Feast CEO David Spinks is combining the e-learning model pioneered by education sites like Udemy and Coursera with his experience in building online communities, and he’s applying it all to building on online cooking school. Read more »
Online food delivery and takeout portal Foodler is now accepting Bitcoin alongside credit cards and cash-on-delivery for orders from more than 17,000 restaurants. Read more »
Y Combinator’s winter batch launched on Tuesday in Mountain View. Here are the second batch of startups we’d pick out of the day’s line-up that are worth a look. Read more »
As Punchfork gets ready to shut down its API post Pinterest acquisition, Yummly hopes to step into its shoes, proving recipe content to food sites and apps. Yummly’s semantic search technology, however, has a lot to offer. Read more »
Jamie Oliver’s new Food Tube channel is live on YouTube – and it’s going to feature some familiar faces for people who scour the video site for unique food videos. Read more at paidContent »
Cooking inspiration is already one of Pinterest users’ biggest reasons for using the popular social network, and Pinterest has decided to make the most of that trend. Its first acquisition is recipe aggregator and culinary inspiration portal Punchfork. Read more »
If you’ve ever ordered a dish off a menu, chances are it’s in Food Genius’s servers. The startup has compiled a mammoth database of menus with the goal of tracking what America is eating. In January it begins selling that data to food companies. Read more »
Looking for high-end fashion ideas in addition to the perfect lasagna recipe? Gojee’s new fashion verticals might seem like an odd fit, but when you look at the company’s approach toward quality products and visual discovery, suddenly the new additions make a lot of sense. Read more »
Evernote Food wants to be the only food app users need. With the upgrade to Evernote 2.0 for the iPhone and iPad, users can not just remember past meals but get restaurant recommendations and recipe ideas for future meals. Read more »
In a digital world, the recipe has transformed from a static set of instructions into a kind of open-source code which any cook and adjust or reformulate. Food Network’s Alton Brown proposes to embrace that trend to create a form of living recipe. Read more »
Crowdsourcing may have liberated the restaurant review from the critics, but Steve and Jared Rivera think its also produced a lot of bad food recommendations. There answer was to create Chefs Feed, a food app where recommendations come solely from professional chefs. Read more »
Community cooking portal Allrecipes.com recorded record traffic over Thanksgiving, but what’s most surprising is where that traffic came from: 41 percent of its visits came from a smartphone or tablet. Allrecipes started out as a web enterprise, but it’s quickly turning into a mobile one. Read more »
Food Network wants to partner with YouTube to produce exclusive content for the site as part of its professional channels initiative. For the cable network, it’s part of a bigger initiative of embracing online content. But can Food Network find an audience on YouTube? Read more »
Walmart Labs, the retail giant’s innovation arm, on Wednesday launched a subscription food service called Goodies. Similar to beauty startup Birchbox, the service charges subscribers a monthly fee to receive a curated box of sample-sized items, which they can then purchase in greater amounts online. Read more »
GrubHub has souped up its mobile apps and web portal with new order tracking features, allowing its diners to track the status of their meals from the moment they leave the restaurant to the moment they arrive at the front door. Read more »
Gojee has been using ingredient data to recommend recipes and track pantry staples on the web for a year. Now it’s final ready to make its service portable. Today it launched mobile apps for Android, the iPhone and the iPad. Read more »
Snooth is making wine recommendations on every recipe that Springpad users clip. Rather than hire an army of sommeliers to suggest pairings for the countless recipes on the web, Snoot has built an algorithm that deconstructs recipes and matches them to their ideal wine profiles. Read more »
Sounds creepy, but someday we may need to change out the blood cartridges in our printers before we can print out dinner. Peter Thiel’s Breakout Labs is investing in a cultured food startup called Modern Meadow, which aims to combine in-vitro meat with 3D printing. Read more »
The online food-ordering firm is emblematic of a new breed of aggressively expansionist German e-commerce startup. And, according to CEO Fabian Siegel, the race is on for pretty much anywhere that’s not the U.S. Read more »
The folks over at iFood.tv are no longer just proffering up cooking videos and recipes. IFood.tv’s founders have launched a nutrition search engine and database called NutritionRank with the rather ambitious goal of making it the web’s top repository of dietary health information. Read more »
Cooks are increasingly using services like Evernote, Facebook and Pinterest to store their culinary ideas, storing recipes as notes, likes and pins for later viewing. The problem is none of the three is designed to be a culinary tool, but Say Mmm plans to change that. Read more »
Social dining network Grubwithus has raised $5 million in Series A financing, which the startup will use to expand its basic business premise: getting likeminded strangers together in a physical restaurant to share a meal. Read more »
Foodspotting is putting great services offered by Yelp right into its social food-finding app: reviews, as well as OpenTable reservations and menu pages from Single Platform. Plus: Restaurants will find more informative dashboard pages and users will see far more data on their profile pages. Read more »
Online delivery service Just-Eat raised $64 million, and has its sights set on expansion. Surely it would target America, the home of fast food, right? Wrong. CEO Klaus Nyengaard tells us why he doesn’t want to roll out in the U.S any time soon. Read more »
European online food delivery service Just-Eat plans to consolidate its position as the industry’s global leader with a bumper new round of funding led by private equity group Vitruvian. And that means more expansion and more acquisition. Read more »
Since its launch in 2009, Food52 has become a premier destination for community-vetted recipes online, but its founders Amanda Hesser and Merrill Stubbs have grown even more ambitious. They want to build a crowdsourced clearinghouse of culinary knowledge that cooks can access anywhere on the Web. Read more »
Finding a recipe is easy. Cooking it can be tough. Startup YumvY hopes to change that with a GPS-style step-by-step Web app that takes those of us who haven’t been to culinary school through the process of getting dinner on the table. Read more »
Food Network’s digital strategy has always been fairly straightforward: to supplement its cable TV content and promote its on-air talent. Consequently its Website, its social media efforts and its mobile apps are all linked to its programming. But this week Food Network deviated from that strategy. Read more at paidContent »
The aim of ZipList has always been to work with the big food media brands, and now it’s getting its wish. Condé Nast has acquired ZipList for an undisclosed amount, linking the startup with some of the biggest food titles both on and off the Web. Read more at paidContent »
After years of building up its cooking video library, iFood.tv is making the move to both bigger and smaller screens. This week, it plans to launch apps for the Boxee, Google and Yahoo connected TV platforms, while last week it launched its first Android app. Read more »
When ZipList launched its digital grocery list and recipe clipping service in 2010, it dreamed of becoming the premier destination website for home cooks. But those dreams were quickly dashed as ZipList couldn’t compete against the big cooking sites. So ZipList decided to partner with them. Read more »
Just in time for its second birthday, food-finding app Foodspotting is rolling out some major design changes. Starting Wednesday, regular users of the app will notice a redesigned interface and a new logo, meant to emphasize new personalization and social features. Read more »
This weekend in New York City, dozens of developers gathered for the second Cleanweb Hackathon, where programmers spent the weekend building mobile and web apps around new ways to manage energy. The event is the latest sign the ecosystem around clean technology is changing. Read more »
Eater.com, the popular blog network that covers bar and restaurant news across 15 metropolitan areas, has teamed up with online matchmaking service HowAboutWe to launch “Eater Dating.” The service will encourage people to set up foodie-centric first dates, such as “Eat oysters at the Ferry Building.” Read more »
Losing weight is on a lot of people’s minds post-New Year, so this is a perfect time to revisit tips and tricks about how to use Apple technologies to help you get healthier in 2012. Attitude, food and activity monitoring can contribute to a healthier you. Read more »
Digital recipes and cookbooks need to emulate the world of digital music. By creating a standard recipe format similar to the MP3, we could overcome the artificial barriers between cooking Websites, apps and our bookshelves. Only then could we be build truly comprehensive digital cooking libraries. Read more »
When you find that perfect recipe on the web, you want to hold on to it. We tested several recipe apps with the aim of creating a digital library of culinary masterpieces. But we discovered that while recipe aggregation tools are useful, they still fall short. Read more »
Foodily, the website that lets you find recipes and share them with your Facebook friends, has launched a superslick offering for the iPhone. A big benefit that’s new to the iPhone app is that users can post personal photos of their latest culinary creations. Read more »
Mobile app Nosh launched just three months ago from Firespotter Labs, whose CEO Craig Walker was one of the founders of Google Voice. It now has 1 million ratings of dishes and on Tuesday the company announced a series of updates, including integration of Google Places. Read more »
The emerging web-sharing movement, which includes startups like Airbnb, RelayRides, and ThredUP, has its roots in the maturing way that people use the Internet and cell phones, and its future economy will rise around location, niche groups and capital-intensive, under-utilized and time-sensitive objects. For entrepreneurs looking ... Read more at GigaOM Pro »
