Webware

OpenTable was the special of the day on Wall Street on Thursday.

The restaurant-reservation company's stock soared on its first day of trading on Nasdaq, gaining nearly 60 percent to close at $31.89 after selling 3 million shares at $20 a share during its initial public offering Wednesday. Nearly 5 million shares changed hands, trading as high as $35.50.

OpenTable's stock performance is the biggest first-day gain for an IPO since energy-management systems firm Orion Energy Systems gained 65 percent in its debut in December 2007, according to IPO research firm Renaissance Capital.

OpenTable's revenue comes from monthly subscription fees charged to restaurants for access to the company's service, as well as a $1 fee paid by restaurants for each seated guest derived from reservations made on OpenTable's site.

The company earned 2 cents per share on nearly $16 million in revenue in the quarter ended March 31, 2009, and lost 10 cents per share on revenue of $13.2 million in 2008.

The San Francisco-based company says it has 10,000 restaurant customers around the world and has seated more 100 million diners since its inception in 1998.

Online restaurant reservation provider OpenTable is getting ready to go public.

According to a release, the company will price its initial public offering at $20 per share.

But a share price doesn't tell you the whole story about a company. Whether you're thinking about investing in OpenTable, or you simply want to see why the company's executives believe that it has a good chance to be successful on the Nasdaq, there's no better way to find out than to look at its current state of operations.

Profits (or no?)
According to its latest SEC filing, OpenTable earned $16 million in revenue during the three months ended March 31. During the same period in 2008, it earned $13.2 million in revenue. For the first quarter of 2009, the company generated a profit of $366,000. Last year, it lost $87,000.

Annually, OpenTable hasn't fared so well. According to its 2008 income statement, the company lost $1.02 million on revenue of $55.8 million. In 2007, the company generated a profit of $9.2 million on $41 million in revenue. That said, its profit was the result of a $9 million tax benefit. It lost $856,000 on operations in 2008 before it incurred that benefit.

Use coupon code 'SAVE' to get $25 vouchers for $3.

(Credit: Restaurant.com)

Hungry? Like to dine out? Restaurant.com normally lets you buy $25 gift certificates for $10, but right now you can scoop them up for just $3 apiece. Simply enter coupon code SAVE when you get to the shopping cart.

Anyone familiar with Restaurant.com knows there are usually a few small strings attached, like a minimum food or drink purchase. However, it's not like you have to order a case of wine or anything. And you can print the coupon right on your own printer: It's immediately ready for use.

A few months back I used one of the gift certificates for a local Italian place, and except for a slight delay while the manager called to verify the coupon, everything went smoothly.

In these horrendous economic times, this deal is too good to pass up. Just make sure to read all the terms and conditions before you buy your certificates, just so you avoid any nasty surprises when the check comes. Bon appetit!

(Credit: CNET)

Despite being a fan of Zagat's restaurant surveys, I've never been overly impressed with the mobile applications for Windows Mobile Smartphone and PocketPC, BlackBerry, and Palm.

Regrettably, Zagat To Go '09 for the iPhone and iPod Touch ($9.99 per year) isn't markedly different.

The components to a great mobile app are all there--venerable content, click-to-call, a Web site link, OpenTable reservations for some restaurants, and search and sorting filters--but the whole is somehow less than the sum of its parts.

Stability is a major concern, the app cries for an in-app browser, and Zagat To Go calibrates your location twice every time you open it, a repetition that quickly wears thin. Providing advanced search options to find, for instance, sushi restaurants nearby for under $30 would make the app immediately more winning.

iTunes App Store reviewers have also thoroughly picked a bone with the app over a "cheesy" link to other apps created by Zagat's mobile publishing partner, Handmark, and "frustrating," "misleading" information about the cities and countries covered. It's true that Zagat Survey is strongest in metropolitan US cities, with passable international coverage in the UK, Italy, and France, and some world cities, like Tokyo, Toronto, London, and Rome. Handmark should more explicitly list those cities to minimize the backlash.

It's also true that Zagat To Go will best serve the foodies who want to "cut through the garbage" found on Yelp's and Urbanspoon's iPhone apps and be funneled to finer dining. Big-city diners dedicated to Zagat's yearly survey have in this iPhone app a slightly more economical and much more convenient and interactive option than toting the book with them on travels near and far, or viewing the cramped mobile Web site from the Safari browser.

Update: 12/2/08 at 3:40 PM. Handmark commented in an e-mail that a new release being submitted to iPhone's App Store for approval today will request location access upon launching the app for the first time. A button on the main search screen will let you manually update your new location.

BooRah, a service that uses semantic technology to find restaurant reviews online and combine them to give users a rating, announced that it has launched a new API for websites and businesses that want to display the company's reviews on their own sites.

The API allows users to search for restaurants in their city and view the detailed ratings for food, service, and ambiance that have already been generated on BooRah. The API will also give its users the option of displaying links for discounts, menus, and coupons. BooRah hopes users will employ the API's location capabilities to deliver location-enabled applications through Mozilla's Geode, Android, or the iPhone.

BooRah's main competitor, Yelp has already released a host of APIs to provide its users, so the company is behind. But by offering an API, BooRah is trying to position itself to expand and become a more viable alternative to Yelp.

The BooRah API is free to use and available on the company's site.

Yelp on the iPhone maps and calls destinations and provides user ratings, but leaves off other social-networking elements.

(Credit: CNET Networks)

Yelp for iPhone contains all the ingredients you'd expect from the well-known site for users to rate local business and restaurant listings--except one. It has a perplexing tendency to space out when loading user reviews. The instability is surely an early bug, but a detraction nonetheless.

Apart from that, Yelp for iPhone features a clear display composed of category listings for nearby restaurants, bars, banks, and so on. Like so many of the other apps that CNET editors have reviewed, Yelp's iPhone offering taps into the phone's GPS receptors to find matching listings in your neighborhood, with further parameters on distance and hours available in the button marked Filter.

Each listing on the results page squeezes in the address, user ratings, distance, and price range. Drilling deeper spreads the information out in a format that lets you map the location, click to call, begin browsing through user reviews, and bookmark the page.

Yelp.com is a data-intensive site bulging with user opinions and social-networking addenda. The iPhone app was clearly never intended as a replacement, but as a companion for the lost or weary to seek out a bike shop or bite to eat. That much is evident by the read-only quality, mobile-specific mapping and call functions, and the de-emphasis on social networking. Still, while the closed, self-centeredness of Yelp for iPhone is somewhat refreshing, certain scheduling capabilities would be welcome--like the ability to invite a friend to lunch.

Looks like we were right: PaidContent reported Thursday that restaurant and take-out menu listing site MenuPages has been acquired. The buyer, they say, is New York magazine.

No financial details were provided.

We reported back in May that MenuPages had been acquired, but didn't have any hints as to a buyer. We speculated that it was possibly Yelp or IAC's Citysearch. With New York as a buyer, it's likely that MenuPages will stay locally rooted rather than continuing to expand nationally: there are editions for Boston, Chicago, Los Angeles, the Miami region, Philadelphia, San Francisco, and Washington, D.C., but the buyer is wholly Gotham-centric. There's no word as to what will happen to the non-New York editions of the site.

New York magazine, which runs an extensive network of local blogs, is owned by private equity firm Wasserstein & Co., and restaurant listings are a prominent feature on its Web site.

Yelp, the business reviews site famed for a vociferous user base willing to be brutally honest about the quality of their local restaurants, bars, bookstores, dog groomers, adult gift shops, and what-have-you, has launched a new service for those business owners to interact with the site's users.

Called "Yelp for Business Owners," the section of the site lets business owners register for special Yelp accounts, which they then need to verify by phone. Once registered, they have access to some analytics (namely to see how many people have been viewing their business page), receive e-mail alerts when they have new reviews, update public data like their hours of operation or contact information, and message the users who have already reviewed their business.

While Yelp will not charge for business owner accounts, it's a way for the company to get more eyes on its ad-supported site.

The service will likely have its biggest splash in San Francisco, where the start-up is based and where "Yelper" has become a mild pejorative among some restaurant and cafe owners.

Elsewhere, it might not have quite the effect. I live in New York, where the food and hospitality industries seem to have a bigger problem with influential food bloggers rather than reviews sites, and the IAC-owned Citysearch is still the online directory of choice for many.

MojoPages is a new user review site that launched last week. It's similar to Yelp, but MojoPages users can post video clips and pictures to individual reviews about restaurants and local attractions.

In addition to offering a free-form template to create your written masterpiece, MojoPages gives you a form on which you can rate each establishment's value, service, and quality--things often mentioned in a well-written review.

One of the other standouts of MojoPages is the implementation of user photos. Instead of just uploading photos to an establishment's profile page, you can add them to each review. This might come in handy if you find a cockroach in your bowl of soup or want to include a photo of a signature dish you ate. The use of photos lets you narrate your reviews a little better and encourages you to come back and add another review if you try something different. This could be very handy with restaurants and hotels, as the quality can differ among dishes or rooms.

(Credit: CNET Networks)

If you have a video clip, you can embed it right onto the review page. There's also a built-in recording function to create your own video review using a webcam. Browsing around I found less than a dozen video reviews, but some of the ones on there were interesting. One in particular might have been poorly lit, but it provided some insight into a restaurant's specialties and its chef. The whole experience reminded me a little bit of GeoBeats and TurnHere, but with more indie user-generated content.

Every time you post a review to MojoPages or somebody marks your review as helpful you're given some "Mojo." Mojo points count as prestige or street cred with other users, like what you'd find with Yelp's 'Elite' status. MojoPages also keeps track of Mojo, with leaderboards featuring the daily and the all-time Mojo points leaders.

MojoPages might have borrowed quite a few things from other review sites, but it's made excellent use of photos and videos to help users make reviews a little more dynamic. If you're looking for more comprehensive listings of local spots, competitor Yelp likely has you covered. If you want to make your personal reviews a little richer with media, give MojoPages a try.