Photograph by Sauce Communications via Bloomberg

A chicken soup dish with accoutrements is served at Naamyaa Cafe in London

A picture may be worth a thousand words, but photos of restaurant food are apparently worth $10 million.

OpenTable, the online restaurant reservation company, is announcing today it’s paying that amount to buy Foodspotting, a smartphone application that lets people share and rate photos of food.

Images from Foodspotting users will appear on the OpenTable site and mobile applications, helping people judge a restaurant based on how appetizing the dishes look.

While OpenTable has pictures for some establishments already, “we don’t have nearly as many as I think will be helpful for diners to pick the perfect restaurant,” Chief Executive Officer Matt Roberts said in an interview. With Foodspotting, “there’s an opportunity for us to present some dishes you might like at the restaurant you’re about to go to,” he said.

San Francisco-based Foodspotting, which started in 2009 and raised $3.75 million in venture capital and private financing, has capitalized on diners’ preoccupation with documenting what they eat. It will continue operating as a separate website and application, although the features will eventually be available on OpenTable, the company said.

Foodspotting has about 3 million photos, or one for every $3.33 OpenTable plans to spend on the startup. Roberts thinks the acquisition will enhance his company’s content on smartphones and help people make better decisions through social recommendations.

He said he will give updates on some other features that are on the way, including tools that let restaurants recognize users by their photo and dining history, on a Feb. 7 conference call with investors.

“We really want to be broader than our foundation, which is reservations,” Roberts said.

Original post is Hungry for Photos: OpenTable Buying Foodspotting for $10 Million by Tech Deals.

Photograph courtesy of The Melt

Over the next five years, Jonathan Kaplan expects to have 100 buses selling The Melt's grilled cheese sandwiches.

Silicon Valley entrepreneur Jonathan Kaplan caused some head-scratching in the tech world last year when the creator of Flip Video announced his next venture would be grilled cheese sandwiches.

Fifteen months and five San Francisco Bay Area stores later, Kaplan is even more bullish on the power of cheese and plans to put nine restaurants on wheels across the state by year end. Over the next five years, he expects to have 100 buses selling the same $8.75 sandwich-and-soup combos as his stationary stores.

His rationale is simple — different neighborhoods come alive at different hours, so why not go where the customers are? For example, The Melt restaurant that’s next door to its corporate headquarters in downtown San Francisco is open until 9 p.m. on weekdays and closed on Sundays, because nobody hangs out around there late at night or on weekends.

“If this restaurant were a bus, I could drive it somewhere like Golden Gate Park,” Kaplan said, in between bites of a sandwich called The Italian Job, which consists of fontina and provolone cheese on garlic bread. “We can deliver the same entire experience out of a 200-square-foot bus as we do out of a restaurant.”

While Kaplan isn’t divulging any company financials, he says the business is doing “very well,” with its top locations serving 500 customers a day and becoming profitable “very quickly.” The Melt, with funding from Sequoia Capital, has three stores in downtown San Francisco, one in Berkeley and one at Stanford Shopping Center in Palo Alto, California. Within five years, he plans to have 500 stores, including 100 buses, open nationwide. He wants to eventually be in all 50 states.

He can afford to be patient. Just three years ago, Kaplan sold Pure Digital Technologies, the maker of Flip Video, to Cisco Systems for $590 million (Flip was also backed by Sequoia). Cisco famously turned around and shuttered the division last year, despite having some of the most popular camcorders on the market.

This time Kaplan’s ambitions are bigger. He talks about being in the top echelon of fast casual restaurant chains, a category that includes Panera Bread and Chipotle Mexican Grill, which are worth a combined $13.7 billion on the stock market. Panera trades at 24 times earnings over the next year, while Chipotle trades at 29 times. That compares with 16 times for McDonald’s, 17 times for Domino’s Pizza and 18 times for Yum Brands.

“This is a business that Wall Street loves,” Kaplan said. “It can be very lucrative to shareholders.”

Original post is The Melt Puts Its Grilled Cheese Sandwich Shops on Wheels by Tech Deals.