OpenTable is a pretty fantastic app that can help you place reservations at restaurants nearby. While plenty of services let you find local eateries, few help you get in. Once you're seated and eating, though, what do you do? Enjoy your meal? Nah. That's for fancy pants. You should take pictures of your food! That's where Foodspotting comes in.

You see, Foodspotting takes the vanity of snapping shots of your dish and turns it into a service. Your pictures are geotagged, uploaded to the server, and shared with people nearby so that they can not only find cool restaurants, but see the actual food that said establishments crank out. It's actually kinda neat!

Now the two companies are becoming one as the former buys the latter. While the two will continue to operate as standalone products, you'll start to see user photos and dishes appear directly in OpenTable, and hopefully other neat forms of integration.

Frankly, this is kind of awesome.

Source: Foodspotting, OpenTable

OpenTable to Acquire Foodspotting

SAN FRANCISCO, Jan. 29, 2013 /PRNewswire/ -- OpenTable, Inc. (NASDAQ: OPEN), the world's leading provider of online restaurant reservations, today announced that it has entered into a definitive agreement to acquire Foodspotting, an app for finding and sharing great dishes at restaurants, for approximately $10 million in cash pursuant to a stock purchase agreement. The completion of the acquisition is subject to the satisfaction of customary closing conditions.

"We're proud to welcome the talented Foodspotting team to the OpenTable family," said Matt Roberts, Chief Executive Officer of OpenTable. "The Foodspotting team is as passionate about dining as we are, and we're looking forward to leveraging their unique expertise in the areas of imagery and social sharing to enrich the OpenTable experience for diners and restaurants in new and exciting ways. By adding more visually compelling content to help people decide where to dine and discover dishes they'll love, we hope to make it even easier to find the perfect table for any occasion."

"We're so happy to have found a home for Foodspotting where our community can continue to thrive while our entire team continues to focus on creating great dining experiences," said Alexa Andrzejewski, Co-founder and Chief Executive Officer of Foodspotting, who will be joiningOpenTable as a lead user interface designer. "While working with OpenTable as partners we realized we could create more intelligent, seamless and beautiful experiences if we had the opportunity to integrate our products more deeply. We look forward to contributing our mobile, social and design expertise in ways that will delight both diners and restaurants."

By enabling OpenTable to deliver a richer visual and social experience for diners and provide its restaurant customers with new opportunities to showcase their offerings, the acquisition supports the Company's focus on continuing to enhance the ways it helps diners discover and book the perfect restaurant table. OpenTable recently added dish photos through a collaboration with Foodspotting, giving diners a small taste of the kind of enhancements that will be coming once the Foodspotting team is on board. In addition to welcoming the Foodspotting team to OpenTable, the Company plans to maintain the Foodspotting site and mobile apps on a standalone basis.