Livebookings, the restaurant booking and marketing service that competes with services like OpenTable, is announcing today that it has picked up another $24 million (£15 million) in funding to continue growing its business in Europe and beyond. The news highlights two trends we’ve seen emerging recently around here: companies dedicated to eating out are not going hungry in the current economic climate; and the more local, European counterparts to U.S.-based tech companies are getting a lot of attention from investors and consumers.

Today’s round of funding, Livebookings’ fourth, is being led by existing investors Balderton Capital, Wellington Partners and Ekstranda and takes the total amount raised by the company to about $62 million.

Colin Tenwick, CEO of Livebookings, has said that the funding will be used to fuel further growth. Existing business areas include online reservations and other restaurant services such as customer database management, email marketing campaigns, and the creation of special offers, and that menu of services may be getting longer:

“Over the last 18 months we have put in place the engines that drive growth by investing in the development of new products, building a larger sales force and implementing new customer support systems to facilitate the growing customer base,” Tenwick said in a statement. “The market-leading increase in dined covers, customers and revenue is testament to this strategy and the new funds will help us to increase our market leading position, deliver the most innovative products to the marketplace and drive even more incremental revenue for our customers.”

The company, headquartered in London, has operations in 23 countries including the U.S. and across Europe. Livebookings offers booking services directly to consumers, as well as through 300 distribution partners, including tastecard, Afternoon Tea and Eniro.se. In all there are 9,000 restaurants and chains powering online booking and other services through Livebookings.

Livebookings does not disclose current revenues, nor whether it is yet profitable, but it notes that in Q1 it saw record sales numbers, with revenues up 34 percent compared to the same quarter a year before. At the same time, the number of seated diners booked through the site went up 65 percent to 3.8 million; and Bookatable, its consumer-facing website, exceeded one million visits for the first time in the quarter for its service that operates in nine languages across 19 countries.

While it almost seems counter-intuitive for a businesses dedicated to eating out and spending more money to be thriving in the current economic climate in Europe, this isn’t the first time this has been noted. Just-Eat, a service that aggregates take-out/food delivery services from different restaurants, picked up $64 million in a third round of funding in April. Just-Eat said at the time that it was generating $750 million in sales generation annually.

And while U.S. companies are also taking a big bite out of European business, they are not taking it all. Just as Qype is claiming that it is actually doing significantly better than Yelp in Europe, Livebookings is also giving OpenTable a run for its money and claims to be the European leader in the field.

Still it should be noted that while growth is still coming for Livebookings, it looks like it may be slowing down somewhat: when the company announced its last round of funding, $10 million in April 2011, it noted that restaurant reservations went up by 92 percent over the year, compared to 65 percent growth this year.

Earlier today when we wrote about UrbanSpoon trying to get a piece of OpenTable’s pie, this quote from Urbanspoon VP Kara Nortman really struck me, “Two years ago, an online reservation system required a massive upfront investment,” she said, now claiming that building a similar platform is as simple as setting up an iPad/iPhone app.”

Perhaps this setup ease (and reduced customer acquisition cost) is why we have seen an outcropping of investor interest in “OpenTable for X” services lately, the most notable being DST’s $50 million investment in ZocDoc. Just yesterday I sat in on a demo for Pencil You In, a platform that pitched itself as a OpenTable for salon appointments, not the first time I’ve heard this.

Perhaps the OpenTable model has even more potential when made even more niche? After all, there are 30K restaurants in the US that take reservations, versus two million salon professionals.

Pencil You In competitor StyleSeat, which launched at TechCrunch Disrupt NY in May, now has over 75K appointments booked, representing $3.5 million in spend. StyleSeat, which allows hairstylists and salon representatives to set up simple online profiles to showcase their wares, now boasts 14K salon professionals who’ve created accounts, with 50K clients added and 1,700 promotions (deals) created.

StyleSeat CEO Melody McCloskey tells me she’s been approached by a couple of major industry players about partnerships since her Disrupt turn, “Disrupt gave us access to companies that we wouldn’t normally get access to so early in the process- we were approached by several decision makers at some of the largest companies out there. If we took traditional channels it’d take us much longer to reach those people.”

McCloskey, plans on monetizing StyleSeat through a freemium model, offering the core StyleSeat product for free and then charging a $25 fee for more advanced CRM and marketing tools. She ambitiously views the company as well-positioned to shake up (sorry, got tired of using the word disrupt) the entire beauty industry, which has annual revenues of $71 billion.

McCloskey says that the social sharing features of the site have had the most impact on its growth and calculates that the Facebook recommendations posted through the platform are worth $6.70 each. One in six recommendations shared on Facebook results in an online booking, at an average service cost of $40. She tells me that 98% of clients using StyleSeat say they’d recommend a stylist to friends.

StyleSeat currently has $700K in funding from quite the roster of white-hot investors including Chris Sacca, Jeff Clavier, Travis Kalanick, Dave Morin, Garrett Camp, Alfred Lin, Christoph Janz, Paige Craig, Joe Stump, 500 Startups and others.

London-based online restaurant reservations and marketing services company Livebookings says it has processed 1 million bookings for restaurants in a single month, marking the largest ever for the OpenTable rival.

In the same month the record was achieved (that would be March, 2011), Livebookings secured £6 million – or nearly $10 million – in a round of funding from existing shareholders, including VC firms Balderton Capital and Wellington Partners.

Livebookings essentially enables restaurants from all over the world to provide diners with a free online bookings service, manage those reservations and collect valuable customer data. In addition, the company enables restaurants execute online marketing campaigns to attract and retain their customers with promotions, deals and whatnot.

According to Livebookings CEO Colin Tenwick, restaurant reservations have increased by 92% compared to March 2010, helped by initiatives like Restaurant Weeks in Denmark and Sweden.

The company currently counts some 8,000 restaurant customers, including Gordon Ramsay Holdings, Tantris, Grill and Aquavit.

The company raised $28 million in multiple rounds over 2008 and 2009, which means the financing round announced today brings its total to a tasty $38 million.

One pitch that caught my attention was Tripleseat, and the company is announcing a $500,000 round of funding later today from Omaha-based Dundee Venture Capital. (More on that round in a second.) TripleSeat isn’t really trying to be an “OpenTable killer.” It’s focused on streamlining the experience of booking and organizing private events, not just one-off restaurant reservations. And its business is not limited to restaurants. Its customers include other places you’d have events like large hotel chains, bowling alleys and boats. (Note to Heather Harde: Can we have our Christmas party on a boat? I’m envisioning something like the one above, and Arrington wearing a hat like Michael Scott in the Booze Cruise episode of The Office. Awesome.)

Tripleseat’s founder, Jonathan Morse, says an average client makes 30% of their income from private events and managing them is a huge headache, because they take a lot more coordination and details than a restaurant full of individual diners. Especially since private events tend to come in clumps, especially during the Holidays. As someone with 20 years experience in the hospitality and restaurant business, he’s seen the pain first-hand. OpenTable isn’t optimized to handle it and most restaurants are just using pen and paper and basic Excel files.

But the opportunity aside, one reason to watch Tripleseat is that they’re building the company completely outside the usual Silicon Valley Web echo-chamber. The company is headquartered in Boston, and turned to Omaha for its Web development and, now, its funding. Until now the company has been bootstrapped, and it’s done pretty well with no cash: It manages $140 million in event revenues for about 100 customers, many of which are sizable hotel and restaurant groups. The company’s revenues are a fraction of that, they charge between $100 and $300 a month for their software as a service package. But it’s an indication of their value to a restaurant or hotel.

Morse and a handful of sales people have built the company since 2008, mostly doing meetings over the Web and cold-calling, boldly saying his business doesn’t need a big on-the-ground-sales team. I’m not so sure he’s right, at least if he wants to become a large company. Software as a service products are great for getting revenues quickly, but most of the big ones have built huge salesforces and taken a decade or more of work to get to point where they could go public. OpenTable, although a hardware and software solution, is a great example of that playbook done well. But I respect Morse’s staunchly anti-Valley mindset. He believes this business will take time to build no matter what and organic and sensible growth is safer than rather than raising a ton of money and throwing dozens of sales people at the problem all at once.

Every week on my TechCrunchTV show, Ask a VC, we get questions on how cities like Omaha and entrepreneurs like Morse who have deep domain expertise, but aren’t coders and are outside the Valley system can get attention from VCs. And nearly every guest always says look to your own community first, build something good and money and attention will come. Maybe Tripleseat will take double the time to get to OpenTable’s size, but the company deserves props for taking that advice and building a solid business whether they get the Valley’s blessing or not.

I’ve had a checkered relationship with OpenTable. Initially, I loved it as a user, then was let down as the service evolved. For instance I found the eat-at-100-restaurants-and-get-a-measly-$20-check rewards system slightly better than a punch in the face and was annoyed that restaurants still required me to call to verify a reservation. If I had time to make a phone call, I wouldn’t have used OpenTable. Duh.

I’ve vocally accused the site of tailoring its service too much to the restaurants’ needs– who after all pay the bills– and ignoring a better customer experience. (Once a customer service rep for OpenTable actually told me they only cared if the restaurants were happy.) Then, the company addressed a lot of my issues, for instance offering easy ways to get larger numbers of dining points, and the CEO Jeff Jordan and I sat down and hashed it out in a video interview and I came away more impressed with him and the company’s management generally.

Lately, a diner like me isn’t the one doing the bitching–it’s restaurants. Something strange has been happening in San Francisco, which is OpenTable’s home market and oldest market. I dismissed it all for a while as purely anecdotal: The half-dozen or so new hot restaurants in my neighborhood that didn’t use OpenTable, the scattered emails from restauranteurs asking my opinion on whether the service was worth the money, based on how vocal I’d been about it in the past. Then yesterday we got this in the TechCrunch Tip jar: A reasonably-articulated, scathing rebuke of why a local restauranteur named Mark Pastore doesn’t use OpenTable, and how he thinks the service’s success has robbed restaurants of their most valuable asset, the relationship with diners, and charged way too much for the privilege. Even if he’s a lone squeaky wheel, it’s worth a read if you’re a regular OpenTable diner, investor or would-be competitor.

At the core of his argument is the belief that OpenTable’s $1.5 billion market capitalization isn’t a result of creating that much value for the market as a whole; it’s largely taken it from thousands of mom and pop restaurants. Pastore did a survey of his friends who were also restaurant owners and only one said that he felt OpenTable actually increased the value of his business. Tellingly, most of the others use it and don’t plan on quitting– but not because they love the service, because they are terrified of disrupting how diners are accustomed to making reservations. It turns out OpenTable is an astoundingly sticky business. It’s billed as a modern pay-only-as-long-as-you-love-it cloud subscription business, but Pastore’s description sounds like what most on-premise enterprise software customers would say. (Paging Ben Horowitz…) This puts a whole new spin on why OpenTable was growing as restaurants over all were losing money.

The most devastating blow is Pastore’s economic break down of what OpenTable costs restaurants:

“The access fees can be substantial, particularly for restaurants operating on thin margins. One independent study estimates that OpenTable’s fees (comprised of startup fees, fixed monthly fees, and per-person reservation fees) translate to a cost of roughly $10.40 for each “incremental” 4-top booked through OpenTable.com. To put that in perspective, consider that the average profit margin, before taxes, for a U.S. restaurant is roughly 5%. This means that a table of 4 spending $200 on dinner would generate a $10 profit. In this example, all of that profit would then go to OpenTable fees for having delivered the reservation, leaving the restaurant with nothing other than the hope that that customer would come back (and hopefully book by telephone the next time).”

Most restaurants suck up the cost to have the competitive edge of easy bookings. But with so many restaurants all using the same system– is it really much of a competitive edge or is it just table stakes? Pastore cites one 3.5 star restaurant in San Francisco where the owner has spent years paying OpenTable substantially more than he pays himself for 80-plus hour workweeks. When the economics are that lopsided, one would have to start wondering exactly how many diners wouldn’t book directly on a restaurant’s site if that were the only option.

Here’s the stunning thing this post made me realize for the first time: Unlike most large Web companies that built their businesses on cutting costs out of an industry and eliminating middlemen, OpenTable has managed to do the exact opposite. It has created a new middleman. So is there room for this new middleman to be disrupted?

It’s not going to be easy, as Pastore’s own survey shows. Restaurants are terrified of getting rid of OpenTable and sending diners to another restaurant that still uses the site. And this is a hard, pounding-the-pavement business to build. It took OpenTable a decade to get to any kind of critical mass and it still provides software for less than 15,000 restaurants network-wide.

But there are ways to disrupt some of what has made OpenTable powerful. As Pastore argues and I’ve seen increasingly in San Francisco, a lot of new restaurants try their own online booking systems first. They mimic the convenience that OpenTable proved customers want, while keeping control of the relationship with the diner. It’s similar to what you saw in the travel industry: Early online travel agents proved people wanted convenience to book online and airline and hotel companies didn’t want the headache of building a site. But increasingly, they’ve all been trying to send customers to their own sites, either directly or through an aggregator like Kayak.

There’s also clearly a role that Yelp, FourSquare and Groupon could play as spoilers. As a diner, I usually go to OpenTable to browse what restaurants in a given neighborhood have availability. It’s less for the transaction of making a reservation itself. There’s definitely some overlap when it comes to on-the-spot browsing with Yelp’s mobile app, and there’s no reason FourSquare couldn’t use geotagging to push a list of restaurants with availability to you. (Yelp’s past partnership with OpenTable doesn’t necessarily preclude something like this.) If they don’t provide the back-end software, they will never have the same inventory that OpenTable has. But so what? They won’t charge restaurants as much either. That might be compelling enough.

Likewise, I wouldn’t be surprised to see some restaurants experiment with using Groupon to drive diners to them instead of paying OpenTable’s monthly fee. They get someone to come in the door once with a hefty discount, but it’s a one-time expense. You could even see Facebook Pages playing a role here. In general, the iPads, iPhones and Android platforms give would-be competitors powerful new tools to challenge OpenTable, which players like UrbanSpoon are counting on. Designing an app from the ground up to take advantage of how far the local game has come with location-aware smartphones is a world away from OpenTable’s DNA as a circa-2000 Web and back-end software company.

And really, all these players would have to do is erode OpenTable’s ability to sign new customers to have an impact. This earnings report was good, but the company’s shares have jumped a staggering 230% since its IPO 18 months ago, trading at a price-to-earnings ratio eight times higher than the Standard & Poors index. Bloomberg reports that short sells are increasing and some analysts call it the most overvalued stock in the sector.

When you’re priced beyond perfection, it doesn’t take much to stumble. Maybe OpenTable should listen to the squeaky wheels out there once again.

Editor’s note: With the growth of local commerce on the Web, the links between online and physical commerce are becoming stronger. In this guest post, Alex Rampell, the CEO and founder of TrialPay, explores the forces behind what he calls “online2offline” commerce.

What do Groupon, OpenTable, Restaurant.com, and SpaFinder all have in common? They grease the wheels of online-to-offline commerce.

Groupon’s growth has been nothing short of extraordinary, but it’s merely a small subset of an even larger category which I’d like to call online-to-offline commerce, or On2Off (O2O) commerce, in the vein of other commerce terms like B2C, B2B, and C2C.

Bear with me. The key to O2O is that it finds consumers online and brings them into real-world stores. It is a combination of payment model and foot traffic generator for merchants (as well as a “discovery” mechanism for consumers) that creates offline purchases. It is inherently measurable, since every transaction (or reservation, for things like OpenTable) happens online. This is distinctively different from the directory model (think: Yelp, CitySearch, etc) in that the addition of payment helps quantify performance and close the loop—more on that later.

In retrospect, the fact that this is “big,” or that Groupon has been able to grow high-margin revenues faster than almost any other company in the history of the Internet, seems pretty obvious. Your average ecommerce shopper spends about $1,000 per year. Let’s say your average American earns about $40,000 per year. What happens to the other $39,000? (The delta is higher when you consider that ecommerce shoppers are higher-income Americans than most, but the point is the same).

Answer: most of it (disposable income after taxes) is spent locally. You spend money at coffee shops, bars, gyms, restaurants, gas stations, plumbers, dry-cleaners, and hair salons. Excluding travel, online B2C commerce is largely stuff that you order online and gets shipped to you in a box. It’s boring, although the ecommerce industry has figured out an increasing number of items to sell online (witness Zappos’s success with shoes: $0->$1B in 10 years, or BlueNile’s with jewelry).

FedEx can’t deliver social experiences like restaurants, bars, Yoga, sailing, tennis lessons, or pole dancing, but Groupon does. Moreover, for your locally owned and operated Yoga studio, there is little marginal cost to add customers to a partially filled class, meaning that the business model of reselling “local” is often more lucrative than the traditional ecommerce model of buying commodity inventory low, selling it higher, and keeping the difference while managing perishable or depreciating inventory.

The important thing about companies like O2O commerce companies is that performance is readily quantifiable, which is one of the tenets of O2O commerce. Traditional ecommerce tracks conversion using things like cookies and pixels. Zappos can determine their ROI for online marketing because every completed order has “tracking code” on the confirmation page. Offline commerce doesn’t have this luxury; the bouncer at the bar isn’t examining your iPhone’s browsing history. But O2O makes this easy; because the transaction happens online, the same tools are now available to the offline world, and the whole thing is brokered via intermediaries like OpenTable or SpaFinder. This has proven to be a far more profitable and scalable model than selling advertising to local establishments; it’s entirely due to the collection of payment by the online intermediary.

Does Groupon deserve a billion-dollar valuation? It’s easy to see a world where O2O commerce dwarfs traditional (stuff in a box) e-commerce—simply because offline commerce itself dwarfs online commerce, and O2O is simply shifting the discovery and payment online. If Groupon can grow its leadership position, I predict a multi-billion dollar valuation based on discounted cash flow alone. Groupon is not a gimmick or a game, but a successful example of offline commerce being driven by an online storefront and transaction engine.

Venture capitalists and entrepreneurs would be wise to think beyond cloning the “deal of the day” concept—and instead think about how the discovery, payment, and performance measurement of offline commerce can move online. This will have ripple effects across the whole Internet industry — advertising, payments, and commerce — as trillions of dollars in local consumer spending increasingly begin online.

Photo credit: Flickr/Jeremy Brooks

One publicly traded Web business that seems to be humming (unlike AOL) is OpenTable. The company announced second quarter earnings last night. Revenues were up 37 percent to $22.5 million, and net profits rose a whopping 273 percent to $2.6 million, or $0.11 per share. Non-GAAP earnings per share were $0.15, handily beating the $0.12 consensus.

OpenTable is installed in 14,128 restaurants and seated 15.6 million diners last quarter, up 27 percent and 52 percent, respectively. Of those seated diners, 97 percent were in North America, but international operations are growing quickly from a base of 500,000 international diners last quarter.

Those diners have now written more than 7 million restaurant reviews. As a point of comparison, Yelp has a total of 12 million reviews across all local businesses, and CEO Jeremy Stoppleman considers the those reviews to be Yelp’s single most important competitive advantage. Many of OpenTable’s reviews are simply ratings, so it is not completely apples-to-apples. On the other hand, OpenTable deletes reviews after six months to keep them fresh, and you can only leave a review if you’ve booked a table at that restaurant through OpenTable.

To make those diners even more loyal, OpenTable is getting into group buying and flash sales by launching a weekly deal program called Spotlight, which will offer deep discounts on meals at OpenTable restaurants. For $25, consumers will be able to get $50 worth of food at a promoted restaurant. (Yelp is also testing out similar deals).

Executed properly, these discount deals could have a significant impact on OpenTable. Using discounts to entice new customers to try a restaurant can be very effective, as Groupon is already showing. (At our Social Currency CrunchUp last week, the owner of Stone Korean Kitchen in San Francisco explained how selling 2,600 Groupon discounts at a loss helped drive repeat traffic and introduced his restaurant to new customers). If diners have a good experience, that will increase their loyalty to those restaurants and to OpenTable, potentially driving more reservations in the future. Anything that results in more reservations and increased customer loyalty will keep OpenTable growing.

But what is the deal with having to print out the deal certificate? Why can’t diners just show the coupon on their mobile phones?

This essentially allows any logged-in Yelp user to make a reservation without having to leave the site. There is now an OpenTable section on the Yelp listing page for all restaurants who are listed with the reservations site, which is currently taking reservations for 11,000 restaurants. You can then make an OpenTable reservation much like you would on reservations site. The feature is only available in the US only. Additionally, you don’t need to have an OpenTable account to make the reservation.

However, if you use the same email to create an Yelp account and an OpenTable account, you will receive your OpenTable points if you make a reservation on a Yelp business page. It’s surprising the feature hasn’t launched earlier; it’s certainly something that will be useful for all Yelp users.

The deal is part of OpenTable’s affiliate program which includes Zagat, Yahoo, MenuPages and TripAdvisor. OpenTable, which is profiting from its rapidly growing mobile business, has seated a total of 24.2 million diners in the past two quarters.

Yelp also released a few interesting statistics today. Over 29% of the reviewed businesses on Yelp are restaurants. And the reviews site just passed its11 millionth review and had more than 32M unique visitors in the month of May.

Yelp has had a tumultuous 2010. The company raised a large round of funding in January and was one of the initial partners with Facebook a few weeks ago to launch personalized experience (which unfortunately had a security hole). But the startup was hit with a number of lawsuits claiming extortion in March.

But useful features like this will only help Yelp become the defacto reviews and listings site and perhaps even overtake main competitor Citysearch.

In less than six months, online restaurant reservation site OpenTable has seated an additional one million diners via its mobile apps. In late October, OpenTable had reached the milestone of seating one million diners via its mobile offerings, a year after its iPhone app launched. It took only four and a half months to seat another million diners. Additionally, the site says that based on an estimation of a $50 average check per diner, OpenTable claims that diners using its mobile applications have generated more than $100 million in revenue for its restaurant partners.

OpenTable allows diners to find and book reservations at more than 11,000 different restaurants in multiple countries via mobile applications for the iPhone, Palm, Blackberry and Android. Other smartphone users can book reservations through OpenTable’s mobile-optimized Web site.

The company also reported strong earnings this afternoon, with Q4 2009 revenue coming in at $19.2 million, representing a a 32% increase over Q4 2008 revenue, which was $14.5 million. OpenTable’s total revenues for 2009 were $68.6 million, up 23% over 2008 revenues of $55.8 million. In 2009, OpenTable increased its number of participating restaurants in North America by 17%, with a total of 10,850 partners by the end of 2009. The number of international partners also increased, rising by 44% to 1501 participating establishments. Total number of diners in North American were 11.8 million, a 39% increase from Q4 2008.

Last year, OpenTable filed for a healthy IPO, despite recessionary conditions in the markets. OpenTable is a solid internet company that has a viable business model. On the restaurant side, OpenTable delivers reservation management software to establishments through a Web browser and collects monthly subscription revenues, similar in theory to the offerings that software companies like Salesforce sell to clients.

Online restaurant reservation site OpenTable has hit a milestone today, seating one million diners via its mobile apps. And the site says that based on an estimation of a $50 average check per diner, OpenTable believes that diners using its mobile applications have generated more than $50 million in revenue for its restaurant partners.

OpenTable allows diners to find and book reservations at more than 11,000 different restaurants in multiple countries via mobile applications for the iPhone, Palm, Blackberry and Android. Other smartphone users can book reservations through OpenTable’s mobile-optimized Web site.

This year OpenTable filed for a healthy IPO, despite recessionary conditions in the markets. OpenTable is a solid internet company that has a viable business model. On the restaurant side, OpenTable delivers reservation management software to establishments through a Web browser and collects monthly subscription revenues, similar in theory to the offerings that software companies like Salesforce sell to clients.

Sure everyone brings up LinkedIn and Facebook as the potentially huge homerun IPOs in the wings, but a lot of the companies queuing up look more like OpenTable.

The reservation Web site deserves props for making it out in a tricky time— the weekend it was picking its bankers one declared bankruptcy and another sold itself to a competitor. And yes, the price has impressively stayed above the $20 opening. But take a closer look at the deal: Only three million shares were floated to the public. No wonder the price has held– hardly anyone is in the stock. With a whopping 18 million still owned by insiders and investors, OpenTable looks more like a private company that just did another round of funding than a public company.

Given that insiders of other private companies are increasingly cashing out shares in later private funding rounds, is there practically a lot of difference returns-wise between a heady Series E or a small IPO with such a tiny float?

OpenTable’s real test will be what happens once insiders start selling to get liquidity.  CEO Jeff Jordan addressed that in his first post-quiet period interview, shot last week for my Yahoo show, TechTicker. (Clip below, around the seven minute mark.)

Jordan also notes at the two minute mark in this clip that since OpenTable priced, he’s been getting a flood of calls from Valley CEOs who are thinking about filing, so expect the mini-registration boom to continue. Actual returns for the beleaguered asset class, however, will be a different story.

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Another small sign that the worst of the recession may be behind us: IPO registrations are clawing their way back from the shadow of the valley of death (also known as the first quarter if 2009, when there were zero IPOs registered with the SEC). So far in July and August alone there have been 14 IPOs, as many as in the previous three quarters combined. These numbers and the chart above are based on the number of IPO filings tracked by Hoovers as of yesterday. Renaissance Capital counts 16 IPO registrations in July and August, and if you look on the SEC’s Edgar site it looks like a few more filed today.

Registering for an IPO doesn’t mean that the company is actually going to go through with it, but the volume of filings is a good confidence index for startups. Most of the companies filing are not technology-related (Hyatt Hotels, RailAmerica, Bayview Mortgage Capital), although Ancestry.com did file on August 3. In terms of actual IPOs, we saw five venture-backed companies start trading in the second quarter, including OpenTable, which is still trading above its $20 offering price.

All this means is that more companies are willing to take a shot at going public, which is encouraging in and of itself. But don’t expect the actual number of IPOs to recover for at least another year.

After four quarters in which venture-backed IPOs have been dead in the water, a handful finally poked their heads up in the second quarter. The National Venture Capital Association counted five IPOs during the quarter, including DigitalGlobe ($279 million raised), SolarWinds ($152 million), and OpenTable ($60 million). A total of $721 million was raised. Just for a little context, two years ago during the same period, there were 25 IPOs which raised $4.15 billion.

So don’t call it a comeback just yet. But any activity is a sign of hope. And this was the most active period since the fourth quarter of 2007. Will it keep building, or will IPO candidates duck their heads back under water?

On the M&A front, the pace remained lackluster. There were 59 venture-backed acquisitions in the second quarter, which was down from 84 deals a year ago (and 62 deals in the previous quarter). The total value of M&A deals was $2.6 billion.

The average M&A deal size shot up to $198 million, no doubt boosted by Intel’s $884 million acquisition of Wind River Systems and NetApp’s $1.5 billion acquisition of Data Domain. However, Internet deals still represented 29 percent of the total count, with lots of smaller deals such as AOL’s purchase pf both Going and Patch.

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Who might need such a service? A lot more services and individuals than you may realize. While most services have some sort of scheduling system, many aren’t optimized, and can’t adapt on the fly to openings/changes. Massage therapists, dentists, doctors are all perfect examples of who could use such a system, founder Ryan Donahue tells us. He notes that health and beauty has been a particularly hot area.

He knows that because the service has actually been around for a little while, but it was formerly know as HourTown. But BookFresh is a much better name for the service because, “appointments are much like produce items in a grocery store, it’s a perishable thing,” Donahue says.

And a name change isn’t all that in-store for users. BookFresh wants to be the main platform for all online appointment booking on the web. As such, they’ve created APIs to let developers of sites take advantage of their tools. But you don’t have to be a developer to implement the service, anyone can do it with a simple line of code added to their site. This is important because a lot of people BookFresh is targeting are one-person or small operations, that probably don’t have a web development team.

Donahue likens the idea of BookFresh as an appointment platform to PayPal as a payment platform. (And he should know, he used to work at PayPal — incidentally with Jeffrey Jordan, the CEO of OpenTable.) He notes that just like a lot of sites out there don’t want to go through the hassle of building their own payment system, they also don’t want to have to make an online booking system. Sure, it’s not as complex, but it’s still a hassle — and might as well be impossible for little shops/services.

And BookFresh offers some nice things with its platform. One is the ability for businesses that use it to get calls when a customer is requesting an appointment time. From your phone, you can opt to accept or decline the request. That’s perfect for someone like a plumber, who may be always on the go and not able to get to a computer to confirm appointments. And the offers easy integration with Google Calendar and iCal to place appointments in your own personal calendars automatically when you accept them.

Alongside the name change, BookFresh is announcing a partnership with Webs.com, one of the largest sites for building free websites out there. A lot of small business owners are already using it, and now they’ll have one click access to install BookFresh if they choose to.

In terms of monetization, the service is free for the end user, but businesses/individuals who wish to use it will pay a month fee that starts at $19.95. If larger sites choose to sign-on, there are other deals such as revenue sharing that can take place.

In terms of competition, there is Appointment-plus, but their service forces you back to their servers to handle everything. BookFresh’s platform allows users to stay on the page they are already on to set everything up, Donahue says.

One service that BookFresh won’t be competing with is OpenTable. They have no interest in getting into the restaurant space, Donahue says.

Is the IPO drought over? Not quite. But OpenTable’s successful IPO today will give tech startups and VCs a sign of hope that you can still go public eventually if you have a real business. On a day when the Nasdaq is down 2 percent, OpenTable is up 40 45 percent from its offering price of $20 (which itself kept moving up from $12 to $14 initially). The stock opened at $24, and was trading at around $28 $29 last time I checked. With 21.6 million shares outstanding, that gives OpenTable a market capitalization of $605 $626 million on its first day of trading. (The company itself cleared $60 million in the offering). Update: The stock closed at $31.89, up 59 percent from the offering price, giving the company a market cap of $689 million at the end of the trading day.

This is an extremely healthy IPO. Opentable is not a blowout Internet company. But it is a solid Internet company that matters. It pulled in $55.8 million in revenues last year and a net loss of $1 million (largely due to expansion-related costs). In the first quarter of 2009, it managed to turn a net profit of $366,000 on revenues of $16 million. (For a deeper financial analysis, see this earlier post).

OpenTable delivers reservation management software to restaurants through a Web browser and collects monthly subscription revenues. In that sense it is in the same class of software companies as Salesforce—selling software as a service over the Web to business customers. But it also has a friendly (free) consumer-facing side. It is yet another example of enterprise and consumer apps merging in the cloud.

So what does it take for a tech company to IPO these days? If OpenTable is the new measuring stick, a company needs at least $50 million in revenues, have at least one quarter of profits, customers with proven loyalty, and solid growth potential. In other words, it needs to be a real business.

Why is it that you can book a table at a fancy restaurant through OpenTable, but you can’t book the bar for a corporate party? That is the question that a startup in New York City called Pogby is trying to answer. Barely in beta, Pogby is an event booking service founded by Joshua Gooch, who used to run JetBlue’s Website and helped build its TrueBlue customer loyalty program. Pogby aims to become the OpenTable of events, where corporate event planners and others can find and book venues for parties.

Pogby is one of the finalists competing in a startup competition at NYC Entrepreneur Week, where I was a judge today. The site is really not much more than an online demo right now, with only a half dozen venues in New York City on the site. But Gooch and his VP of sales Duane Lawrence plan to sign up 50 to 100 restaurants, bars, and other event spaces in short order. They are focusing on New York City to prove the concept. (This is really early stage—the company is still looking for seed funding). Each venue on Pogby gets its own page with pictures for each available event space, along with a calendar showing availability and a booking engine. Gooch knows a lot about reservation systems from his time at JetBlue, and you can see some of the design influences on Pogby.

it’s a fairly simple concept. Find a venue, check pricing and availability, and book online. Pogby plans to charge venues an 8 percent commission fee for any bookings and eventually will introduce a $99/month subscription fee. A typical event can cost $4,000 or more, and event spaces typically go unused 70 percent of the time. So any extra events a restaurant or venue can capture is worth the fees. Why hasn’t anyone done this already?

There is an obvious need for this service. Pogby however faces a few challenges. First, it needs to sign up a critical mass of popular event spaces before anyone will take it seriously. Second, it needs to make it easier for venues to sign up themselves in a self-serve fashion (this is coming, but to appear on the site right now involves too many manual processes). Third, it needs incentives to prevent people from looking up availability on the site and then calling up on their own to strike a better deal. (A discount would be good). Fourth, it needs to give event planners a way to negotiate prices and other terms on the site. Fifth, it needs to look beyond New York City.

But the biggest threat might come from OpenTable itself, which could add event booking a sa feature fairly easily since most of its restaurants rent out spaces for parties as well. Until they do, Pogby has an opportunity to carve out a niche for itself.

OpenTable, the online restaurant reservation site that was founded in 1998, is hoping to raise as much as $40 million in an IPO, according to a filing with the SEC (embedded below). The prospectus offers a detailed look at the company’s finances and operations.

Revenues through the nine months ended September 30, 2008 were $41.3 million, a 41 percent increase from the same period in 2007. The company makes money from the restaurants, which pay both subscription fees (54 percent of revenues) and reservation fees for each diner that shows up through the system (42 percent of revenues). It also makes a small amount on installation fees (4 percent of revenues).

The company lost 149,000 in net income, but turned an operating profit of 261,000. That is a rather slim margin, however, it appears that the company was spending as much as it could to grow and take market share, especially internationally where it is just getting started. Operating income in North America for teh period was $6.8 million, whereas the company took an operating loss of $6.5 million internationally. Those are startup costs, since it is just getting its foot in the door at restaurants outside the U.S. and Canada.

As of September 30, 2008, OpenTable offered reservations at 9,709 restaurants worldwide, 8,788 of which were in North America It seated 25.5 million diners the first nine months of last year, up 45 percent. It employed 292 people, and had $17.4 million in cash.

I have a feeling any IPO money will go towards international expansion. A successful IPO would be a coup for CEO Jeff Jordan, a former eBay executive who is well regarded in Silicon Valley.

http://d.scribd.com/ScribdViewer.swf?document_id=11529889&access_key=key-kge5qpx1se31oqv5scf&page=1&version=1&viewMode=

Some of the most useful set of apps on the iPhone are the restaurant apps that tell you what is to eat nearby. There’s UrbanSpoon, Yelp, and LocalEats, among others. But once you find a restaurant, you still have to call to make a reservation. Now, you no longer have to use up those minutes. Online reservation service OpenTable released an iPhone app today that lets you not only find nearby restaurants, but book a table as well. You don’t have to call and wait on hold. The app uses OpenTable’s online reservation system to book and confirm a table. It will even give you directions to the restaurant from wherever you are.

You are shown only nearby restaurants, and cannot filter by type of cuisine or refine your search as easily as you can on the Website. But the app is perfectly functional. The key is that it only shows you nearby restaurants that have open tables for the time when you want to eat.

OpenTable is especially great for reserving tables at high-end restaurants. If you are on a business trip, or wandering about town with some friends and want to make impromptu dinner plans, I could see this app becoming indispensable. I’m a big fan of OpenTable, and already have an account there, so for someone like me it is a must-have iPhone app.

The app is free and you can download it from iTunes (link opens up iTunes).

OpenTable, the web-enabled restaurant management provider, has introduced a new mobile feature that lets users make restaurant reservations from their from their phone’s browser. The new site, which is available here, supports the 8,500 OpenTable restaurants scattered across the country.

To book a table, users specify the date and the restaurant they wish to dine in, and the site presents a list of available times. Alternatively, users can request to see all available listings for restaurants in the area – a feature that will be a lifesaver for those last-minute anniversary reservations. A quick run through the site on an iPhone worked well, allowing me to find an available restaurant and book a table in less than two minutes.

OpenTable offers restaurants a reservation management solution that allows prospective diners to reserve tables from the web. Since its launch in 1999, the site claims to have booked over 70 million diners across its 8,500 restaurants.