IAC/InterActiveCorp (NASDAQ:IAC) subsidiary Urbanspoon has a huge userbase on the web and on the iPhone. As a matter of fact, about one million people “shake” the iPhone application per day.
Now Urbanspoon is setting up a reservation system with a pilot of 4 restaurants in Seattle. The reservation system competes directly with OpenTable, a service that has a reservation system that filed for an IPO this past Janaury. Eventually Urbanspoon will be opening up to additional restaurants.
OpenTable pays $300 per month to rent a terminal for reservations. Urbanspoon and OpenTable pay about $1 for every reservation made through the systems.
Restaurant locator and review service Urbanspoon.com has one of the most used iPhone applications that exists in the market today. The Urbanspoon iPhone application automatically detects where you are and is able to help you find a restaurant within a certain vicinity, priced from low to high prices, and of different ethnic tastes.
Earlier today, stastistics about the iPhone application has been revealed by The New York Times. The statistic is that about one million people use the Shake feature on the Urbanspoon application everyday. The Shake feature randomly selects restaurants for you based on your location or the city that you pick. You can also “lock” one of the three columns – city, price, food type.
Urbanspoon is a website that recommends local restaurants based on reviews and tastes. In a way its a competitor of Yelp. Urbanspoon was founded by three former employees at Jobster, Patrick O’Donnell, Ethan Lowry, and Adam Doppelt. They built the service without the need of venture capital investments, something that Jobster heavily depended on. InterActiveCorp (IAC) bought that self-funded company.
Although there isn’t an official figure, TechCrunch believes it is “something in the millions of dollars range” since the company is already fairly profitable. Urbanspoon used IAC’s CitySearch reviews for customers looking for restaurants. The acquisition talks have been taking place since the second half of last year.
Urbanspoon’s popularity had especially grown from their free iPhone application which finds out where you are located and recommends a random restaurant using a slot machine style. Urbanspoon will remain based in Seattle and will update their iPhone application soon. Now that Urbanspoon has access to IAC’s various other Internet properties, you never know what they will come up with next.
