Silicon Valley’s always been a show that commits to unexpected, weird plot lines, but the rise of Jian-Yang’s accidental company SeeFood—or, in elevator-pitch parlance, “a Shazam for food”—has been uniquely unhinged. The story has given a focal point to the tempestuous relationship between Jian-Yang and Erlich while also giving the show’s writers yet another opportunity to shit on the sort of stupid products the real Silicon Valley disrupts our lifestyles with.
Last night’s episode saw the introduction of an app that could do one thing: identify hot dogs. It would then tell the user whether what they were looking at was either a “Hotdog!” or “Not hotdog!” using an appropriately low-rent graphical interface.
Well, that app is real, and you can download it now to better identify whether objects are or are not hot dogs. Not Hotdog is in the App store, with credits “By SeeFood Technologies Inc.” and an ostensibly Jian-Yang-penned description:
What would you say if I told you there is a app on the market that tell you if you have a hotdog or not a hotdog. It is very good and I do not want to work on it any more. You can hire someone else.
Early reports are that the app does exactly as indicated, identifying hot dogs and also correctly identifying “not hotdogs.”
That’s not quite a Shazam for food, but it’s a promising vertical slice of what the final product might be. No wonder it’s raking in five-star reviews.