Yes, please. (Photo: Ness)

It's surprisingly difficult to stand on a street corner and use your smartphone to find a restaurant you'll actually like. Yelp, for example, just serves up a long list of other people's favorites. But a new-and-improved version of the recommendations app Ness, released late last night, hopes to remedy that.

Open Ness 2.0, CEO Corey Reese told Betabeat, and "it provides instant recommendations without a person having to take any interaction at all."

"Now, when you boot up the application, the first thing it does is says we're finding recommendations for you," Mr. Reese added. The app adjusts its results based on factors like time of day (no legendary brunch spots at 10 p.m.) and location (people in Palo Alto can drive farther).

Meanwhile, version one's list of options has been replaced with recommendation cards explaining why you might like a particular place, illustrated with photos pulled from Instagram. Users are also provided with a "likeness" score, a best guess for how much they'll like a place.

If you like the looks of a rec, you can swipe down, and a pop-up gives you the option of calling, getting directions, or making an Open Table reservation. If you're not quite ready to book, you can flick down to save the suggestion or share it with friends.

Mr. Reese said that 300,000 people have downloaded the app in the last year, and users have generated more than 4,250,000 ratings of restaurants. Back in August, the startup raised a $15 million Series B from SingTel Innov8 and American Express Ventures. Based on Ness's own surveys, he added, "over 70 percent of people prefer the new version of Ness to Yelp and are likely to continue using it." New York is its most active city.

Eventually, Ness would like to expand the service beyond eateries. "We want to show people a different way, a better way, where each time they pull up their mobile device, they can get a personal set of recommendations unique to what would make sense for them right now," said Mr. Reese.

See the new version in action in this video:

Ness 2.0 from Ness on Vimeo.

(Photo: MSN)

You know how some people (like, hypothetically) eat their way through vacation? A little pasta in Rome, some cheese in Paris, barbecue in the South. A new pop-up hotel that recently opened in London is taking that concept quite literally, creating hotel rooms made entirely out of edible goods.

You might want to leave your Nike Fuelband at home for this one.

The Daily Mail reports that the hotel contains over 100 pieces of edible "art," including windowsills made out of fudge, a cake carpet, a bathtub full of caramel popcorn and edible sugar flower arrangements.

Created by sugar company Tate & Lyle Sugars, each room had a different theme: the Pirates of the Caribbean room had a treasure chest full of candy; a Mayan-themed room had a Mayan temple made of fudge; the Guyanese room had a giant seat turtle cake.

This is the stuff dreams are made of. U mad, Willy Wonka?

Taylor would never (Photo: Thebosh.com)

Oh god. Fresh out of the U.K. and the dairy aisle comes "Milking," a new internet craze. To be a "milker," one must stand in a public place and dump an entire jug of milk over one's head. It's an extraordinary waste of food and time, but kind of amazing to watch in the worst kind of way.

But what is it with wasting dairy products for the sake of some public reactions? Is "coning," the act of sticking an ice cream cone onto your head while going through a drive-through to blame? This is the worst Internet trend since planking.

[via @MichaelHayes]

Duuuuude. (Photo: TrendsUpdates.com, Paul Cooper)

Sometimes, particularly as pangs of hunger creep up on you just before bed, you want a little snack without worrying where on your hips said food will take its revenge. It's normal, really. Human.

But sometimes, well--sometimes you want to inhale a steam of boiled food ingredients through a cauldron-like futuristic device. Luckily, a French scientist is here to sate your utmost desires. David Edwards, a professor at Harvard, has created what one Redditor called "a food bong."

According to the CBC:

The idea is called Le Whaf, where ingredients of a meal are boiled into a liquid, strained, then poured into a large French gadget, similar to a glass cauldron....

"It's a vase that has an ultrasound planted in the bottom of it, so it agitates the liquid hard enough and fast enough that it will create a cloud," Aitken said, "It is used, essentially, as a vehicle for flavour."

The cloud of food can be inhaled through a straw.

The device is apparently growing in popularity among European dieters because it's a non-caloric appetite quencher. You could also like, live above a really delicious smelling restaurant, but we assume that's simply not as chic.

We're sure it won't be long before Le Whaf carves a space for itself in the startup ecosystem, particularly amongst those offices where group starvation is a team building exercise.

Talk about a reset button. (Image: screencap)

Startups and established tech companies alike love nothing so much as feeding their employees. How else does one keep developers tied to their desks for those all-night coding sprints? However, just a few days of eating at one's desk and the filth starts to build up--pizza grease, Cheeto dust, and let's not even discuss the trauma of soaking one's setup in cold coffee.

Luckily, Logitech has heard the prayers of techies everywhere and just debuted a keyboard that is washable. We're not talking a mere sponge bath, either--the demo video shows a keyboard fully immersed in a tank of water. Finally, freedom from the consequences of our lunch-related decisions.

Surely it's only a matter of time before we see this added to the standard array of Silicon Alley/Valley perks. At the very least, it'll do more for the quality of one's worklife than a Segway.

(h/t @Farhad Manjoo)

Note the "lunch" sign, in case someone was confused. (Photo: courtesy of Cater2Me)

Founded a year and a half ago in San Francisco, Cater2Me quickly found its niche feeding the ravenous techies of Silicon Valley, nabbing clients like Dropbox, Square and Klout. "You can call it the Google effect, if you want," cofounder Alex Lorton told Betabeat, and "that idea is becoming the norm in New York, as well."

Hence the company's decision to expand to New York City. The service just launched yesterday, but it sounds like Mr. Lorton is already halfway to going out for the cheerleading team.

"I think it's cool to be part of the expansion of Silicon Alley, to use the phrase, to be part of that startup community," he said. "People in startups are, I think, more willing to embrace something that's new, something that's initially not as tested."

Well, hopefully it's not that untested.

He also expects to have a leg up with the financial sector, as Mr. Lorton and his cofounder did tours of duty in consulting and banking, respectively. (He didn't have anything to say about financiers' appetite for untested ventures, however.)

Asked about their competitive advantage, Mr. Lorton basically just told us that he's bonkers about food: "We go out and we follow the food blogs religiously and we are constantly looking for the highest quality and the most interesting things," he said. Seamless, for example, can't match that, he argues: picking from the wide variety and knowing the chosen vendor can handle spiraling headaches like service elevator snafus are real challenges for the poor non-foodie coordinator likely charged with ordering.

He expects the city will be logistically more difficult. Then there's the fact that Seamless is the market leader. "There's just more things vying for people's attention here," he said. Nevertheless, he has high hopes for New York and expects they'll be serving 20,000 to 30,000 meals a month* a week by the end of the year. (They're currently at "well over" 70,000 in San Francisco.)

They might have to borrow a few coolness points from their startup clients, though: Mr. Lorton told us they're working out of an office in... East Midtown.

As denizens of the Times Square area, Betabeat sympathizes.

*Updated: This article originally stated that Mr. Lorton predicted Cater2Me would be serving 20,000 to 30,000 meals per month; Mr. Lorton reached out to let us know he anticipated they'd be doing that many meals per week. Betabeat regrets the error. 

Beware all ye mollusks who enter here.

Sure, they'd already heard from The Village Voice that they "reinvent(ed)" choucroute among other high marks, but the Times stamp of approval is an internationally-regarded one; the kind that can make or break a restaurant, especially one like Littleneck, a small upstart in a neighborhood most Manhattanites have never even been to.

Not even with a Kickstarter can you buy press like this:

Andy Curtin, an owner looking more shipmate than band mate in a beard and woolen cap, swoops about with dishes you’ll be happy to dine on. [...] The fabulous bicoastal oyster selection delivers bracing, diverse pleasures. The clipper-ship-size clam roll pretty much redeems the mollusk; fat-bellied fried Ipswiches burst from their griddled split-top roll. [...] Perhaps we are indeed experiencing a changing of the guard.

The review doesn't mention the Kickstarter aspect of the restaurant; fair enough, a previous Times piece already covered that territory. That said, it's worth pointing out now more than ever, if only as further evidence of Kickstarter's success in democratizing (and maybe, dare we say, revolutionizing) things like personal investment, small business models, and the way we eat.

Also, now, the clam roll. Every once in a while, the startup world actually produces some happy endings. Not that Littleneck's narrative is totally written, already, but this book in their story ended pretty nicely. Very rarely—but still, sometimes—everybody wins. Unless you're a bivalve, this would appear to be one of those times.

fkamer@observer.com | @weareyourfek