OpenTable is now built into Evernote Food so that users can book reservations directly from the app, the company announced on its blog. They can share recipes on Facebook, Twitter and via email. And people who already used Evernote to store recipes, but weren’t using Evernote Food, can import those recipes from Evernote into the Evernote Food app.

Evernote Food has also made some content deals in Asia: “Evernote Food lovers in China and Japan will also now be able to search recipes from top regional publishers,” the company noted.

Evernote Food relaunched as an iOS and Android app last December, beefing up its discovery features like an “Explore Recipes” tab and Foursquare integration. In that way, the app aims to compete with other food discovery apps like Urbanspoon. The recipe storage and sharing features are its answer to recipe-focused apps like Say Mmm, Paprika and Gojee, and aim to take advantage of the fact that a lot of people already use Evernote to store recipes.

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“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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Facts are lazy and facts are late

Facts all come with points of view

Facts don’t do what I want them to

—From “Crosseyed and Painless” by Talking Heads (written by Brian Eno and David Byrne)

Business growth at established companies tends to decline relentlessly over time in the absence of inspired innovation, an impact I affectionately refer to as “gravity.” If CEOs want to fight this gravity and improve the long-term growth trajectory of their businesses, they need to take proactive, concrete steps to make it happen.

As CEO of OpenTable, I was always trying to develop and test a portfolio of potential new initiatives, targeted at both optimizing the core business and adding new layers of growth (see my last post on this topic, “Adding Layers to the Cake”). I wanted to identify completely new initiatives that would boost business growth — things we weren’t already doing. Things you are already doing are largely yesterday’s news, and their impact on future growth tends to wane over time. Implementing completely new innovations can help your business fight gravity.

At OpenTable, one of the most highly leveraged examples of an innovation to optimize our core business was developing a rigorous methodology to pursue and assess potential site improvements. A while after I became CEO, my predecessor Thomas Layton (who did a spectacular job positioning OpenTable for long-term success) sent me a fascinating video of Ron Kohavi (previously the director of data mining and personalization at Amazon) talking about Amazon’s approach to something Kohavi called data-driven product development. Here’s a link to one of his presentations: http://videolectures.net/kdd07_kohavi_pctce/. (FYI, it only works sporadically.)

The video details how Amazon rigorously deployed A/B testing to optimize website efficiency. Kohavi starts the presentation by showing a number of different executions of the same feature that they had tested over time. He then asks the audience to vote on which they thought had performed better. The folks in the audience — all website geeks — were unable to consistently pick the winning execution. That was mildly surprising. But what was astonishing was the delta between the results driven by different executions of the same feature: what often appeared to be a subtle change could drive huge improvements in performance.

In the video, Kohavi also talks about the impact of the “HiPPO” (Highest Paid Person’s Opinion) in the product development process. Not surprisingly, most HiPPOs believe they know intuitively what will work best (spoken by the former HiPPO at OpenTable). But pretty much none of us have the product instincts of a Steve Jobs, and Kohavi makes a very compelling case for letting the data and not the HiPPO make the decision.

So we resolved to test data-driven product development as one of OpenTable’s potential core business optimization initiatives. We tasked a talented product manager, Julie Hall, to lead the effort, and we procured the necessary tools. For the art side, we found the low-cost and highly efficacious UserTesting.com service, which enabled us to get qualitative user feedback literally overnight to inform what we planned to test. And for the science side, we bought the overpriced but also highly effective Test&Target system from Omniture, which enabled robust quantitative measurement of a number of simultaneous A/B tests.

These two tools worked together marvelously. One time, we stumbled upon a big “improvement opportunity” (aka a nasty usability problem on the site). We used usertesting.com to task a handful of unregistered users with making a reservation. Then we watched in horror as a significant minority of the test users got trapped in our “Sign-In” functionality and couldn’t complete their online reservation. In the real world, they probably would have gotten pissed off and simply picked up the phone (OpenTable’s biggest competitor for consumers) and called the restaurant, a disaster for our user acquisition, brand affinity and OpenTable economics.

Here is the offending page:

The problem we encountered was that non-registered users would set the radio button that said “I am a new OpenTable customer” and then fill in their email address and select a password, which sat under the “I am an OpenTable member” section. This combination caused the page to return an error message.

In response, we developed alternative treatments of our sign-in functionality and tested them via Test & Target. The winning executions presented non-cookied users with a form tailored directly to new users, with clear visibility of a link for existing members to sign in:

After the user hit the “Complete Free Registration” button, we then presented them with a popup that prompted them to register to become an OpenTable member:

These simple changes boosted our reservation success rate by 10 percent over the prior implementation. And a 10 percent improvement in the revenue stream that comprised well over half of the company’s total business due to one simple change was a monster win for the business.

Over time, the data-driven product development methodology at OpenTable matured into a highly disciplined testing regimen. Hundreds of tests have been run in the past few years. Not all were home runs like the change above, but lots of singles and doubles supplemented the occasional home run to have a highly material impact on the business. I can’t recommend a rigorous data-driven product development process enough to managers of website businesses — it’s extremely low-hanging fruit in the pursuit of growth.

Other examples of core business optimization initiatives that helped OpenTable boost growth include:

• Developing a new version of our enterprise software used by restaurants that improved search-to-reservation conversion by having the software better mimic the decision-making process of the person at the host stand
• Redesigning key pages of the site to improve their efficiency, such as a complete overhaul of our search-results pages (tested thoroughly through A/B testing)
• Focusing dedicated resources on optimizing the percentage of OpenTable restaurant owners who had “make an online reservation” links on their own websites, as well as improving the visibility of those links
• Applying concerted product and engineering efforts to boost our ranking in search engine results
• Hiring a lot more sales people to accelerate the acquisition of restaurants using OpenTable (not a product change, but highly effective)

The key takeaway here is that all of the above were new, concrete initiatives that were not yet part of the company’s arsenal. Their successful deployment helped fight off the impact of gravity and led to accelerated growth for the company.

Jeff Jordan is a general partner at Andreessen Horowitz. Previously, he was president and CEO of OpenTable, president of PayPal and senior vice president/general manager of eBay North America. He blogs at http://jeff.a16z.com/.

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Frankly, today’s new announcement is just an affirmation of what has been reported in the past, ad nauseam. Sarah Lacy of TechCrunch had first reported of the likely investment on May 30, 2011, and speculated that the company was valued at close to a billion dollars. We have heard similar valuation metrics as well. As we previously reported, the company is on track to take in $25 million of net revenues during the current year and is also said to be doing flow-through revenues of around half a billion. The company itself says that two million nights have been booked using the system. The company is experiencing rapid growth in overseas markets. The New York Times  reports that the company is racking up about 10,000 guests a night.

AirBnB is an amazing story of enterprenurial grit. More importantly the company is at the leading edge of what I have described as a new peer-to-peer (or person-to-person) economy. This p2p economy is an area of much interest to me. Here is a video interview with AirBnB CEO Brian Chesky, who shared his story with me a few months ago. In addition, Colleen Taylor interviewed his co-founder, Joe Gebbia, and I have embedded that interview as well.

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OpenTable, one of the big beneficiaries of the emergence of mobile Internet, acquired UK-based toptable.com today for roughly $55 million in cash. Toptable.com’s network has 3,000 restaurants in the United Kingdom and another 2,000 in the rest of Europe. OpenTable had only 900 restaurants in UK and 600 in Germany. With this acquisition, the company is looking to bulk up its European presence.

This is a great move by a company that I believe is only going to keep growing because of the consumer shift to on-the-go computing. The San Francisco-based company has seen its stock jump 140 percent so far in 2010 to $60 a share. The toptable.com acquisition continues the current wave of merger & acquisitions within the technology sector.

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According to OpenTable, of the 17 million total seated diners during the second quarter, nearly 1.3 million came from the company’s mobile apps. In the first quarter of 2010, of 15.6 million seated diners, about one million diners came from mobile users. Since it  first started offering mobile apps in 2009, OpenTable has in total seated around 4 million diners via mobile devices — with 2.3 million of those signing up in 2010. I’m one of them, and find it more convenient to use the app to make a reservation minutes after I am done making plans to dine out.

Smartphones are to computing what mobile phones were to communication. Mobile phones made it possible to talk to anyone, anywhere. Smartphones (and other such devices) free computing from the shackles of a desk. Now we can compute everywhere, which means we can browse and do short tasks wherever we are. From that perspective, we’re going to see more and more usage of web-based services such as OpenTable. I’d go out on the limb and say that in a couple of years, a majority of OpenTable’s diners will be coming from the mobile apps. For another company benefitting from this shift, check out Pandora.

According to Morgan Stanley’s Mary Meeker, today nearly 7.5 percent of OpenTable’s “seated diners” are coming from mobile applications, a share which is going to increase as the company launches newer apps. OpenTable recently released an iPad app, which is getting a lot of traction, according to Meeker.

From my perspective, I’d say OpenTable needs to add some additional functionality. For instance, it should be looking at ways to transform itself from just being a reservation service to being a combination of Yelp, Gowalla and Groupon. (Since OpenTable doesn’t have a market cap ($1.1 billion) big enough (or pockets deep enough with about $87 million in cash) to buy these companies, it would be better off partnering with one or more of them.

OpenTable has the database of places which are actually interesting to people, and customer feedback about a restaurant. It has the actual data which shows how many times people have visited a restaurant. I’d bet they have the data on how many people abandon a restaurant. That data could be used to build new behavior patterns, including loyalty programs to reward the loyalists and lure in the holdouts.

OpenTable CEO Jeff Jordan is an astonishingly smart guy — I met him once and I know that for a fact — so I’m sure there is more than a good chance he’s already thinking along those lines. If not, he should.

And if an application is free, it should stay that way. Tapulous COO and co-founder Andrew Lacy said install rates for one of its free gaming apps dropped 95 percent overnight when the company started charging 99 cents for it. On the other end of the spectrum, according to Epic Tilt’s Nikao Yang, there’s a small class of mobile users who will install paid applications regardless of the price. “The install rate doesn’t change dramatically from 99 cents to $4.99,” he said.

But if more often than not, the only price a mobile consumer wants to pay is no price at all, how can developers make money off mobile apps? The panelists, which also included OpenTable’s Scott Jampol, said advertising is a key way to monetize applications (see a related post on GigaOM Pro, subscription required). Indeed, with mobile ad spending forecast to hit $5.7 billion by 2014, mobile advertising startups such as Nexage and AdMob have been among those receiving funding despite the struggling economy.

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Updated

LogMeIn makes software that allows folks to access their computers over the Internet remotely. It competes with Citrix (GotomyPC), Microsoft and Cisco Systems’ WebEx. The company had sales of $51.7 million but lost $7.75 million in 2008. During the first quarter of 2009, LogMeIn had sales of $17.2 million and a profit of $1.5 million. John Fitzgibbon, a longtime IPO analyst and founder of IPOScoop, told The Wall Street Journal that this is the IPO that “should blow the socks off people.” 

Update: One of the reasons why I think this is a good proxy (and a good IPO is) because as a company it represent some of the current technology and consumer trends. Distributed and mobile work forces is prompting companies to look at remote access and collaboration tools more proactively. It is a trend that is only going to increase as wireless broadband becomes more pervasive. Of course, LogMeIn as a company would have to show that it can do much better than the most recent results — but as I said: opportunity exists. (Hopefully this answers the questions raised by some of the readers in comments below.)

This would be the second technology IPO in as many months and may have unintended consequences. OpenTable, another start-up, went public in May 2009. A LogMeIn offering could result in more technology mergers and acquisitions. The possibility of more IPOs may drive up prices for likely buyout candidates, giving buyers a much-needed impetus to loosen their purse strings and snap up likely candidates.

Related Post: Tech IPOs Are Back — but Only for Those That Don’t Need Cash.

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Buyers with cash to spend on tech startups have enjoyed a period of depressed valuations since last fall, but M&A deals have been few and far between as stock prices have fluctuated and uncertainty has prevailed. More recently, though, increased stability in the public markets has led to reports of rebounding M&A activity. A closed IPO window typically coincides with a buyer’s market for tech companies on the M&A side, while superior IPO opportunities tend to drive prices upward as stakeholders believe they have alternatives beyond a sale. Could OpenTable’s striking success — at least thus far — portend a run on venture-backed startups before their prices rise again?

According to one boutique investment banker I spoke with, there’s currently a perception among some buyers that it’s time to move quickly while target companies are still cheap. “People with cash who’ve been hiding out on the sidelines are coming back aggressively,” he said. A McKinsey study released last month showed that high-tech companies that became stronger during the post-dot-com bust of 2000-2002 frequently did so by making acquisitions, and did so most effectively when they waited for more attractive valuations later in the downturn before buying. Though some still believe valuations will continue to drop, companies such as Yahooare showing interest in acquisitions, and Internet stocks are beginning to rally again. And although no tech companies are on deck for upcoming IPOs in OpenTable’s wake, the perception that a candidate could go public sooner that expected could raise its price on the M&A market.

To be sure, OpenTable wasn’t a typical IPO candidate. Founded in 1998, the dot-com survivor is way past the 4-to-7-year-old window in which most VCs seek to gain liquidity, and has even outlasted the 10-year lifespan of most VC funds. It’s also looking to raise proceeds to compensate insiders, rather than fill its coffers for growth as many tech startups do. But the mere existence of any IPO window at all, let alone one in which a company that initially intended to price its shares as low as $12 saw them change hands for as much as $35.50 on the first day of trading, surely represents a psychological change from a few months ago, and may signal a fresh chance for VCs to gain liquidity through a sale as well.

Shares of OpenTable, which were initially set at a range of $12-$14 and were subsequently repriced to the $16-$18 range, finally priced at $20. They ended their first day of trading at $31.89, up just shy of 60 percent.

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