Now the two have decided to merge and build the mother of all delivery and takeout portals. The companies said combined GrubHub and Seamless will have a presence in more than 500 cities and more than 20,000 restaurant clients. In 2012, the companies said they processed a combined $875 million in gross food sales, bringing in $100 million in revenue (though neither has taken the unusual step of accepting Bitcoin as payment like competitor Foodler.)

The companies didn’t reveal any financial terms of the deal, nor did they unveil a name for the combined the company. GrubHub co-founder and CEO Matt Maloney will become CEO of the merged entity, while Seamless CEO Jonathan Zabusky will become President.

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The payments startup is now chummy with the top two POS terminal and software makers used by U.S. restaurants (the other is Micros), and has deals will several smaller suppliers. The startup still has a long way to go before all of the burger joints and bistros that use those systems adopt its payments solution, but it’s comfortable in the knowledge that half the restaurants in the country could easily adopt that solution.

LevelUp offers both its own mobile payments app and white label technology that retailers can integrate into their own apps. In both cases, the implementation is pretty simple: they generate QR codes linked to a customer’s credit card information, which they can then scan into a terminal at the restaurant to make a mobile payment.

That terminal could be as basic as the proprietor’s smartphone (several previously cash-only merchants have used LevelUp to start accepting credit card payments), requiring no additional hardware, or it could take the form of a dedicated terminal. LevelUp takes 2 percent off the top of any transaction, but it also uses its platform to track customer data for rewards and promotions, bridging the gap between a loyalty program and a payment processing service.

At the end of 2012, LevelUp’s apps had about 500,000 users and it was handling about $5 million in transactions each month. Even in the nascent mobile payments market that makes it relatively small, however – in 2012, Square’s annual processing rate was $10 billion. But LevelUp believes it can become the Android to the Square’s iOS by working with other players like NCR in transaction value chain.

That’s one of the main reasons is focusing on independent restaurants, LevelUp said. Most restaurants already have a fully functioning (and often expensive) POS system in place. Instead of requiring a business to implement a new system for mobile payments, LevelUp merely acts as an appendage to their existing ones.

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Paying for food online with Bitcoins isn’t new. Pizzaforcoins has famously set up a site that takes Bitcoins in exchange for ordering a pie from your local Domino’s. Some entrepreneurial food purveyors online, such as Bitcoin Coffee, also deal in the digital currency. (For a detailed explanation of how the Bitcoin economy works, check out my colleague David Meyer’s comprehensive post.) But what’s interesting about Foodler is its scope.

Foodler is an online delivery and takeout portal a similar to GrubHub that hosts menus and handles orders for restaurants in 48 states, and it has made Bitcoin another option for payment alongside credit cards, debit cards and cash on delivery. You can’t pay for a pizza or your mu shu pork order with Bitcoin directly to the delivery guy, but Foodler has set up an account portal that generates a unique deposit address and QR code, which customers can use to deposit their Bitcoins. Using the current USD exchange rate, Foodler turns them into FoodlerBucks, which can then be used to pay for orders and even tip through its online portal or mobile app.

It might sound like a marketing gimmick, but Foodler CEO Christian Dumontet said the company is firm believer in innovation, whether it’s technological, economic or, in the case of Bitcoin, both.

“We understand that Bitcoin users are a small, but influential, group of early adopters and Bitcoin orders will likely be a small percentage of all Foodler payments this year, but as early adopters ourselves, we are excited to support the community and help it grow,” Dumontet said in an email. “We were surprised to receive our first Bitcoin payment from a customer in San Francisco just hours after making it available in our system – prior to any kind of public announcement.”

Of course, given the recent nosedive in Bitcoin value, some people may be reluctant to part with their Bitcoins just yet – it would take four times the amount of Bitcoin to buy an $8 burrito today than it did last week. Still, Dumontet isn’t letting the volatility of the crypto-currency phase him. He said would Foodler would hold on to the some of the Bitcoins it does receive, instead of immediately cashing them in for U.S. dollars, and it plans to participate in the Bitcoin economy by seeking out vendors that accept the currency.

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What’s more, Food Genius knows exactly how much more restaurants are charging for adding that sprinkling of basil to turn a standard pie into a pizza Margherita. Food Genius can tell you what hot combinations of ingredients, flavors and culinary buzzwords can boost the appeal – and thus the price – of a dish. In short, Food Genius has built the country’s biggest virtual test kitchen with menu data.

Food Genius has compiled a mammoth database of 100,000 unique menus from independent and chain restaurants around the country, giving it a massive data set to play with, said Justin Massa, Food Genius co-founder and CEO. The startup gets its data from some key menu aggregation partners, the biggest being fellow Chicago food outfit GrubHub. It also takes in readily available menu data from the national and regional restaurant chains, sometimes manually scraping data off of restaurants websites.

Any company can aggregate menus, Massa admits, but Food Genius is only using those raw lists of ingredients and dish descriptions as a starting point. It’s built parsing and categorization algorithms that break down those menu items into 14,000 ingredients, techniques and concepts that make up its internally developed culinary taxonomy. From there, it ferrets out the relationships between the items, like what categories they fall into and how different ingredients and techniques are commonly paired.

By crunching that data, Food Genius had generated more than 1 billion different food concepts, each of which represents a sort of meta-dish. Some of those concepts have been produced millions of times over in restaurants all over the country, like cheeseburgers, but many more are specific to individual restaurants. And others are just concepts inferred from Food Genius’s data.

Teaching a Kraft to cook like a Wolfgang Puck

While it might be tempting to think that Food Genius wants to use its data to automate the creative process of cooking, Massa quickly dispelled that notion. While Food Genius can suggest ingredient combinations based on patterns its database detects, pure math could never replace the chef, Massa said.

Instead, Food Genius is doing the opposite. It’s tracking trends in independent restaurants and relaying that information to big food companies – restaurant chains, food distributors, consultants and most importantly food manufacturers.

“The big food companies take it on faith that innovation starts in independent kitchens,” Massa said. “The problem is the lifecycle of product development at a company like Kraft is two years. Meanwhile, in an independent restaurant, a new dish could be conceived and executed in 30 minutes.”

Food trends are becoming ever more fleeting. Bacon in desserts or gourmet sliders may be hot concepts today, but they could become passé quickly. By using Food Genius’s database, food companies can identify food trends with true mass appeal, and they can latch onto those trends early. The last thing a major food manufacturer wants to do is invest large sums of money and time bringing to market a new line of frozen southwestern chicken entrees, only to discover that the consumers are now into Thai cuisine with pork.

“We want to give them the confidence that they can catch a trend within nine months, rather than within two years,” Massa said.

Taking food analysis to the next level

The company plans to take its service live in January, and already has half a dozen food industry consultants and food product manufacturers signed up. It’s selling its data through a licensing model, with monthly fees starting at $2,000 per user.

Food Genius is one of the growing number of companies to emerge from Excelerate Labs’ accelerator program in Chicago. In September, it raised a $1.2 million funding round led by Hyde Park Venture Partners and Hyde Park Angels with participation by New World Ventures, IDEO, Amicus Capital and I2A Fund.

Massa said right now its customers are using Food Genius data to develop their own food concepts, but as the company scales it hopes to offer more custom analysis. Instead of trying to identify food trends themselves, Food Genius will tell them what trends they should be paying attention to, Massa said.

The startup is also looking for ways to refine its data by tracking what diners are actually ordering, not just what restaurants are offering. Knowing what dishes are in the menu doesn’t tell you which ones are popular. Food Genius would like to delve deeper into sentiment analysis, but Massa will that such data-mining techniques aren’t fully baked, especially when it comes to people’s mercurial tastes in food.

Food Genius could start pairing specific restaurant dishes with reviews in Yelp or dish sightings on apps like Foodspotting, but the information it would gather would be of questionable value.

“Say there’s this one guy who has written 10 Yelp reviews about 10 different brisket dishes he’s had, and he hated every single one of them,” Massa said. “Does he really hate brisket? Or does he really love it? Clearly he’s going to order brisket again at the next place he goes to.”

Saute pan photo courtesy of Shutterstock user Fedor Kondratenko; Dining photo courtesy of Shutterstock user Everett Collection

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That’s why I’ve been excited about Tabbedout, an Austin, Texas startup that has been trying to speed up the process of paying at a restaurant or bar using a smartphone. The company has been signing up restaurants that use its mobile app to help customers open up a tab on their phone and then check out with a stored credit card. Now, it’s letting restaurants that have their own mobile app easily embed the Tabbedout experience with a mobile SDK for iOS and Android. This way customers aren’t forced to use Tabbedout’s app.

Tabbedout in April integrated its payment technology into T.G.I.F’s Friday’s app, which was the first time it offered its mobile payments in another app. With the mobile SDK, other restaurants can drop in Tabbedout’s payment framework into their app, which can communicate securely with Tabbedout’s infrastructure.

Consumers just open the restaurant app and start a tab using a stored credit card. During their meal, they can see what orders have been added to their bill. When it comes time to settle up, they can just pay with their credit card from the app. Users can also choose to split the bill with other people in their party. Unlike other mobile payment systems, Tabbedout doesn’t rely on businesses owners buying scanners or NFC readers. That’s because it’s integrated on the backend with point of sale terminals from Micros, Future POS, Focus and Dinerware, which covers about 70-80 percent of the restaurants and bars in the U.S.

Arturo Coto, VP of sales and marketing Tabbedout told me that restaurants are starting to realize that the slow payment process can be a liability for them. Many have traditionally prized the payment interaction as the final chance to leave a good impression.

“What they’re realizing is delays in the process like if a server is busy, can only ruin the experience,” Coto said. “They’re starting to see the value of mobile payments as an enhancement to the guest experience rather than taking away from that last touch point.”

Tabbedout is currently deployed in 1,000 locations including 380 T.G.I.F. restaurants. It has two more big chains poised to integrate Tabbedout into their mobile apps, Coto said. The new SDK will not incorporate PayPal as a funding source, even though Tabbedout started testing PayPal integration at restaurants in Austin earlier this year.

The new SDK won’t work for restaurants that don’t have their own mobile apps. But for those that do, it makes their apps a lot more usable instead of just offering menus or location finders. And it really shows how the checkout experience can be improved through mobile payments. Having to wait for a waiter to appear several times has often kept me at a restaurant much longer than I wanted to. If I can be assured my bill is accurate and then pay when I’m ready to pay, that makes the whole experience more enjoyable.

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Duda is bringing hundreds of thousands of small-and medium-sized businesses to the mobile Web, giving food trucks and haute cuisine joints, attorneys and dentists, their first taste of the mobile Internet and a means for their customers to find them on their phones.

We last reported on Duda when Google tapped the Silicon Valley/Israeli startup to power its Go Mo program, which will optimize any Website for mobile and host it for a year at no charge. But the company has also licensed its service to AT&T, HP, Yahoo and Webs.com, leading to enormous growth in its business. Last August it was hosting less 100,000 sites. Now it’s up 1.65  million, CMO Dennis Mink said.

A good portion of those sites are in the personal rather than the small business category. Duda will allow any user to throw a free but ad-supported mobile-optimized version of their Website online, so anyone wanting to optimize their 100 greatest Baywatch moments tribute page or Twilight fan fiction portal can easily do so. Duda’s primary customers, though, are the ones that either pay $9 a month — or come through Go Mo — to access its premium features.

It beats advertising on public benches

Including pizzerias, restaurants are Duda’s biggest customers, accounting for 28 percent of its premium sites. Duda recently began direct integration with Open Table, allowing the more sophisticated set to place reservations directly from the mobile browser – rather than just order up delivery with click-to-call.

Food trucks, which already depend heavily on social media to bring in customers, have also begun to use the service, Mink said. For instance, Brooklyn’s Mexicue uses a Duda mobile site to broadcast its trucks’ current location, to point people to its Twitter and Facebook accounts and to detail its current menu.

Professional services makes up the next biggest category, encompassing locksmiths, plumbers and a whole lot of lawyers, Mink said. Health and Wellness businesses account for 10 percent of its sites. About half of those are beauty salons and spas, but a good portion of the remaining chunk are doctors and dentists.

“For service professionals, they want phone calls,” Mink said. “If you’re a lawyer or a dentist, that’s how you build your livelihood.”

Another major category is travel and tourism, which is dominated by small, privately owned hotels and B&Bs, Mink said. The logic here is that when people are on the road they often don’t have an easy way to access a computer. Having a mobile site is therefore key to landing last-minute business.

What Duda can’t do (but is working on)

Duda’s site builder does have some limitations. It’s not building new and distinct mobile pages for its customers. Rather it automatically plugs content from their full Websites into template pages optimized for the mobile browser. The approach may not be as slick as a custom-designed mobile Website, but it has its advantages, Mink said. It’s cheap, and you can get a mobile Web presence up within minutes. It’s also easier to manage, since any update you make to the full site is automatically reflected in the mobile version.

That said, more sophisticated features don’t carry over to the microbrowser. For the hotel and B&B sites, for instance, it’s a simple button push to call the front desk, but if you try to access their online booking features, you’re taken to a full PC browser page, which is difficult to use on a small screen. Duda also can’t carry over in-site e-commerce features, which explains the dearth of e-retail businesses among its customers.

But Mink said Duda is solving many of those problems through partnerships. Its integration with Open Table allows restaurants to book digital reservations. And it just reached an agreement with eBay to mobilize its ProStores customers retail sites, though it charges more for the feature (a $99 one-time setup fee and a $20 monthly subscription).

Duda has raised $8.4 million since its founding in 2009. Its latest Series B round brought in $6 million and was led by Pitango, Israel’s largest venture capital firm. While the company was founded in Tel Aviv, it is now based in Mountain View, Calif.

Food truck image courtesy of Flickr user edibleNY; Feature photo courtesy of Shutterstock user Lasse Kristensen

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That’s where a startup called Ness Computing comes in. On Thursday, Ness launched its debut iOS app, a “personal search engine” that aims to provide highly personalized restaurant recommendations. In an interview this week, Ness co-founders Corey Reese and Paul Twohey took me through an extensive demo of the app, and I have to say, it’s pretty awesome. Essentially it’s like a Pandora Radio for restaurants: From the start it’s almost creepily accurate with its recommendations, and the more you use it, the better it gets.

Tailored restaurant ratings

Here’s how it works: You sign into Ness using either your email address or Facebook credentials. If you sign in with an email address, it asks you to begin rating nearby restaurants that you may have visited to start getting an idea for the kinds of places you like (it knows your location via your mobile geo-data, but you can enter in any place in the United States too.) Once you have rated ten places, it can begin to start offering recommendations of other spots you may also enjoy. Ness assigns each restaurant with a so-called “Likeness Score” of between zero to 100 that predicts how much you’ll like it.

But if you connect Ness with your Facebook or Foursquare account, you’re on the app’s fast track. Sifting through all the data provided by these services, Ness automatically aggregates all your friends’ recommendations and check-ins as well as your own to estimate what kinds of places you might like. It starts assigning Likeness Scores to restaurants right away, and you can train the app to better understand your tastes by adding your own ratings to restaurants you’ve already visited.

Behind the slick user interface, serious tech muscle

Ness is the product of 18 months of work from a 15-person team based in Los Altos, Calif., south of San Francisco. Backed with $5 million from a star-studded group of venture capitalists including Khosla Ventures, Alsop Louie Partners and Eric Schmidt’s Tomorrow Ventures, the company has made some pretty hardcore technology under the hood to do what it does. Ness’ staff is comprised of former engineers at Apple, Google, Ning, and Palantir with specialties in applied machine learning, natural language processing and more. The company leases its own servers to process the large amounts of data it sifts through to determine Likeness Scores, and Ness has already filed a handful of patents for its search technology.

Ness plans to eventually monetize its app, which is free, with targeted advertising — but the company’s co-founders tell me that’s a bit further out on the horizon. “Right now, our revenue is user happiness,” Twohey said. “Our model will never be to give all the data we collect to advertisers. We realize that it’s a trust-based relationship we have with our users.” Users could be hugely turned off if Ness starts placing paid results alongside its real recommendations, so the company has to be really careful about how it chooses to monetize when it starts needing to pay the bills.

It’s not just for foodies

And Ness’ co-founders say that restaurants are only the beginning. The company’s core technology could be used in the future to find upcoming concerts you would probably like, or nightlife spots that would suit your tastes, Reese said. “In the same way that Google’s objective is to organize the world’s information, at Ness our goal is organizing the world’s opportunities.” It’s an ambitious aim, to be sure, but it’s also a worthwhile one.

Here are some screenshots of Ness at work (click to enlarge):

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Many assumed the Toronto native had cracked under the pressure of a rigorous Ph.D. program and was now experiencing a complete mental breakdown. They weren’t buying the ex-computer hacker’s improbable explanation — he’d dropped out the world’s most famous technical university because he was bored. As for the new waiter gig? It was “research” for a new startup that would revolutionize the restaurant industry. Suuure.

Fast forward two years and Suri’s classmates have little choice but to buy his story. Celebrating its official launch today — E la Carte (a graduate of the Y Combinator summer 2010 program) is supplying partner restaurants with handheld, touchscreen tablets that let customers view pictures and read descriptions of food, order meals and pay at their tables without having to wait for the human waiter.

The product operates on the premise that restaurants are “chaotic environments” that haven’t been improved upon much since the first tavern opened in the middle ages.  Orders are constantly mixed up, cooks can’t decipher custom orders written on greasy order slips, waiters spend too much time chasing lost orders — and heaven forbid a party of seven wants to split their bill at the end of a meal. Forget about it.

In fact, Suri says he came up with the E la Carte concept after dining out with a big group of MIT engineering buddies. The check came. Some people wanted to pay with credit card, some people with cash. Everyone wanted to pay for their meal alone. No one could figure out how to split the check.

“This felt like it went on for hours,” Suri says. “I thought if a bunch of MIT engineers were having this much trouble, others must be having the same problems.” (Cue smug wisecrack from the boys at Cal Tech in five, four, three..)

As a result, the E la Carte software comes with an especially nifty feature that allows friends to easily split the bill — either evenly or by menu item — and pay with a combination of cash and credit card.

It has other useful bells and whistles as well, including a timer feature that counts down until an item’s estimated time of delivery (which can be customized to account for restaurant conditions). And to fill those painfully agonizing minutes between ordering spinach artichoke dip appetizer and waiting for it to arrive, the tablet includes entertainment and social media features. Customers can play an array of solo and team games, partake in a little trivia, doodle in a paint brush application and upload the artistic masterpieces — along with their menu choices — to Facebook.

While the Presto tablet uses touch screen technology, it doesn’t exactly look like a sleek iPad, which would likely be broken in five minutes in a family-friendly restaurant environment. Instead E la Carte is supplying restaurants with heavier, more durable hardware that happens to be coated in rubber. Much of the product’s heft is devoted to a heavy-duty battery that can last a day without a charge, as well as a credit card reader so customers can pay at their tables.

E la Carte has 15 employees (14 are engineers and most are from MIT) and Suri requires those without restaurant experience to apprentice in the service industry before signing on to the project. He believes this strategy gives his tech-heavy crew insight into the trenches.

The team is definitely taking a risk. Hardware-driven startups have had a shaky history of finding success in Silicon Valley. For a grim reminder, look no further than the recent news that e-learning startup Kno scrapped plans for its much hyped tablet and will focus exclusively on software serves as a grim reminder.

But prominent members of the tech world appear to be banking on its success. So far, E la Carte says it has secured more than $1 million in funding from Y Combinator, SV Angel, and prominent tech investors that include founders of Reddit, Gmail and Dropbox, along with restaurant executives from Applebee’s and other major national chains.

After beta testing in Boston, the service is launching in about 20 locations in the Bay Area and beyond. The company has also made a deal with a major American restaurant chain, which it plans to announce later. (A hint might be in the press kit, which lists Applebee’s executives among the initial founders).

Suri says he has received calls from about 100 restaurants that want to get the tablets on their tables. And it’s not difficult to see why some restaurateurs would be interested.  According to company figures based on six months of data from pilot roll-outs in a half dozen locations, restaurants using the system are seeing an increase of 10-12 percent higher sales through “impulse” orders, and 84 percent of guests are making more regular visits.

There are other promising applications for restaurants in data collection. The machines save consumer information and the E La Carte team gets detailed reports on what food customers are ordering, and what menu items they think about ordering based on the amount of time spent lingering over it. As for how customers will feel about their dining preferences being stored for posterity and mined for every nugget, that’s another story.

Suri pitches the tablet by saying it clearly makes a waiter’s job much easier, freeing him or her up to take care of customer-service tasks like quick refills and interacting with guests. And with higher total bills and an automated feature that allows the customer to choose a tip between 15 and 25 percent (or write in a custom amount), he says he isn’t worried about waitstaff getting stiffed on tips.

But with technology that allows customers to realize they can order their Quesada explosion salad with substitutions before a waiter even says, “How are we doing today,” how long is it before customers start to ask whether they even need a waiter at all?

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Zagat is one of the best-known sources for finding the best restaurant for any special night. Zagat’s printed guide is what your parents or grandparents used before they had the Internet, and initially I was skeptical of an iPhone app based on such an outdated and analog approach. However, I’m glad I took a look. Zagat to Go ($9.99) is perfect for finding a great place to eat. Restaurants are ranked on a 0-30 scale based on food, decor and service. Each entry includes key data about the restaurant such as price, location and features, and when applicable, the website and a link to OpenTable to make a reservation. In select metro markets such as New York, Paris and San Francisco, the app walks you through a series of questions to find the perfect restaurant based on scenarios such as (using a type of date as an example) first date, “dating,” anniversary or break-up. One downside of Zagat is that there are very few entries for smaller cities.

For information junkies looking for crowd-sourced reviews, the Yelp (Free) app is the market leader. Yelp is especially good in smaller and medium-sized cities where apps like Zagat’s don’t have much of a presence. In big cities, Yelp’s information can be simply overwhelming. One of San Francisco’s famous restaurants, The Slanted Door, had over 2000 detailed reviews. Light reading anyone? In my hometown market of Kansas City, with reviews numbering in two- to three-digit range, the app was much more useful. Since it’s free, you’ve got nothing to lose here.

Alternatively, UrbanSpoon (Free) and Google Places (Free) aggregate information from multiple sources in order to help you make a balanced choice about where to dine. They give you a general score, then allow you to drill down to detailed reviews from other restaurant sites and even local food blogs. Google Places is location-based, as the name suggests. It’s best for “what’s nearby” rather than as an advanced research tool to find the ideal place to eat. UrbanSpoon has location-based options, but also allows you to browse places not nearby as well as adding additional search criteria such as type of food, vegetarian, gluten-free, and so on.

If you want more specialized selections than even UrbanSpoon provides, there are diet-specific dining apps such VegOut ($2.99 — vegan and vegetarian), Kosher ($4.99 — Kosher dining) and CeliacFeed (Free — gluten-free). Not only will you pick a great place to eat, but you’ll get bonus points for considering your Valentine’s specific dining requirements!

Whichever app you use, it’s time to start your research now as restaurants fill up quickly for Valentine’s Day. Of course, these apps work great year-round, so there’s never a bad time to take that special someone out to eat with your iPhone! If you find Valentine’s Day dinners too overwhelming, my personal tip is go to lunch instead of dinner. Slipping out of your busy day to spend time with the person you care about is very rewarding — and reservations are much easier to get.

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