By relying on the smartphone’s built-in camera, the app for last-minute, day-of bookings is looking to enhance its carefully curated hotel choices with photo-based user reviews. Hotel Tonight started asking for users for simple thumbs up or down reviews nine months ago and began sharing those responses as “percentages of users who’d recommend this hotel” in September.

But the Snap Your Stay feature will add more information that a simple user recommendation. The new feature is sort of a guided scavenger hunt: users get a template with places to fill in six photos, with a request for specific highlights of the room you’re staying in an a “wild card” photo for something you liked about the hotel. The idea is for it to be simple and fast, with just a few taps on your phone.

“We wanted people to put in more info about what they liked about that hotel, but we didn’t think enterting a ton of text was the right paradigm for mobile,” said Hotel Tonight founder and CEO Sam Shank in a phone call this week. “We want it to be something you do during your stay, not after your stay.”

Other travel and booking sites want user reviews, but the major ones, TripAdvisor’s, for example, require text input even in their mobile apps. And Yelp doesn’t even allow mobile reviews — you have to sit down at a computer to compose them.

Hence, Hotel Tonight’s attempt to stand out with photo-oriented reviews. This method allows users filling out reviews to avoid typing descriptions on their phone — and users reading them don’t have to wade through pages of text on their phone when they’re trying to make a last-minute hotel decision. In addition to that, Shank says it’s a good way of only allowing reviews from people who’ve actually stayed at the hotel and booked through the app.

Because smartphone cameras are so good, Shank is confident that images submitted will be pretty high quality. But please, no Instagram photos: “We want Hotel Tonight photos to look different, don’t want them to look vintage, or black and white, or like they’re from 1977. So we have a dimmer switch to brighten them up.” Which, Shank points out, is going to be good for indoor room photos.

Hotel Tonight, just over two years old, is now in 12 countries, nearly 100 cities and has been downloaded to 5 million iOS and Android devices.

In addition to the photo-based room reviews, the app also plans to introduce on Wednesday guaranteed room rates: if you find a lower rate on another site, tell Hotel Tonight and you’ll get the dollar difference back in Hotel Tonight user credits.

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The list of honorees follows below, and it’s a list packed with newcomers as well as Silicon Valley veterans. Thanks to all for voting in the nomination process, and now that we’ve narrowed it down to five candidates for each award, don’t forget to vote for which person or company you think is most deserving. Voting begins today (the voting page can be found here, and the rules are here) and closes on January 24th.

As a reminder, the Crunchies, a joint production with our friends at Techcrunch and Venturebeat, will take place on Thursday, January 31, 2013, from 7:30pm to 11:30pm at Louise M. Davies Symphony Hall, 201 Van Ness Ave, San Francisco. You can purchase tickets here.

So, without any further delay, the nominees for the 2012 Crunchies are as follows:

Best Technology Achievement
Baumgartner Jump
Google Glass
Mars Curiosity
SpaceX docks with International Space Station
Tesla Supercharger Network

Best Collaborative Consumption Service
Airbnb
Get It Now/Postmates
Lyft
TaskRabbit
Uber

Best E-Commerce Application
Fab
Hotel Tonight
Karma/Facebook Gifts
Warby Parker
Zulily

Best Mobile Application
Evernote
Google Maps
Grindr
Instagram
Square

Fastest Rising Startup
Exec
Lyft
Pinterest
Snapchat
Stripe

Best Content Discovery Application
Flipboard
Instapaper
Pinterest
Prismatic
Tumblr

Best Design
Facebook Timeline
Medium
Paper by FiftyThree
Square
Svbtle

Best Bootstrapped Startup
FreshBooks
Instapaper
Nimbus
Techmeme
Upverter

Sexiest Enterprise Startup
Asana
Box
Cloudera
Plexxi
Zendesk

Best International Startup
Hailo
Rovio
Soundcloud
Spotify
Xiaomi

Best Education Startup
Codecademy
Coursera
Edmodo
Khan Academy
Udacity

Best Hardware Startup
Lit Motors
Lockitron
Makerbot
Nest
Raspberry Pi

Best Time Sink
Angry Birds Star Wars
Buzzfeed
Letterpress
Pinterest
WhatsApp

Biggest Social Impact
Donors Choose
Indiegogo
Kickstarter
Kiva
Reddit

Angel of the Year
Michael Arrington
Chris Dixon
Paul Graham
David Lee
Chris Sacca

VC of the Year
Marc Andreessen and Ben Horowitz
Matt Cohler
Jim Goetz
Michael Moritz
Peter Thiel

Founder of the Year
Nathan Blecharczyk, Brian Chesky, Joe Gebbia (Airbnb)
Kevin and Julia Hartz (Eventbrite)
Elon Musk (SpaceX, Tesla)
Kevin Systrom (Instagram)
Nir Zuk (Palo Alto Networks)

CEO of the Year
Dick Costolo (Twitter)
Phil Libin (Evernote)
Marissa Mayer (Yahoo!)
Larry Page (Google)
Mark Zuckerberg (Facebook)

Best New Startup of 2012
Coursera
Crowdtilt
Lyft
Snapchat
Waze

Best Overall Startup of 2012
Fab
Github
Instagram
Palantir
Square

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YPlan’s Passbook-integrated iOS app only works for the British capital at launch, but it offers an interesting range of events, from gigs (Hot Chip and Chemical Brothers co-manager Robert Linney is a backer) to shows, whiskey tasting, rooftop cinema and, er, chessboxing (a thing, apparently).

“For bands, live concerts and events present the biggest revenue drivers. But many of these live events aren’t sold to capacity, with millions of seats staying empty every year,” Linney said. “YPlan is aiming to change that for the better. Not only does it give YPlan’s customers immediate access to some of the coolest live performances in London, but it also helps the artists by allowing more fans to discover and see their shows.”

Compared with social event discovery services such as Vamos, this is a much more curated affair, with an element of learning the user’s tastes.

“We learn everything from what the user does,” YPlan founder Rytis Vitkauskas told me. “We track the clicking and booking patterns and we become smarter over time. This only works once you have lots and lots of events. That is ultimately the objective, to always have a shortlist, but a pretty well-tailored list.”

Now, about that ‘lots and lots of events’ point. YPlan isn’t really starting out with that many, largely because it sources its events directly. The sales team is led by an ex-Time Out digital director, though, so there’s clearly experience on that front.

YPlan quietly took in a round earlier this year and, according to Vitkauskas, it won’t need any more cash until next year, when it expands out of London. “Then we do the States, starting from the East Coast, then back to Europe — Berlin and Spanish cities,” he said.

Given the highly curated nature of the service, I would imagine that YPlan will have to be very deliberate about its growth strategy. But it will be interesting to see how it pans out, particularly as a more tightly-controlled counterpoint to the social tack taken by the likes of Vamos.

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PrimaTable was founded in early 2012. The two co-founders, CEO Jamie Davidson and Colin Zima (both former Googlers), will become VP of Product and Data Scientist, respectively, at Hotel Tonight. PrimaTable will also bring along its main developer. PrimaTable had done a limited beta of its software earlier this year and was looking to possibly raise another round of funding when their investors introduced them to Hotel Tonight chief Sam Shank.

Shank, meanwhile, had been looking to hire people to build out its platform — the system that helps hotels advertise their same-day room vacancies to consumers — when he had a fortuitous meeting with the PrimaTable guys, he said.

“We were really impressed by the caliber of these people, the amount of thinking they’ve done in this topic,” said Shank. “Instead of taking another round, we convinced them to join forces with us at HT and bring it to a much bigger audience.”

Shank would not disclose the price or any financial details of the acquisition. But he did say — without naming names — that Hotel Tonight beat out a large internet company for the acquisition. “Public internet companies were interested in the acquisition as well,” he told me. “To be able to acquire them in a competitive situation was pretty amazing.”

What will this mean for users of Hotel Tonight’s iOS or Android app? Hopefully nothing, Shank says. “From a consumer standpoint, our goal is for you not to notice this because our front-end apps are so simple, and we want to keep that experience effortless. Over time [users] will notice more hotels, better inventory with more relevance.”

Relevancy is a feature Hotel Tonight has been actively trying to improve. A few weeks ago the company released a significant app upgrade that introduced some limited user reviews and personalized recommendations of hotels they might like. As Hotel Tonight has grown from 29 hotels in just San Francisco, New York City and Los Angeles when it launched in 2011 to the current 1,500 hotels in 50 cities in the U.S., Canada and U.K., figuring out how to help customers cut through too many options and clutter is paramount.

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One of the design changes with this goal in mind is an important first for Hotel Tonight: it’s dipping its toes into user reviews. This is significant because the premise of Hotel Tonight has been to present you with a short, curated list of hotels the company recommends. By adding just a basic rating, in the form of a thumbs up or thumbs down (no long-winded written reviews) the company is giving users more subjective information about that hotel and whether they should pick it.

But don’t worry, there’s not going to be very many poorly rated hotels on the list. The average score is 91 percent, and Shank says if a hotel’s user ratings fall below a certain threshold, Hotel Tonight will stop working with them. It’s data the company has already been using for this purpose, but is now making it public and useful for users.

The other major change is the addition of three bonus “impulse deal” hotels to each destination city’s screen. This is a feature that will get better the more you use the app, and should help cut through the increasing volume of lodging options as the company continues to expand its offerings. (Hotel Tonight now has 1,500 hotels in 50 cities in the U.S., Canada, and the U.K.)

Starting Tuesday, the app will begin to customize the first hotel options it shows you based on picks you’ve made in the past. For example, if you open up the app in New York City, among the top hotels you’ll see first on the screen is the hotel that’s closest to you at the time, and two local hotels that are similar to the type of place you’ve stayed at before. If you usually stay in “hip” or “basic” hotels, the app will show you those kinds of places first, for example.

Using the thumbs up/thumbs down user reviews, the app will also show you hotels that users  like  you have picked. Hotel Tonight is using a similar methodology to what Amazon has been using for years to recommend products, the “people who like this, also like that” approach. “We’ll start showing you stuff that’s relevant to you personally,” said Shank. Among the top few hotels on a city’s page, “not everyone will see the same three things,” he added.

I like the idea of giving users more signals as to whether a hotel is good or bad. Sometimes I do too much research on hotels in the app because I want to make sure that users similar to me like a place as much as HT’s staff does. With user percentage ratings and recommendations based on past places I’ve stayed, I think this will keep users in the app and help them make decisions faster.

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The company signaled it had its eyes set on London after it announced the opening of an office there in April, and made its ambitions clear for all of Europe — and beyond — two weeks ago when it revealed a huge funding round of $23 million.

In a phone interview from London on Tuesday, CEO Sam Shank told me why the city was first on his list when thinking of expansion to Europe.

“It’s an English-speaking country, it’s got a lot of travel between the U.S., so there’s a lot of existing demand. And we’re already working with hotel groups with properties in the U.S. who were asking for Hotel Tonight in London,” he said. “And it has lot of characteristics of some of our most successful U.S. cities, it’s similar to New York in a lot of ways.”

And that’s promising, he says, because New York City is one of the company’s most successful markets, along with San Francisco, Chicago and Boston.

Localization efforts

Hotel Tonight is also plunging into the growing London tech scene: its office — which currently is staffed by two people but will be expanding soon — is in the city’s tech hub in the Shoreditch neighborhood. The London office will act as the launchpad for the company’s eventual expansion to the European continent.

That effort will be overseen by Heather Leisman, who was just hired as Hotel Tonight’s Managing Director for Europe. Leisman recently left Jetsetter, the struggling luxury travel deals subsidiary of Gilt Groupe, where she was head of supply and operations. “She’s just phenomenally well connected in the travel industry,” Shank says.

The list of London hotels available upon launch with Hotel Tonight’s app is small and carefully curated — which is the company’s m.o.. Like in other cities, the hotels were chosen based partly on reviews from consumer review sites like Yelp and Trip Advisor, as well as editorial reviews and competitors’ reviews.

“We ask [other hotels] who they want to be featured with,” Shank explained. “Even if they’re competitors, they want to be featured with other hotels on the same level of quality.”

In London’s case, the selection of hotels is focused on hip, luxury lodging: Belgraves, Blakes Hotel London, St. Martins Lane London, The Langham and The Cadogan.

Hotel Tonight is based in San Francisco and launched in early 2011. To date there have been 2 million downloads of its mobile apps.

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Hoberman’s PROFounders Capital vehicle is one of several investors in a funding round announced on Thursday, which brought in $2.5 million for the mobile-focused last-minute hotel booking service.

Other big names in the round included London’s DN Capital, SoftTech VC’s Jeff Clavier, former American Express global chief Charles Petruccelli and Carlos Domingo, the head of Telefonica Digital.

Not a bad lineup, considering Blink has only had its virtual doors open for the last six months. Already, the company offers last-minute hotel bookings in 39 cities across seven countries (Spain, Italy, Germany, the UK, Portugal, France and Ireland), with more than 400 hotels on its roster.

Customers get a choice of four hotels each night in each city – Blink says it does this so it can negotiate the best rates on exclusive terms, and that Blink reps personally visit the hotels before they are selected.

Blink has seen more than 160,000 downloads of its Android and iOS apps. It also claims to be the largest mobile reservations platform of its kind in Europe, and promises hotels that it’ll be giving them access to more than a million customers by the end of this year.

Going global

This mobile-led strategy is smart – after all, a truly last-minute booking will usually be made on the move – but there are rivals out there. These include Hotel Tonight and Priceline, and it would come as no surprise if Blink used its new reserves to take them on on their home turf.

The company said in the funding announcement that it would use the cash to improve its product and expand internationally. And, of course, most of those investors are from the U.S. and European countries outside of Spain.

Blink co-founder Rebeca Minguela used the funding statement to repeat a now-well-worn truism: that getting VC funding is a pain in mainland Europe.

“In Spain, private funding is more limited than in countries like the U.S. and valuations of start-ups are generally lower,” Minguela said. “This, coupled with bureaucratic obstacles, not only in Spain but in Europe, means that entrepreneurs have to rely on foreign funding or, in many cases, give up on their project.”

Of course, the funding is still there for countries on the Continent, even if it sometimes doesn’t come from local sources. For Hoberman and his co-investors, the Spanish VC scene’s loss might be their gain.

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Fresh off its $1 billion valuation, Airbnb is the most common reference point for all manner of “this for that” pitches bouncing around the Valley right now, with many new ventures proposing to be the “the Airbnb of X.”

But Airbnb is only one species of the sharing economy genus — a genus that will stratify over the next few quarters.

Real-time makes your brand a hero

Hotel Tonight is a great example of the flip side of the Airbnb coin. It focuses on real-time reservations, and the real-time use of latent capacity.

Airbnb’s transactions typically take place five or more days in advance of a stay, and any requests inside that window are put on a standby list. In contrast, Hotel Tonight only offers rooms for the current night, with a cutoff of 2 a.m. local time. It’s a fascinating constraint, and one that has propelled their business forward. When people need a room immediately and you’re able to provide them one, they will remember you.

Real-time can command premiums, not just discounts

Of course, different markets and different kinds of capacity have unique sensitivities to time.

Uber’s car service business is incredibly time-sensitive. One of its most common use cases is trips to and from the airport, which usually involves a high-stakes deadline on at least one end of the journey.

Other popular uses are travel on a busy holiday (think Halloween or New Year’s Eve in New York City during a public transportation strike).

The more time-sensitive a market becomes for buyers and sellers, the more lucrative the corresponding business opportunity.

This is an old lesson — price and revenue optimization wizards hold time in the highest regard. And as the time-sensitivity of a situation increases, the number of parties we’re willing to entrust with our affairs dwindles to a small handful.

Real-time puts coveted data in your pocket

What Hotel Tonight, Uber and my company LiquidSpace have in common is that we all know a lot about our customers’ travel patterns.

Additionally, we can extrapolate a ton of information about preferences — from who customers are likely to collaborate with to where they like to work or hang out.

With this real-time data, we’re primed to find other ways to make your stay, ride or meeting that much more enjoyable. We can quickly provide add-ons that customers need, such as snacks or printing, or partner with other vendors who can.

Whether by offering new services or opening up this powerful real-time data, we are exposing new revenue streams that the sharing economy enables.

With enough time, any latent capacity can be utilized. Each year at South by Southwest in Austin, Texas, we see twelve month’s worth of planning make use of every nook and cranny.

On short notice, sharing economies are harder to organize, and they involve more risk. Real-time capabilities mean that you sit closer to purchasing decisions, closer to strategic imperatives, closer to profit and loss, closer to sealed deals and averted crises.

Real-time is difficult, and precisely because it is so challenging to do real-time well, and safely, the market will reward those who invest in making the “here and now” a priority. In short, you’re closer to risk, and closer to reward.

Consumers want real-time access, and businesses demand it. The sharing economy is not only online, it’s also picking up speed.

Mark Gilbreath is co-founder and CEO of LiquidSpace, a mobile application that helps people find and share available workspaces.

Image courtesy of Flickr user psd.

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The company has raised $8.65 million in the round so far, the documents show, with $446,000 of the offering remaining to be sold. Hotel Tonight previously raised around $3 million in venture capital earlier this year, so this new batch of funding will bring its total outside investment to around $12 million.

Hotel Tonight launched in December 2010 and has been growing steadily since; it now offers deals in more than 25 cities. But the company is not without competition — Priceline recently debuted its own day-of hotel booking feature — so the money will certainly come in handy as it works to keep its edge in the increasingly hot travel app space.

We’ve reached out to Hotel Tonight for comment on the funding but have yet to hear back; we’ll update this post with any new information we receive.

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The feature only works for discounted three- and four-star hotels, and only for rooms available that night. It’s in 34 major cities to start with, with promise to expand further.

Sound familiar? It’s essentially the same concept as mobile last-minute hotel booking app Hotel Tonight, whose latest expansion into vacations I covered Thursday. Of course Priceline.com is huge compared to Hotel Tonight, with hundreds of thousands of hotel listings. Hotel Tonight is purely mobile, with no desktop or web equivalent, and in only a couple dozen cities. Are its 750,000 app downloads in nine months making its much larger competitors nervous, or is this market for finding deals on quality hotel rooms at the last minute just now ripe for tapping?

Perhaps both. Priceline says 70 percent of the bookings via its existing mobile app are already for rooms the same day a person plans to stay. I talked with Priceline spokesman Brian Ek:

We just saw that with the sheer number of people booking of the same night, obviously there’s a market need. In general we’re finding that mobile apps we put out there are being used by a different set of travelers; we a call them ‘the untethered traveler.’ They tend to hold off booking their travel reservations until the last minute…many of them wait until they’re actually in town.

Ek said that’s very different from “what you typically expect of a desktop consumer.”

It’s easier to target travelers toting smartphones with higher quality, and sometimes pricier rooms, too. Hotel Tonight has a hand-picked selection of “hip, elegant, or basic” rooms to choose from. Priceline says it’s sticking to just three- and four-star rooms for its new service because the statistics of the booking habits of mobile travelers show “they treat themselves well” when on the road. Eighty-two percent of mobile customers chose three-star hotels or higher, versus 75 percent of those who book travel from a desktop computer, according to Priceline’s findings.

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