatically improve the ability to manipulate and analyze data, has thus far had a very limited user base. Read more