Great news to share with our Watchup users & friends! Watchup has been featured by Apple in the New & Noteworthy section of the iPad AppStore. This sounds like an amazing recognition of the latest improvements that we've been cooking up here at the Studio Watchup of Menlo Park, California. Especially with today's release of Watchup 1.10 which offers some great new features:

Here are the latest improvements of your favorite video news app:

✓ Removing a channel is much easier now: hit the channel lineup button (on the upper right side of the Browse View) to delete (or reorder) your channels.

✓ Adding a new channel is also easier: open the channel lineup and hit the plus button to open our expanded channel catalog.   

✓ Newly designed channel lineup button.

✓ Expanded channel catalog with new channels from the U.S. but also Mexico, Venezuela, Ecuador, Colombia, Argentina, Italy, France, Germany and more. Email hey@watchup.com to request more channels. 

✓ Channels are now ordered and preloaded according to your country.

All this comes on top of our recent updates:

✓ First channel in Spanish: Univision, the leading news source for Hispanics in the US! 

✓ When your queue is empty, just hit the ON button to play your automatic newscast. The more you use Watchup the smarter it gets.

✓ Schedule your daily newscast with an easy interface

✓ While your next video is loading sharing the video that has just ended is extremely easy with our new share panel, which is now even faster! 

✓ Faster and easier registration process (for new users only)

✓ Non U.S. users are now asked for country instead of ZIP code

✓ Various improvements and small bug fixes

Keep providing feedback by emailing founders (at) watchup (dot) com. All emails will be answered by the founders of our startup. Thank you! 

The app is now featured in the What's Hot section:

Watchup is also featured with a Main Banner in the News section for the second consecutive week: 

This recognition represents a major milestone for our company and is yet another reason for us to keep elevating the news watching experience on the iPad. If you haven't downloaded Watchup yet, you can do so in our iPad AppStore page, even if you're on your computer. 

Techcrunch's Anthony Ha enthusiastically reviewed Watchup's newly released Automatic Newscast and Daily newscast features:

With the new Automatic Newscast, you no longer have to build the playlist yourself. Instead, if you touch a button, Watchup will assemble the playlist for you, based on factors like the channels you seem to prefer, the video types that you watch the most often, and the videos that you’ve skipped. Farano likes to describe people watching their Watchup newscasts while they’re performing some other task, such as cooking dinner. Making the setup process as easy as possible should help with that.

Techcrunch also reviewed the scheduled Daily Newscast feature:

Watchup has also added a Daily Newscast feature, which is basically a variation on the automated playlist, but set to play at the time and for the duration that you specify. Do you want to watch 15 minutes of news every morning at 7:30 as you get ready for work? Watchup will assemble the newscast for you, and it will send you a notification at 7:30 when it’s ready. It’s an interesting way to return to that idea of the once-a-day broadcast that captures all the news you need to know, but in a way that fits into your schedule. (And obviously, you can watch your playlist later if your schedule changes and you’re not available at a specific time.)

...before adding:

I tried out the daily playlist for myself, and it was as easy to create as Farano claimed. 

Watchup: Your Daily Newscast has recently been added to the Google Developers Showcase for its innovative usage of the YouTube API. According to Google:

Watchup unleashes the power of video journalism with a beautiful iPad app that lets you build and enjoy your personal newscast. 

This is an incredible milestone for our small Stanford startup and we look forward to elevating your video news experience like never before. Thank you for all your fantastic support!

Watchup 1.9 comes with an incredible set of new features that include the following:

The most prestigious Internet festival in the world, Austin-based South by South West (or "SXSW") organizes every year its coveted Interactive Awards, once won by Twitter and Facebook when those companies only were startups.

We would be delighted if you could vote for us and spread the word by liking us on Facebook or retweeting us here. Thank you and keep watching smart with the Watchup iPad app! 

After announcing a few days ago that Watchup is a 2013 SXSW Interactive Awards finalist, we are proud to say that we are also a finalist at the 2013 SXSW Accelerator competition for startups in the News Technologies category, which will take place on March 11 and 12.

Being a finalist at both SXSW competitions is something extremely rare. Thank you, SXSW! And thank you, dear Watchup users and StartX, the awesome Stanford accelerator who helped Watchup grow and thrive.

We hope to see some of you in Austin cheering for your favorite video news iPad app!