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OpenTable gobbles up Foodspotting for $10M

Erica Ogg — Tue, 29 Jan 2013 13:45:37 +0000

The best-known site for online restaurant reservations will acquire one of the original food photo mobile apps, Foodspotting, both companies announced Tuesday morning. OpenTable will get the three-year-old San Francisco-based company for $10 million in cash. It’s not a huge return for Foodspotting’s investors, Blue Run Ventures, who put $3.75 million into the company.

“We’re so happy to have found a home for Foodspotting where our community can continue to thrive while our entire team continues to focus on creating great dining experiences,” Alexa Andrzejewski, co-founder and CEO of Foodspotting, said in a statement. “While working with OpenTable as partners we realized we could create more intelligent, seamless and beautiful experiences if we had the opportunity to integrate our products more deeply. We look forward to contributing our mobile, social and design expertise in ways that will delight both diners and restaurants.”

Andrezejewski will join OpenTable as a lead user interface designer. Foodspotting, currently available for iOS, Android and Blackberry users, will remain a standalone product.

In his own statement, OpenTable CEO Matt Roberts said he looked forward to using Foodspotting to add ”more visually compelling content to help people decide where to dine and discover dishes they’ll love.”

OpenTable and Foodspotting first worked together starting in May 2012, when Foodspotting added the ability to book restaurant reservations through OpenTable from within the Foodspotting app. In recent months, Foodspotting appeared to lose its original buzz, as dozens of food-related apps and mobile photo networks like Instagram became the go-to app for snapping and sharing pictures of food. OpenTable appears a good fit for Foodspotting’s original mission, however: to find the best dishes in a given city.

In joining OpenTable, Foodspotting brings 10 employees and 3 million dishes spotted since the app first went live in 2010.

Updated at 6:12 a.m. PT with information about Foodspotting’s previous investment.

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Foodspotting moves to ensure you don’t need Yelp’s app

Erica Ogg — Thu, 17 May 2012 16:00:13 +0000

For several years I’ve used Foodspotting and Yelp together in concert on my iPhone: If I see a particular dish I want to eat based on a Foodspotting post, I’ll jump over to the Yelp app to find important restaurant details, like when it’s open, where it’s located and more importantly, the reviews. It’s not ideal, but it has worked. However, thanks to an update to Foodspotting’s mobile app scheduled Thursday morning, I won’t need to hop between the two apps anymore.

Each restaurant listed in Foodspotting, which has a little over 3 million downloads to date, will now have a dashboard, or profile page, instead of just a stream of food photos taken there. A bunch of new, practical information about the restaurant will be found on that page.

For example, Foodspotting is using Yelp’s own API to list Yelp’s starred review rating right on the restaurant’s page. If you want to read the reviews, you can click a link that will take you to Yelp’s mobile site. And in another smart move, right below the Yelp rating will be an option to make a reservation through OpenTable, something else Yelp offers, and menu pages supplied by Single Platform, a subscription menu service. Both Yelp and Nosh make mobile menus much easier to access from within their own apps.

Though they compete in the same space, Foodspotting co-founder and CEO Alexa Andrzejewski called Yelp data “an important complement” to her own app in a recent interview.

That’s not all the updates in Foodspotting 3.5, however. Restaurant dashboards also will aggregate not only the dishes you’ve spotted at the place, but dishes your Foodspotting friends have liked there, and recommendations of dishes you might enjoy there based on other dishes you’ve favorited or that you tend to eat often.

Since I’ve been deemed a “sandwich expert” based on the number of sandwiches I’ve spotted and reputation points I’ve earned, as an example, most restaurant dashboard pages will recommend highly rated sandwiches to me if they serve them. But beer experts or Mexican food experts will see other recommendations.

Users are getting more interesting profiles too: In addition to a prettier page with the latest dish you’ve spotted as a large image up top (similar to Facebook’s cover photo), other users will now be able to see all the dish categories you’re an expert in, the dishes you recommend most, your profile bio, location and your reputation points-based ranking.

Overall, the thing users will notice most in this app update is how much more interesting data is being presented to them — and that’s the point, said Andrzejewski. Though Foodspotting has seen more than 1.75 million photos uploaded as of April, “We’re not just a feed of photos. We actually have structure around that data. We have a lot richer data than a Yelp or Instagram would have, and that’s something we really want to play up a lot more.”

iOS and Android users should see the update roll out sometime Thursday.

Update: The Blackberry and Windows Phone version of Foodspotting’s app will not received today’s software update, as previously stated.

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Lawsuit Says Hacked Address Book Contacts Worth 60 Cents To $3 Each

Jeff John Roberts — Fri, 16 Mar 2012 03:34:24 +0000

It can be hard to put a dollar figure on privacy. Unless, that is, you’re suing Apple (NSDQ: AAPL) and app makers like Path for uploading address books from smartphones without permission.

The lawyers behind a massive class action suit filed in Austin this week cite a report that claims:

the market value of and per-Âcontact going rate for the purchase of similar contact information currently ranges from a minimum of around $0.60 per contact up to several dollars per contact.

A footnote says the report is by social acquisition company Pointiflex and that some individual contacts can be worth more than $3.

The numbers matter because the lawyers are accusing more than a dozen app makers — including Hipster, Facebook and Instagram — of unjust enrichment by taking the contacts without permission from millions of smartphone users. (You can read more about the case here).

It’s not clear if the $0.60 – $3 price per contact is an accepted industry figure or simply included for dramatic effect. In an unrelated social media lawsuit, for instance, a publisher raised eyebrows by citing “industry” figures that said every Twitter follower is worth $2.50 per month.

The new lawsuit, which purports to represent smartphone users across the country, also includes figures about how much money the illegal uploads cost in time and money. It claims that the total airtime used for the alleged “hacking” was worth more than $5,000 and referred to one app to say:

Foodspotting has admitted that it takes “a few seconds” to upload each device’s Address Book Data to its own servers. Alone, that figure may at first appear negligible; but aggregated across each Application Developer Defendant’s many millions of users, that figure becomes very large, very quickly (particularly if the App frequently polls and reports back to the App developer’s servers on any updated contents of a user’s address book). For example, just one 3-Â‐‐‘ second upload from each user of an App having a one-Â‐‐‘million user install-Â‐‐‘base amounts to the consumption in the aggregate of roughly 833 hours of wireless airtime.

Finally, here is a chart in which the plaintiffs estimate how many people were using the apps:

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Should Apple Pay For The Bad Deeds Of Its App Makers?

Jeff John Roberts — Fri, 16 Mar 2012 00:28:31 +0000

A sprawling lawsuit filed in Texas this week targets Path, Instagram, Facebook and others for instructing their apps to suck up user address book data without permission. But the most interesting part of the case may be Apple’s role in the affair and whether it had a legal duty to police the app makers.

The 152-page lawsuit, filed in Austin by veteran business lawyers, may also help shape the rules of what Silicon Valley can and can’t do with the personal data that sits in every smart phone.

The address book issue first gained widespread attention in February when the media reported that Path, a social sharing app, was helping itself to users’ contacts without permission. The incident also produced rumors that many other tech companies had been quietly doing the same thing.

A Path-related lawsuit has been anticipated for some time and now it’s arrived with a vengeance. It appears plaintiff attorneys were taking their time in search of deeper pockets and now have found them. In addition to Path, the other defendants include Twitter, Electronic Arts (NSDQ: ERTS) (maker of Cut-the-Rope), Yelp, LinkedIn (NYSE: LNKD) and Angry Birds maker Rovio.

The plaintiffs, who want to represent every iPhone and Android phone user who downloaded the apps, say the companies violated federal computer and racketeering laws as well as a series of California and Texas state laws.

They add that Apple (NSDQ: AAPL) too should pay millions for “aiding and abetting” the app makers and failing to enforce its own policies.

The claim against Apple is interesting because the lawsuit also describes how the Amazon (NSDQ: AMZN) App Store for Android and the Google (NSDQ: GOOG) Android Market (now Google Play) sell the offending apps but yet it doesn’t name them as defendants.

According to plaintiff lawyer, Carl Schwenker, this was a “strategic” decision that resulted from Apple having a “closed system” that gives the company a “significantly larger amount of control” over how the apps are used. Schwenker also suggested Apple is liable because its iOS developer library provided information that allowed the app makers to harvest address books without permission.

The lawsuit itself portrays Apple and its late founder as scheming and hypocritical over privacy issues:

For example, Apple has rejected Apps for competitive reasons .. and occasionally even for moral reasons. Mr. Jobs further expressed that Apple’s control over the approval of Apps for iOS-Â‐‐‘system devices was instituted, in part, to provide device owners “freedom from programs that steal your private data” [..]

Apparently, [Instagram's] non‐‘compliance with Apple’s own App Store policies and developer agreements is not a disqualifier for Apple’s “App of the Year” award [...]

If not for Apple’s assistance, encouragement and support, the defendants’ Trojan-Âhorse-‐‘like Apps would never have been available to the iOS-Â‐‐‘device user marketplace over the AppStore

Apple is likely to respond in court by stating that it simply provided developer tools like any other publisher, and that it’s not responsible for app makers that misuse them. I’ve reached out to Apple but the company almost never comments on lawsuits.

Schwenker, the plaintiffs’ lawyer, says the lawsuit is a seminal one in which consumers are “really looking to see reform in the industry.”

The legal case is likely to take further shape this summer when Apple and the other companies respond or file motions to dismiss.

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What’s Facebook mean for early developers? Huge traffic, apparently.

Ryan Lawler — Wed, 15 Feb 2012 21:09:13 +0000

A screenshot of Facebook's Timeline interface (click to enlarge)

Facebook released some metricsaround early partners for its app platform, showing how the apps affect their traffic. The results? Partners like Pinterest, Fab.com, Artfinder, Foodspotting and Foodily are seeing large increases in the number of users connecting to their sites.

The Timeline apps platform was first announced at Facebook’s f8 developer conference last September, with 60 apps going live just a few weeks ago. But despite the newness of the apps, many partners are already seeing a significant uptick in traffic.

In the fashion vertical, virtual pinboard site Pinterest, for instance, has seen the number of Facebook users visiting the increase by more than 60 percent. Fab.com has also seen a 50 percent increase in traffic from Facebook, with fashion and style discovery mobile app Pose touting a 5x increase in signups since implementing the app.

Food sharing app Foodspotting reported a 3x increase in the number of visits and activities, while recipe site Foodily touted a 4x increase in new users since its Timeline sharing app was released. Art discovery platform Artfinder has seen a 60 percent increase in new visitors from Facebook, while Rockmelt has seen users add 14 new articles on average, driving 20 percent more traffic.

Of course, it’ll be interesting to see how this evolves as more apps and app makers appear on the Facebook platform and users have to distinguish between the signal and noise. In the meantime, however, a relatively small number of apps seem to be benefitting from tying into the social platform.

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Foodspotting makeover emphasizes personalized dish discovery

Erica Ogg — Wed, 01 Feb 2012 14:19:16 +0000

Updated. 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 features.

The changes in the interface are intended to drive home what the founders of the San Francisco startup want this app to be: a tool for food discovery. Though some people may associate the app with people who like to take pictures of their food, Foodspotting co-founder Alexa Andrzejewski says these tweaks to the UI better illustrate the app’s intended purpose.

“We never meant for it to be just photo-sharing, it’s not Instagram for dishes or food,” she said in an interview earlier this week. “It’s trying to be a better food finding app and discovery app.”

Update: The content is there: There have been 1 million dishes uploaded to the app. Now it’s about people using those pictures to decide what they want to eat.

Here’s a round-up of the main changes:

Tell Foodspotting what you like and what you hate. There’s a little “x” that pops up on each picture of a dish. Don’t eat red meat? If you reject beef dishes in the app, over time Foodspotting won’t show you dishes that feature it. Like mac and cheese? The app will show you much more of that. In other words, the more information you give it about you, the better the app will work for you. “More data helps us understand what you like,” said Andrzejewski.
More emphasis on who’s recommending. You can see that someone loved it and that the person is an expert in a certain category (sandwiches, sushi, dessert). Reputation, in other words, is coming more to the fore.
More social features. It’s more obvious right away when you view a dish in a restaurant you’re in or near if your friends have recommended or eaten something there already.
Navigation for commenting is more intuitive. It has surfaced the buttons to tell someone “great shot” or “great find.” The option to say “want it,” “tried it” or “loved it” is hidden beneath a star button.
New logo, less emphasis on the camera, more on the lens. Andrzejewski redesigned the logo herself, replacing the “I [camera] Food” in favor of either a lens or a cookie with a bite out of it, depending on how you see it. That multilayered interpretation is intended: Andrzejewski says it’s really in the eye of the beholder. But her intention is to make the logo more representative of what Foodspotting is really about. The logo is “the camera lens or any kind of lens that you can look through to see stuff around you [that] you wouldn’t otherwise have seen,” she said. “Like food x-ray vision.”

Note: This story previously said there have been 2 million dishes uploaded to the app.

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Foodspotting spots daily deals with Scoutmob

Erica Ogg — Tue, 13 Sep 2011 17:00:37 +0000

Foodspotting, the app for finding and rating restaurant dishes, is getting in on the daily deals action. The San Francisco startup plans to announce Tuesday that it is hooking up with Atlanta-based local daily deals purveyor Scoutmob. It’s the first partnership for Scoutmob, and a sign that Foodspotting is testing the waters of the boiling-hot daily deals space.

Starting Tuesday in 13 major U.S. cities, users of Foodspotting’s iOS app will automatically see local deals from Scoutmob when they search for dishes that are nearby. Those cities are: Seattle, Portland, San Francisco, Los Angeles, Denver, Austin, Dallas, Chicago, Nashville, Atlanta, Boston, New York City and Washington, D.C.

The Foodspotting crew went with Scoutmob because they like their philosophy better than those of other daily deals companies, according to co-founder Ted Grubb. Scoutmob “believes that the ability to stumble onto a deal is a little more interesting than buying deals up front,” he said in an interview last week, seemingly drawing a distinction between Scoutmob and other group-buying sites like Groupon, Living Social and Yelp’s (now scaled back) Deals.Scoutmob coupons, which generally range from 50 percent to 100 percent off, reverses the process that Groupon or LivingSocial users are probably used to by now. Rather than being offered a deal for a restaurant via e-mail, buying it, and having to remember to use it, this doesn’t require much advance planning. Scoutmob works best with Foodspotting, according to Grubb, because “you discover deals as you’re trying to find food.”

Though Foodspotting is trying out this feature because they have an inkling their users will like it, Grubb also indicated that Foodspotting is very interested in learning more about the business of daily deals, potentially for more future opportunities. Said Grubb:

The deal space is something that’s exploding right now. There’s going to be a shakeout, so before we go full steam, we really want to understand it and see how our users react to it. Whether it’s creating our own deals–we don’t have a salesforce, but we’re very user experience and research-driven, so we want to understand the landscape before we make any decisions. For Scoutmob, they want to know what distributing their deals looks like.

Foodspotting launched in early 2010, and has more than 1.5 million downloads of the app and 800,000 reviews and photos uploaded since then. The Scoutmob partnership is available for iOS users only right now, though Grubb said to expect the Android version to roll out in “about a week.”

To learn more about high-engagement apps, the connection between mobile, social and location, and much more, don’t forget to sign up for Mobilize 2011, which runs September 26 and 27 in San Francisco.

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Nosh, an app to make your mouth water

Om Malik — Thu, 14 Jul 2011 15:00:31 +0000

One of the best part of Yelp reviews is the comments, that often point you to a good dish on the menu at a restaurant you are visiting. Foursquare does it well with “tips” left by visitors to an eating establishment or a bar that are essentially a recommendation to order a specific dish, a kind of drink or a type of tea. Of course there are apps like Chewsy and Foodspotting that have focused on food related conversations and social sharing.

Today, Firespotter Labs, an incubator of sorts backed by Google and co-founded by Craig Walker, the co-founder of Google Voice, released Nosh, an app that will compete with the incumbents.

Nosh is a mobile app for iPhone and Android that allows users to check in, rate, review and share menu items. You can think of it as a cross between Foursquare and Yelp for dishes. Nosh helps answer the question of “what’s good here?” by giving users what essentially amounts to an uber-menu on their phone, leveraging the content generated by the Nosh community to create a much better dining experience. It’s a fun and social way to share what you eat and find out what’s good everywhere.

Nosh has approximately 150,000 menus, 475,000 restaurants and 10 million menu items in its database, which makes it pretty easy for one to take a photo of a dish, check-in to a location and start sharing that with friends and family.

I have been using the app for a couple of days and there are a few things which actually will make this app a worthy competitor. Nosh does a good job of creating the follow-follower viral loop that had made Instagram and Twitter very popular with folks who don’t want to share, but want to consume the information others are sharing. Nosh as an app is pretty simple, lacks pretension and is easy to use. I would urge you to give it a try.

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Meal Snap Finds Sweet Spot at the Crossroads of Health and Fun

Darrell Etherington — Wed, 13 Apr 2011 17:03:13 +0000

Counting calories isn’t fun, which you’ll know if you’ve tried it. But a cool new iPhone app released just last week actually manages to make the exercise entertaining and light, while still keeping it informative. Meal Snap analyzes pictures of food you take with your iPhone’s camera, and returns an approximate calorie count for each item.

The app represents somewhat of a departure for DailyBurn, the company behind its creation. DailyBurn, which was acquired by IAC in 2010, is a social network that focuses on fitness and diet tracking, with an emphasis on community involvement and granular detail. Meal Snap, however, represents a slightly different approach, and one which DailyBurn CEO Andy Smith thinks will be easier to swallow for customers the company’s other products may have had more trouble reaching.

Smith says Meal Snap is part of an effort to create “fun, engaging products that help with behavioral change,” and DailyBurn has found, in taking the pulse of users, that’s the way to go in the future when it comes to health-focused apps. Health tracking is hard to maintain longterm with a high level of detail. Meal Snap is only one of a lot of different apps in the pipeline from DailyBurn based around the idea that simple, fun, focused apps are what customers are looking for, according to Smith.

Meal Snap, which sells for $2.99, doesn’t really tie-in much to DailyBurn’s own iPhone app or the site itself, but that’s sort of the point. It simply offers the ability to take a photo of food, add a caption (optional) and let the system find out how many calories it contains. The app also automatically keeps a daily log of your tracked meals, but there’s no sign-up process, and no real settings to fiddle with, although you can sign in to Twitter, Facebook and Foursquare to share your snapped meals with those social networks. The photo logging element taps in to the recent success of apps like Instagram and Foodspotting, while still providing health information at the same time.

Meal Snap succeeds because it has few barriers to usage, and does one thing very well. Social networking features are a nice bonus, but they aren’t central to the app and no login is required at any point if that’s what a user prefers. Everything happens from one central screen, and meal identification can happen in the background after you exit the app. Smith thinks “apps that do one thing, and do them very well” best represent the direction we’re headed with mobile software, and after a few days using an app as simple, impressive and intuitive as Meal Snap, I’m inclined to agree.

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Foodspotting Gets Funding for Food-Based Social Network

Mathew Ingram — Wed, 25 Aug 2010 16:00:46 +0000

Foodspotting, a startup that allows users to share photos of their favorite dishes with friends and other food-lovers, has landed a $750,000 seed round from a series of angel investors led by former Google executive Aydin Senkut and Dave McClure’s 500 Startups fund and including Path CEO Dave Morin, Google product manager for location-based services Steve Lee and Dipity founder Derek Dukes. Foodspotting recently re-launched its site and unveiled an iPhone app, and also announced a series of partnerships with the Travel Channel and travel guide Zagat.

Unlike review-based services such as Yelp, where users can post their positive or negative reviews of restaurants and other locations, founder Alexa Andrzejewski says that Foodspotting is designed for people to share photos and descriptions of their favorite meals. Users can login to the service, then look at a map of their location to find nearby food recommendations from their friends and other users. The partnership with the Travel Channel, for example, allows users to check into the app in dozens of cities that chef Anthony Bourdain has visited and locate his 100 favorite meals.

In some ways, the service is like Foursquare’s user-generated “tips” about locations (which many users say is their favorite feature) as a standalone app, and also shares some features with Urbanspoon: a restaurant-recommendation application from IAC/InterActive.

Foodspotting was founded in 2009 in San Francisco by Andrzejewski and Ted Grubb, along with former New York Times social-media maven Soraya Dorabi, who joined the company full time earlier this year. All of the founders are self-described “foodies,” but Andrzejewski says that the service isn’t designed just for those who are obsessed with food.

“It’s not just for foodies, and it’s not about ‘food porn’,” the Foodspotting co-founder said in an email. “These are just a means to an end, which is answering the question, ‘What should I eat around here?’” She said that unlike other location-based services:

We aren’t teaching people a new behavior, we’re making an existing one easier — finding and sharing food recommendations with friends. The photos just seemed to be the simplest and most resonant way to do that…We see Foodspotting as a way to bring the ‘location based service’ trend to the mass market by using the technology to meet a practical need. My mom might never ‘check in,’ but she loves being able to discover new foods around Pittsburgh using Foodspotting.

Although Andrzejewski says that the service isn’t just for foodies, at first glance the company’s single-minded focus on food seems a little restrictive for a social or location-based network. For me, food is just one element of a trip, so an application that involves photos and recommendations of food would seem to make more sense as a feature of a broader service such as Yelp. To that end, Foodspotting’s CEO says that the company has integrated its application with Foursquare and other location-based services (it offers food-related badges much like Foursquare does), and plans to do the same with Facebook’s newly launched Places feature.

Andrzejewski also said that Foodspotting plans to move beyond food into various other products and travel-related experiences in the future (although presumably that would require a name change). Embedded below is a video that describes how the service works.

What is Foodspotting? from Foodspotting on Vimeo.

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