Dish.fm, the recently relaunched restaurant recommendation app which focuses on the best menu items, as opposed to overall venue reviews, is today rolling out an update which expands the service into more of a dish search engine than local utility. The company had previously allowed you to see the best dishes nearby and compare dishes inside a restaurant, but now the app also helps you find the… → Read More
Local business data provider Locu is announcing a partnership with Yelp today, in order to help update Yelp’s menus and other listings data with Locu’s real-time information directly from businesses. This will allow restaurants on Locu to distribute their menus and daily specials to Yelp, but it will also help Locu further expand into other verticals beyond restaurants alone. The… → Read More
Ness, the restaurant recommendations app that uses social data combined with machine-learning techniques to offer personalized suggestions, has released the next major version of its application today, now focused on what it’s calling “instant recommendations.” In the earlier version, Ness relied on user-initiated searches and a setup wizard that asked users to select their… → Read More
If you’ve ever been in a sports bar with your friends to watch a big game, you’ve likely run into the “muting” problem. While the bar may have two dozen TVs, each might be playing a different game, and there’s either too much sound or none at all. At most local restaurants, bars, airports and health clubs, you’ll find TVs muted for this very reason. → Read More
Automattic’s WordPress.com recently added a restaurant vertical to make it easier for restaurant owners to manage their sites and avoid the pitfalls of Flash-based homepages that auto-play annoying music and don’t work on mobile. Today, those sites get even better, thanks to a new integration between Locu and Automattic that makes it easy for restaurateurs to bring their Locu menus to… → Read More
NoshList, the restaurant waitlisting app for iPad launched just over a year ago, is today making its way to smartphones, including both the iPhone and Android devices. Although possibly not the ideal form factor for the job, the mobile app allows restaurants to test the NoshList experience on devices they likely own, before making an investment into a tablet (or multiple tablets) to run the… → Read More
The online ordering market for restaurants has a new competitor today. A startup called EatStreet has made it to Series A by targeting the secondary markets across the U.S. for its expansion. The $2 million round was led by Cornerstone Opportunity Partners, and includes participation from Great Oaks VC, Independence Equity, and the Wisconsin-based accelerator gener8tor. → Read More
OTG, the restaurateur that made waves when it installed free access iPads in some of the world’s busiest international airport hubs last year, is improving its existing system with the deployment of a translation system that will allow it to provide translation of its restaurant menus in 13 different languages. The system is already live in test deployments at locations like Toronto’s Pearson… → Read More
OLO, the New York-based online and mobile ordering platform for restaurants, has raised a $5 million Series B round of funding from PayPal and existing investors, David Frankel, RRE Ventures, and Core Capital Partners. The company had previously raised $8.75 million in outside funding. Exactly a year ago today, as it turns out, the company announced reaching the milestone of 1 million customers… → Read More
Locu, a local business data provider which extracts structured data from business websites and then makes it available via an API, is today announcing two major new partnerships, specifically for its restaurant data: CitySearch and TripAdvisor. The news comes only a couple of months after OpenTable signed with Locu on a similar deal. → Read More
Dish.fm is a new restaurant recommendation mobile application, launching today, which focuses on helping users find the best dishes at their local eateries. Initially, the company had gone the Foodspotting route, debuting an early version of the app this summer which relied on crowd-sourcing techniques to fill its database with photos and reviews. But just a month after the app went live in the… → Read More
Back in August, we introduced you to OrderAhead, a Y Combinator grad and mobile ordering solution that had just raised $2.3 million from Facebook co-founder Adam D’Angelo, Ignition Partners, Matrix Partners, Menlo Ventures, Eric Schmidt’s Innovation Endeavors and SV Angel, among others. Today, along with some strong growth trends seen over the last few months, the startup is announcing that it has… → Read More
Teburu, a newly launched tablet-based online and mobile ordering system for restaurants, is now live with a handful of restaurant chains in the Southern U.S, including Gondolier Pizza, Pita’s Republic, and Little Greek Restaurant, and it has also recently signed a contract with a large, undisclosed Middle Eastern restaurant management company with 600 locations. → Read More
Restaurant app maker and reservation management system provider Urbanspoon is today expanding its international footprint through new partnerships with online reservation services Dimmi and Livebookings. The deal will allow international diners the ability to book reservations at nearly 7,000 more restaurants via the additional inventory. → Read More
Locu, a local business data provider which works to extract structured data from business websites, is announcing a notable new partnership today with restaurant reservation service and guest management solution provider OpenTable. According to the agreement, OpenTable’s menu data will now be powered by Locu, and restaurant owners will also optionally be able to edit those menus in real time, if… → Read More
Urbanspoon is continuing to heat up the competition between it and competitor OpenTable with the launch of a new feature for Rezbook, its iPad-based reservation and tablet management system for restaurant owners. Today, the company is introducing Rezbook “Right Now” which lets diners view immediate table availability at the restaurants found in Urbanspoon. The feature supports real-time… → Read More
Grubwithus, the social dining network and 2011 Y Combinator grad, announced today that it has secured $5 million in new funding to snack on, led by GRP Partners with contribution from Lebanese entrepreneur Michel Daher, who is best known as the founder of Daher Foods and its Master Chips and Poppins cereal brands, two of the largest consumer packaged goods brands in the MENA region.
The… → Read More
It’s been a year since E la Carte launched its customized tablet for restaurants, which brings menus, wine lists, nutritional info, play-while-you-wait games, and payment options tableside, and now the company has new numbers to reveal. This time last year, there were around 20 restaurants using the tablet; today there are now over 600, including national chains Pizzeria Venti and Umami Burger… → Read More
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… → Read More
NoshList, the new waitlisting application for restaurants out of Firespotter Labs, the makers of the food photo-sharing app Nosh (and, as you may recall, the awesome SoLoMo spoof app Jotly), is announcing today that it has now hit 1 million seated since the app’s debut in February of this year. According to company CEO Craig Walker, the fast uptake for the iPad app by those in the industry… → Read More
We’ve written quite a bit about BiteHunter, a mobile app for iPhone that aggregates dining deals in the U.S., since it launched about a year ago. Now, the New York-based company has released version 2.0 of its app and this update makes a good app even better. BiteHunter 2.0 doesn’t just introduce a new, highly visual interface for discovering restaurants with available deals around you, but it… → Read More
Finding a good restaurant – even in a city you’ve never been to – has never been easier. Thanks to Yelp, Urbanspoon and its various brethren, a good place to eat is generally just a few clicks away. What if you want to find a restaurant with a very specific atmosphere, though? Say you’re in the mood for a pizza at a relaxed place where the noise level is just right for a good conversation? Chances… → Read More
At TechCrunch Disrupt NYC last year, Gauri Manglik, Mike Lewis, and Orion Burt launched SpotOn, a recommendation engine in app, which served its users suggested local businesses based on their friends’ activity on Foursquare, Facebook, and more. The co-founders quickly found, however, that its customers were using the app more as a social networking tool than for its recommendations. So, based on… → Read More
Popular restaurant app Urbanspoon is releasing new data today related to its growth over the course of 2011. The company says its traffic is up by 80%, with mobile growth outpacing the web. The site is now seeing 28 million visits per month, with traffic now split roughly half and half between mobile and web.
On the mobile side, Urbanspoon has seen 112% year-over-year growth, while on the web… → Read More
OLO, a web and mobile online ordering service for restaurants, is celebrating a lot of things: bigger office space in New York’s South St. Seaport district, hitting the 1 million customer milestone, adding new restaurant partners, and plans to launch its long-awaited GrubHub integration, nearly a year in the making. → Read More
Urbanspoon, the mobile restaurant recommendations and reservations application, is today adding a new feature called “Dineline,” which allows users to check-in to restaurants in order to track their dining habits. While most check-in apps are meant to register your presence at a venue for the purpose of game play, social networking, or receiving offers or discounts, Dineline is meant to be used… → Read More
LivingSocial is now testing a new food ordering and delivery service as a part of LivingSocial Instant, the company announced this morning. At launch, members in the Washington D.C. area can order food from select area restaurants and have the meals delivered to their home or workplace.
In conjunction with the restaurant delivery service, the company is also launching something called… → Read More
BiteHunter, the new mobile app for finding nearby dining deals, has just completed a $800,000 funding round. The round was led by angel investors Avraham Kadar, M.D. and Eyal Chomsky. The funding will be used to provide additional resources for the development of new features, an expansion to other platforms, and ongoing maintenance of BiteHunter’s deals database. → Read More
Restaurant reservations service OpenTable is launching a completely redesigned mobile website today based on HTML5. The company says it was prompted to make the changes due to customer demand. Since 2008, the company has seated more than 15 million diners through both its mobile website and apps, representing over $600 million in revenue for its restaurant customers. These days, OpenTable mobile… → Read More
Locu, a data-focused startup founded by MIT graduates and computer science researchers, is closing a seed round of over $600,000 from East and West coast investors, including Factual founder Gil Elbaz, Google’s Bruno Bowden, Cloudera founder Jeff Hammerbacher, Hubspot’s Dharmesh Shah, Twitter VP of Engineering Michael Abbott, Facebook co-founder Andrew McCollum, MIT’s Ed Roberts, Jean Hammond, … → Read More
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