If you’re not familiar, Grubwithus is Los Angeles-based startup that specializes in organizing group meals for people with similar interests. Users sign up for a Grubwithus account, and then start signing up for dinners, organized weeks in advance around themes such as the love of sushi or a fascination with Ron Paul. Grubwithus pre-arranges set meals with partner restaurants, and diners prepay their bills before attending. Once there everyone only needs to cover their drink tabs.

GrubTonight works in a similar way, though much accelerated. The iPhone-only app — Grubwithus probably isn’t hosting any Android-lover meals just yet — alerts members to dinners being held that night along with their menus and locations. Unlike the regular Grubwithus dinners, there’s no theme, just social interaction. Diners again prepay and they receive a confirmation an hour before the meal is held. At launch, GrubTonight is only offering up meals in the LA area, but the company said it would expand to more cities in the coming months.

Grubwithus said that the app is focused on immediacy, making it ideal for business travelers, tourists looking to meet each other or the locals or as a means for the newly relocated to meet the community. If a group of diners hit it off they can meet for future meals using the social tools in the larger Grubwithus network.

Grubwithus is one of many startups exploring the idea of a “real-life” social network built around the communal table, but it’s developed more momentum than most. A Y Combinator alum, Grubwithus raised $1.6 million in seed funding from Ashton Kutcher, Andreessen Horowitz, First Round Capital, Aviv Nevo, and other angel investors.

Last year, it announced a $5 million Series A round led by LA VC GRP Partners. In February it used some of those funds to buy up Canadian “supper club” startup The Social Feed, allowing it to expand internationally. In addition to LA, Grubwithus is now organizing meals in Chicago, New York, San Francisco and San Jose, Toronto and Washington, D.C.

Photo courtesy of Shutterstock user corepics

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In his latest book, former National Geographic and Time photojournalist Rick Smolan, who is best known for The Day in the Life series, features more than one hundred powerful stories from around the world about scientists, innovators and others using big data to improve medicine, conserve energy, track the weather and more.

MacArthur Fellow Shwetak Patel developed a sensor that can help homeowners determine which appliances are the biggest energy hogs.

The book, titled The Human Face of Big Data, hit shelves last month but on Tuesday Smolan and his partner Jennifer Erwitt released an iPad app that puts an interactive twist on about half of the book’s stories, with extra videos, charts and graphics. For example, in a story about how MacArthur Fellow and University of Washington computer science professor Shwetak Patel developed a sensor that can help homeowners determine which appliances are the biggest energy hogs, the app lets users tap on images of different appliances to see their energy load. Or in a piece about the global online collective art project The Johnny Cash Project, which combined fans’ illustrations of Cash into one video, iPad users can click on the individual pictures to see video of them being drawn. (You can see five of the stories from the book here, as well as a description of the project from my colleague Derrick Harris here.) All earnings from the app, which costs $2.99, will be donated to the nonprofit Charity: Water.

In addition to launching the iPad app on Tuesday, Smolan and his team sent copies of the book to 10,000 of the world’s most influential people, from President Barack Obama and United Nations Secretary General Ban Ki Moon to Oprah Winfrey and Actor Robin Williams to Facebook COO Sheryl Sandberg.

In October, the project hosted global events to bring journalists and big data innovators together. It also released Android and iOS apps that ask people around the world a set of questions about their beliefs, aspirations and lifestyles and then let them compare responses.

Earlier this fall, Smolan told me he believes big data is currently where the Internet was in 1993 but could change society in even bigger ways. While the government and corporations are considering its impact, he said he worries that ordinary people aren’t pondering about how big data could affect their lives.

“One of the goals  [of the project] was to get people thinking and talking about this world of big data while it’s still in its early formation stages,” he said.

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Two good reports out overnight run through the state of play as Uber, the Californian town car service beloved by San Francisco’s technocracy, prepares to hit New York with an app for yellow cab booking. It’s Uber’s latest move from the high end of the market down the stream (the company has already introduced UberX lower-grade private car hire in SF and NYC) but it’s not coming easy: just as the app was supposed to be released, it’s hit a few snags.

A report in The New York Times runs through Uber’s situation, and outlines the concerns that the city, particularly the Taxi and Limousine Commission, has with its product.

…the program may have a significant problem: Taxi officials say that Uber’s service may not be legal since city rules do not allow for prearranged rides in yellow taxis. They also forbid cabbies from using electronic devices while driving and prohibit any unjustified refusal of fares. (Under Uber’s policy, once a driver accepts a ride through the app, no other passenger can be picked up.)

As a riposte, Uber CEO Travis Kalanick appears to be promising to launch the app for free to give riders “a taste of the future” (either a blessing or a Trojan horse, depending on where you sit).

But what’s really interesting is why Uber’s pushing to get to market so quickly. After all, it already has two services in New York. Can’t a third wait, just a little while?

No, says Betabeat in a great blow-by-blow breakdown of the situation, which points out that there may be something else prompting Uber’s speedy approach: the competition.

In particular, the company is heading for a straight-up clash with Hailo, the London-based taxi hailing service that is also preparing for its debut in New York. Hailo’s already going strong in London and has already built a service there that’s more in line with what yellow cabs would require, rather than a new product like Uber’s. As Betabeat says, Hailo “is planning on launching here in a couple of weeks. However, Hailo does not have explicit approval from the TLC either,” but it “has 2,500 pre-registered to use its app.”

Hailo has since stood by those numbers, and if they are in any way accurate, it’s got good reason to scare the living daylights out of Uber: that base of 2,500 drivers is way higher than Uber’s 105 — perhaps signaling why the San Francisco company wants to be first.

So who will win?

Trying to understand who’s going to emerge victorious is hard right now, not least because there’s only one city where Hailo and Uber are in competition, albeit indirectly, and that’s London.

There are no clear winners there, but it’s a brutal arena for anyone to fight in, so there may. I wrote about the complexities of that market earlier this summer in a post detailing precisely why Uber would find the British capital complex, confusing and highly competitive.

There are more rival startups in this space than I can count, and they aren’t simply clones of the San Francisco company. Some, like the well-backed Hailo, focus on black cabs. Others, like UbiCabs, are pointed toward the lower end of the private hire (minicab) market.

But Uber’s biggest rival in London comes from neither the world of black cabs or the world of tech startups. Private hire firm Addison Lee is the most significant player in the British capital’s upscale private driver market that Uber wants to dominate. It’s been around for a while, and it’s doing well: the company’s last financial filings say it ended up with £5.5 million of profit last year ($8.5 million) on revenues of £127 million ($198 million). Addison Lee may not be liked by all, but it is ubiquitous, connected, competitive and extremely aggressive.

I don’t think anything has changed since then.

Anecdotal evidence suggests that right now Hailo has the upper hand over its rival. Uber is spending heavily to try and build up a fleet of drivers, but finding it hard going, while Hailo is getting more traction and building up a strong community of black cab drivers and users. The economics of both are tough, and the markets they’re appealing to are slightly different, but Hailo is showing more signs of success in hostile conditions. Still, I’m going to dig in and see what more I can find out about this, because it’s a really interesting area.

One thing to remember, though: this isn’t a two-horse race.

Sure, there are other startups who could win — but I also think you shouldn’t forget the system. In Washington, the local legislature is looking at blocking Uber from offering lower-tier services, and while New York may not be run by the same sort of quislings, it has its own problems and inefficiencies. The march of progress might be inevitable, but that doesn’t mean Hailo, Uber or anyone else from this generation of startups will be able to overturn the TLC’s legal objections easily.

Taxi photo courtesy of Flickr userPankseelen

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Vodio improves as you use it; it has 90 curated channels of video content, and users tell it what categories of videos they like (like Sports, Tech, and Food). Users can also connect social media accounts to it, and based on Facebook likes or Twitter subscriptions, in addition to the videos they watch, Vodio will continue to refine the videos it shows to match a user’s tastes. If you like Stephen Colbert on Facebook, for example, Vodio’s algorithm will rank videos with Colbert higher and will add these to your video feed. It’s similar to Frequency and Squrl, which are built around your personal preferences, as opposed to Shelby.tv and ShowYou, apps that are populated with videos shared by your friends.

It’s easy to see why Vodio went iPad-first — the larger tablet screen is well-suited to what Vodio does: easily and seamlessly let users toggle through their chosen feeds of videos with simple swipes. (There’s a reason it’s been called “the Flipboard of video.”) So why didn’t the Vodio Labs team opt to expand to other large-screened mobile devices, like Android next? I asked co-founder Jonathan Messika that question last week in a Skype interview.

Vodio Labs is actually just three guys in Tel Aviv. They set out to make Vodio for the iPad because “we thought we could make a visually beautiful app that could stand out,” Messika said. And they’ve certainly struck a chord: since January they’ve acquired around 240,000 registered users of the app.

However, it turns out that even though the app was iPad-only, it was pretty popular among iPhone users too. “With the iPhone the thing is that the user base is huge, and we’ve seen more and more people — surprisingly — use the iPhone to watch [our] video content,” he said. “We thought we should go to the iPhone next rather than Android tablets because we saw there’s huge growth of viewing habits over the iPad.”

The installed base of the iPhone does far overshadow that of the iPad — Apple’s sold around 244 million iPhones since mid-2007 versus about 84 million iPads since early 2010. But Vodio’s own data revealed more valuable information. Any Vodio user can share a video link via Twitter, Facebook or email with others. If they don’t have the app it’ll go to Vodio’s mobile website. The Vodio guys were seeing that half of the traffic to its mobile website was coming from the iPhone’s mobile browser. So the decision to address that group was fairly obvious, said Messika.

But it’s not just data that’s driving Vodio to avoid Android for now. The teams also prefers the pressures that building for iOS users brings. “It’s not a secret that iOS users are more picky,” Messika said. “They have higher standards and appreciate lovely design. We want to make sure to test ourselves with a pickier audience before we [address] an audience that is more diverse.”

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The free app is (rather unimaginatively) titled “Mitt’s VP.” It’s is available for iOS and Android devices.

A Romney campaign press release proclaimed Tuesday: “Users of the app will be the first to get the news on the biggest political decision of the year through an instantaneous alert on the one device most people carry around the clock — their phone.”

It’s still a mystery when the VP pick will be named, but it will be before the Republican National Convention, which kicks off August 27.

Romney’s campaign is updating Obama’s own VP announcement method in 2008 (via text message) for this era, which is undeniably the era of native mobile apps.

Hopefully the Romney campaign’s second smartphone app effort includes a thorough spellcheck this time around. When Romney’s “With Mitt” app was introduced in May, it became an almost-instant punchline for misspelling America as “Amercia.”

President Barack Obama’s reelection campaign also revealed its own mobile app on Tuesday, an updated iOS app. Obama, however, doesn’t have a major news hook  to drive downloads like a running mate to announce — he already has one.

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With major music services like Spotify and Rdio yet to launch in Russia, Yandex plans to announce the iOS app later on Wednesday, offering users the chance to tap into its Yandex Music service and pay for the right to stream direct to their handsets or iPods.

But while the subscription proposition is fairly common among international services, it’s not the norm everywhere — and that could prove tricky.

Most music services in Russia are free, including the web-based version of Yandex Music, which launched in 2009. In order to take that service mobile, however, the company is asking people to pay 199 roubles each month (around $6) for the right stream a library of music that currently holds more than 3 million tracks by 80,000 artists over the air to their phone.

There are subscription services available locally, including Zvooq.ru, which charges $5 a month for mobile and offline access — but, like Yandex, it still offers a free web player.

Yandex, which owns around two-thirds of the Russian search market, is clearly hoping it can covert some of its 5 million monthly web listeners to go the mobile route. But even it can convince them, just 2 percent of Russians use iPhones and — perhaps more importantly — the Russian music market is relatively undeveloped, with total sales across all formats of less than $100 million for 2011.

Turning profit in a market that is heavily reliant on piracy is tough — but could prove a significant bonus for the first company to really crack the problem, as Zvooq’s founders told the Financial Times last year:

“Some people see piracy as a threat, but we see it as a ready market with tens of millions of people consuming music online. It’s an opportunity,” says Simon Dunlop, one half of the duo behind Zvooq.ru, the online music service (whose name reflects Russian zvuk “sound”).

“If you have an established pirate market, it forces you to be that much better because you are competing with the free stuff,” he says.

Still, most potential entrants are steering clear for now. While our map of the worldwide market shows that there are 13 digital music services available locally, most international players have stayed out. Only Deezer and YouTube could really be considered global services: Spotify, for example, has no outpost in the region, despite taking a large slice of funding from the Moscow investment group Digital Sky Technologies.

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But while Zynga CEO Mark Pincus was all smiles on signing the deal, he may be less impressed six weeks on, thanks to an intriguing report from Forbes that indicates a precipitous decline in the game’s user base since the acquisition.

According to figures from AppData.com, the simple and highly-addictive drawing game — which rocketed to 36 million downloads in just a few weeks — has lost around a third of its daily active users in the past month.

So what’s going wrong? There seem to be three major possibilities on the cards.

Technical problems

Lots of players have reported trouble accessing the game over the past few weeks. That seems to be a scaling problem, with the servers struggling to meet the demand of more and more downloads — though the move to shift OMGPOP’s traffic onto Zynga’s “Z-cloud” may also be a culprit, since similar reports are also surfacing about another game, Words With Friends.

For many new and existing players, server issues that mean dropped games or lost moves are an immediate black mark against the game: something that can really hurt in the instant gratification world of mobile entertainment.

Zyngafication

Moving to the Z-cloud meant something else, too: the addition of new features that seem to have soured many players’ relationships with the game. For the most part, this means pushy Facebook and Twitter integration — though the company does seem to have also expanded the number of advertisements, too, taking more money from Doritos, the NHL and others to include brand-related words into the game’s dictionary.

These might not be a turn-off for everyone, but they do seem to have had an impact on some users who feel uncomfortable at the commercial options.

Natural wastage

While Draw Something was an overnight success — spreading virally, zooming up the charts and bringing in a lot of revenue for its makers — many people are saying that they bored of it rapidly. That’s not entirely untypical for a faddish game, and since it has little variation, a pretty limited dictionary and real no long-term stickyness it appears OMGPOP hasn’t done a great deal to boost the game’s longevity.

This sort of wastage is pretty normal for short attention span games, which makes their success all about growth: you have to keep marketing the game to new players and expanding the overall market to compensate for those who switch off.

So who’s fault is this? And is it a real problem, or just a temporary glitch?

Some may argue that this isn’t a big deal for Zynga, since it owns not just Draw Something, but the entire business and team behind it. However, as we wrote at the time, Zynga’s purchase was not really about talent acquisition — while OMGPOP’s team are no doubt smart, they’d produced so many duds that the company didn’t have many rolls of the dice left.

No, for Zynga it was a numbers game: the revenues and user base of Draw Something were interesting, but underneath it all it was really about gaining access to a large, mainstream, purchase-happy audience.

Those users are great targets for Zynga to sell its other games to. And the speed at which Draw Something was growing — it had more than 36 million downloads in just a few weeks — meant that the audience was going to be significant.

Except it’s not. And that’s got to hurt.

If this drop continues — in fact, even if the decline is arrested — it could become a really serious problem for Zynga. After all, it not only shows a lack of judgment from management in buying into a fad when it’s at its very peak, but it also suggests that the company wants to strip mine new assets rather than build them up.

Because while scaling issues and a lack of longevity may be rooted in problems at OMGPOP’s end, the reality is that all these issues have been made worse, not better, by Zynga’s involvement. It’s either failed to support the game fast enough and bring in enough new users, or it’s been actively making it worse for players.

And none of those are good news.

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Still, that intense competition doesn’t seem to have shaken off the belief of wave after wave of startups that think they can stand out from the crowd and become the next Instagram. Next up? French service Sharypic, which has just gone live on the iTunes store.

The site, which is based in Paris but was funded by pan-European incubator HackFWD, offers a twist on the formula by focusing on events rather than people. The system is organized around real-world happenings, with pictures collated into albums that build events either by taking your location data or by users explicitly adding their images to a particular event.

Right now, for example, you can see lots of photographs from Mobile World Congress in Barcelona, or the recent Rio Carnival. Navigating through the albums is easy and fast, and discovery of events — both through the app and the website — is smooth and intuitive.

I suppose that makes it not entirely dissimilar to Color, the crash-and-burn startup that raised $41 million, flamed out with the press and users, and then shifted gears to become a Facebook photo and video app.

But where Color had an expensive team and a bucket of money so large that left it vulnerable to launch hype, Sharypic is running lean and mean. And unlike, say, Instagram — which lets users apply retro filters to their photographs but really has no memory of what happened yesterday — Sharypic is centered around actual nostalgia. It wants to be there when you look back over photos, or help you discover what other people were doing at the same time as you.

That’s an important human emotion, and while Sharypic’s approach to it is not unique, it is at least defensible.

The site currently offers event owners and planners the chance to use a Pro version that will help them engage with attendees and collate photographs afterwards — something that gives it an actual business model, unlike many of its peers.

But still, photo apps are so numerous that it still feels like a crap shoot. I don’t know whether Sharypic can make an impact. It’s a nice app, and with some smart event partnerships, it may stand a chance of making some headway. But at some point there will be a massive amount of consolidation or collapse: perhaps the best objective for anyone wanting to be in this space right now is to build a strong user base for when it all shakes out.

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But while the frog may look more like a dinosaur these days, one Israeli startup thinks it has found a way to evolve the idea for the modern mobile user — and believes that if it succeeds, it will become bigger than premium ringtones ever were.

Pops, an Android development firm out of Tel Aviv, thinks that personalized notifications are the next big mobile money spinner, and is backing that up with the formal announcement today that it has raised $1.5 million from Mangrove Capital Partners, best known for being an early investor in Skype.

Essentially Pops is a wrapper for notifications, which allows users to turn their ordinary alerts into something flashier and more entertaining. The free-to-download app hosts a gallery of more than 1,000 animations (called pops) that hook into the notification systems for apps like Facebook, SMS and Gmail, letting users to spice up their Android handset and see different clips or video depending on what sort of message is coming in.

For example, instead of a small on-screen message informing you that there’s a new Facebook message, you can have a Nyancat pop that dances on-screen. Or instead of a simple email alert, you could have a shiny metal Transformers-style announcement. Users can create their own pops from videos on their mobiles, too.

Pops CEO and co-founder Yaron Orenstein, who cut his teeth in the browser toolbar business, said he came to the idea when he saw how popular notifications and alerts were with users — and how broad the opportunity for personalization was.

“We personalize the pictures at the top of our Facebook timelines, our Twitter backgrounds, our ringtones, we put stickers on our laptops, we personalize everything. What could we do to take it a step further?”

The average smartphone owner sees 3,000 notifications each month, he says: ”I had to do something with that.”

He sees notifications — many of which could be premium content — as a vast untapped market, and so far at least it’s looking pretty good. Since launching on the Android market last November, Pops already claims to have reached 500,000 users, and Orenstein says the average Pops user sees around 15 individual pops each day — with some being exposed to as many as 80 or 90.

“You make, what, 10 or 15 phone calls in a day,” he says. “You probably see many more notifications. It’s an order of magnitude bigger than ringtones.”

While the idea of customizing your phone this way might seem garish to some, there’s no doubt in my mind that it has got the potential to be a big hit.

After all, customization was what drove premium ringtones to explode in the mid noughties, creating a market that was worth an estimated $4.5 billion in 2006. It’s been on the decline ever since then, but ringtones are still a big money spinner — bringing in more cash for record labels than digital services like Spotify and Pandora, for example.

Nowadays apps are the big noise, but it’s easy to imagine media companies jumping on a bandwagon that allows them to score extra revenue in this way. The numbers that Pops is posting are the sort of thing that could easily entice brands to start using its system to provide premium downloads that promote their own properties.

Still, Pops has its weaknesses. Right now it’s Android-only, and looks set to remain that way, with the company waiting to see if Windows Phone is a valuable platform and Apple’s restrictions on iOS apps making it impossible to replicate for the iPhone. At the same time, there is a lot of effort required to provide a consistent service across the fragmented Android ecosystem: it’s tough to produce a service that is easy to use while taking into account the variable flavors of Android devices use, their screen size and their resolution.

And like premium ringtones, which declined just as smartphones took off, premium notifications could suddenly see themselves undermined by a shift in the market.

But although there are many potential obstacles, Orenstein is bullish about Pops’ prospects — and plans to use the funds to grow his team and expand the company’s partnerships to create what he believes can be an entirely new category of content.

“Right now this is a new ecosystem that we’ve invented, so we have a lot of challenges — but you also have a lot of room for innovation.”

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Herbert Bay, co-founder and CEO of Kooaba

Herbert Bay doesn’t like QR codes very much. He’s not alone of course: The glitchy glyphs, which are generally used as a clumsy way to link physical media to the web, are regarded by many as the ugliest thing seen in black and white since D.W. Griffiths’ Birth of a Nation.

Yet they have proved remarkably popular with publishers, advertisers and web consultants desperate to find gimmicks that can add interactivity to analog media.

But it’s not just that Bay, a Swiss entrepreneur, dislikes QR codes. He also thinks he has a way to kill them off entirely.

His company, Zurich-based Kooaba, has been working on a suite of image-recognition technologies for the past six years, ever since it spun off from Switzerland’s Federal Institute of Technology. And now it has launched a new app that it hopes can make a significant dent in the way we link the offline and online worlds.

The app, Shortcut, allows users to take a photo of newspaper pieces, magazine articles, advertisements and even billboards and then link them straight to a digital version on their phone. With a Path-like UI, users can then share, comment or store what they have found — or go and play with it if there are interactive extras attached.

“The pitch when we talk to newspapers and printed publications is that we can make them interactive — and they don’t need to place any QR codes anywhere,” says Bay. “In addition they can sell their advertisers on that interactivity . . . it removes the need for QR codes.”

It already works with publications like USA Today and the New York Post, and more are being added all the time. In practice, it is not a million miles away from Google Goggles but with more focus.

Here is a video that shows it in action.

The app — for iPhone, Android and Windows Phone — is actually a retooling of a previous release known as Paperboy, which was focused on news media. That remains its strong point, with recognition of more than 1,000 newspapers and magazines from all over the world. However, through a partnership with the international media sales company Publicitas, Bay and his team realized they wanted to branch out into advertising — and that meant they needed to rework what they had done.

But even though Shortcut has broadened out its remit a little, the reality is that Kooaba could actually apply its technology to any media: DVD cases, books, movie posters, CDs. Instead the company has chosen to keep its focus narrow to try to gain traction.

“The thing with a startup is deciding where to put your resources,” says Bay. “Newspapers and magazines are low-hanging fruit for our app, so we’re focused on those for now.”

Simply recognizing images may not be enough, though. Image recognition — Kooaba’s secret sauce — is a hard nut to crack, but it has become radically easier over the past few years with computing power moving to the cloud. Bay thinks the extra ingredient lies in a system that Kooaba has built that allows publishers to add interactive elements to the content that is fed into Shortcut. However, with many media companies struggling and confused about where to spend their time and energy, he admits that it is proving a tough sell.

Right now the majority of the app’s traction has been powered through partnerships — one with NewspaperDirect, which has a huge inventory of around 2,000 newspapers every day, and one that links it with Evernote.

It has gotten this far with around $5 million in funding — one seed round from a Swiss bank, friends and angel investors, and another slightly larger round from private Swiss investors.

To break through, however, what Kooaba needs to do is forge a couple of really smart deals with great publishers and advertisers so that the dreaded QR code can be sidestepped. But Bay knows that in order to take the service to the next level, it will need something more . . . and that could require more funds.

“In terms of profitability we do well on the technology side,” he says. “But the advertising part is resource-demanding — we need sales guys and business development, so we are looking for strategic investment.”

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