New name, soon.

After rumors swirled the past few days that food delivery companies GrubHub and Seamless were in talks to merge, the news is now official. Bloomberg reports that the companies are combining in an effort to out-deliver their competitors in the fast-growing online ordering sector.

Matt Maloney, CEO of Chicago-based GrubHub, will lead the merged entity while New York-based Seamless CEO Jonathan Zabusky will be its president. Financial details have not yet been released but neither company is paying to acquire the other. The company will be rebranded, although a new name hasn't been selected.

The combined company will beef up customers' offerings to more than 20,000 restaurants in 500 American cities, a press release states. Between the two companies, nearly $875 million were spent by cheesecake-at-2am-craving consumers, resulting in $100 million in revenue. The merger will help the companies further epand into that lucrative section of mobile food delivery. Nearly 30 percent of orders on GrubHub are conducted through mobile, while Seamless pulls in 40 percent of orders through its app.

Mr. Maloney told Bloomberg the company will continue to grow:

“This has nothing to do with cost savings; it has everything to do with increasing growth,” Mr. Maloney said. “We’re totally focused on the top line and how we continue to drive more orders for our restaurants.”

The deal will have to be approved by government regulators. In the mean time, can we get a Seamless discount code in celebration?

Mr. Dickerson (Photo: Twitter.com)

Lots Of Tiny Wicker Puppets Sold Etsy CEO Chad Dickerson took to the company's blog to address his craft-obsessed minons and report big new numbers. Etsy recently hit 20 million members across over 200 countries. In the first week of November, they passed the $700 million sales mark and their direct checkout system has now processed over $100 million in transactions. By the end of the year, Etsy projects that it will have sold over 100 million items in the company's history.

The company is also going all out for the holiday season and expects to have its best month yet. It's running a multi-million-dollar online advertising campaign and opening a Etsy Holiday Shop in SoHo from November 29th through December 8th. SoHo though? Isn't Greenpoint or Williamsburg more on target with the Etsy brand?

Chu Bets Against Zynga Betable has already announced partnerships with big game companies and is right on the path to become the Spotify of online gambling and pass its closest rival, Zynga. Ya-Bing Chu, a former VP and GM of Zynga's mobile division, has now joined Betable as the company's new Chief Product Officer. At Zynga, he was responsible for operating Words with Friends and Scramble with Friends. Mr. Chu explains the move in an essay on Betable's blog, where he says, "I realized that Betable was the only frictionless way to enter the real money market, which is revolutionary."

Make It, Don't Break It Mayor Bloomberg and NYCEDC have opened submissions for their New York's Next Top Makers challenge. Competitors will have to create a product with commercial potential which includes consumer products, equipment, furniture and lighting, soft goods, packaging, interaction, transportation, DIY (kits) or something else. There are six $5,950 prizes and an $11,000 grand prize up for grabs. The deadline is in three months, so get to brainstorming right away.

Tumblr Goes Native Tumblr just released an update to its iOS app with a completely redesigned dashboard. The app has gone fully native and now finally runs a lot smoother: it runs faster than before, photos are a lot bigger, and GIFs play automatically when swiped. Better GIF's on your phone people, this is the stuff of the future.

Where's Our Food? There aren't many differences between the major players of the online food ordering game. But GrubHub has just changed the game a little bit with the beta release of its Track Your Grub feature. Similar to Domino's Pizza Tracker, Track Your Grub lets you know what the status of your order is during every step of the way. You'll get texts when your food is expected to arrive and when it leaves the restaurant. In certain areas, you can even watch your food make the trip to your apartment in real time on the maps feature. Seamless just got a little nervous.

Shop Like No One's Watching Sole Society, the West Coast based site that lets you order shoes direct from the manufacturer, has announced its first celebrity collection with two-time Dancing With The Stars champion Julianne Hough. On the site, Hough says, "Every girl needs a sexy leather jacket and a cutout heel." Noted.

Big Data Gets Big Money The social data platform, Datasift, has just secured $15 million in Series B funding. The round was led by Scale Venture Partners and Northgate Capital and Daher Capital also contributed. Rory O’Driscoll, the managing director of Scale Venture Partners, said in a press release sent to Betabeat, “Great companies make hard problems simple for the end user, and DataSift has done that with its game-changing visual interface."

Sad Turkey Daily deals site are a dime a dozen and so 8Coupons, a site that thinks of itself as "Kayak for deals," lets you see all daily deals across the web at one glance. The site's efficiency was proved this week when David Burke at Bloomingdales tried to pawn off its special turkey dinners on nine different deal sites at the same time. Seems a little desperate to go for nine sites at once.

Poke Your Way To Africa Plyfe, the game that rewards you for using social media with real prizes like Lady Gaga tickets, is about to go mobile. The site, which raised one million dollars in funding last March, has also announced an unexpected new partner--the United Nations. Users can now win opportunities to do development work in Africa. That should lead to some great new submissions for Gurl Goes To Africa.

Bad Guys Still Temporarily Nice Time Warner Cable, the unexpected nice guys of Hurricane Sandy, has announced that it will automatically credit many local residential and business customers whose services were impacted. The company says that it will also waive any fees or penalties for equipment, such as set-top boxes and cable modems, which were lost, damaged or destroyed as a result of the storm. In a press release sent to Betabeat, John Quigley, regional VP of operations for Time Warner Cable’s New York City market, said, “By posting credits automatically to customers’ accounts in the hardest-hit parts of our service area, we hope these affected residents and businesses will have one less call to make as they recover from the storm.”

Ms. Kapur.

As if Seamless didn't have enough to worry about with GrubHub nipping at its heels. Ever heard of online food ordering service FoodToEat? Maybe not, as the young startup has been quietly growing in beta. But FoodToEat launched in June 2011 and after a recent redesign, founder Deepti Sharma Kapur, 25, is ready to feed her public.

FoodToEat offers food from 500 restaurants, and Ms. Kapur charges vendors just $.10 per order--a huge savings compared to her competitors, who she said charge between 10 and 18 percent.

FoodToEat has also signed up 50 food trucks, thanks in part to the fact that Ms. Kapur speaks four languages. The original inspiration for the site came when she was preparing for the LSAT and pondering how many minutes of studying the long line at Treats Truck would cost her.

FoodToEat designed a three-way system to get orders to the truck operators. Trucks can choose to receive orders via a lightweight GPRS printer, for which FoodToEat built custom software, or through emails sent to their smartphones. For trucks that have Wifi, orders appear on the website. "We're the only ones that have ever worked with food trucks in this kind of way," Ms. Kapur said.

Ms. Kapur is also targeting the corporate clients that helped Seamless conquer Manhattan. But she's able to keep her costs low because FoodToEat's business model is based on advertising and data collection. Once FoodToEat has enough volume, it will be able to collect large amounts of data from different types of vendors. The startup's close relationship with vendors, Ms. Kapur said, gives them an advantage with monetizable data collection and advertising.

FoodToEat has more than 1,500 registered users, Ms. Kapur said, and the vendors range from ten McDonald's franchises to chicken-and-rice carts to the gourmet West Village hotspot Rickshaw dumplings. The restaurants and food trucks offer a mix of delivery and pickup.

Betabeat commented that Ms. Kapur seemed awfully calm given her plan to take on two wildly successful websites. "Our goal is not to bring them down," she said. "Our goal is to be healthy competitors." Seamless and GrubHub can't compete on price, she said, because they're too entrenched and too big.

FoodToEat has apps coming in the next two weeks for iPhone and Android, and is already scheming a pilot launch in Los Angeles. Ms. Kapur, who raised $500,000 in funding from family and friends, has eight employees in an office in Midtown East. The company will raise a series A soon, she said.

So, what happened to the LSATs? "I did end up taking them," she said. "It's just this idea was too strong for me. I felt like this was the age to work on a startup and take such a high risk." She's already working on her next business: SeekATable.com.

CORRECTION: An earlier version of this post misstated Ms. Kapur's age. She is 25, not 26. Betabeat regrets the error.

(twitter.com/seamless)

The Mayor is on a techie ribbon-cutting roll lately. Twitter office. Facebook engineering headquarters. New York Tech Meetup appearance. Yelp office opening. Cornell-Technion tech campus. Mike Bloomberg wants to be remembered for his impact on the New York internet industry, and today he stopped by a granddaddy of web startups: the company formerly known as SeamlessWeb. "Seamless is exactly the type of company we're looking to grow," the mayor said as he ordered chicken soup for lunch. "Seamless is transforming the city's restaurant industry."

Seamless recently raised $50 million in private equity, acquired MenuPages and opened the foodie-centric office in West Midtown, under the leadership of Jonathan Zabusky, who replaced Jason Finger as CEO.

The company changed its name, redesigned its website, ramped up advertising and threw huge resources behind its mobile effort, an area of explosive growth, all since late spring / early summer. Seamless is hiring “for everything,” Mr. Zabusky told Betabeat in September, when he described the new office as “conducive to brand we’re building,” boasting, “we’re going to have food permeating through our environment.”

Seamless's acceleration comes just as competitor GrubHub comes nipping at its heels in New York. (Has anyone else noticed that sometimes Seamless orders arrive in GrubHub-branded plastic bags?) Peep the city's full press release for the event here.

Fresh redesign! Get it while it's hot!

Being early to market isn't always an advantage. Especially when you may have been a little too early for mass consumer adoption--and are owned by the VC arm of A big corporation like Cantor Fitzgerald. Enter Delivery.com.

Delivery.com, a website that connects its half  million users with local merchants to get goods delivered, was launched back in 2004 (same year as GrubHub). You can think of it like a hybrid of modern-day Seamless (which was born as a corporate catering company in 1999) crossed with Kozmo.com, since the site also connects users with local merchants who sell groceries, alcohol, flowers, pet supplies, and deli items. But there's no army of messengers in green and orange. In Delivery.com's case, the stores themselves do the delivering.

[Let's all give a moment of silence for our dearly departed Kozmo.com, shall we?]

Now that the convenience economy (err, laziness market? we're still l0oking for the right word) is bubbling over, sites like Seamless (née Seamlessweb), Grubhub, Amazon's Diapers.com and Soaps.com are all spending heavily to become the slothful person's service of choice. Even the Zaarlys and TaskRabbits of the world--which let you hire someone else to, say, deliver you a pack of gum--are rapidly multiplying.

To get its head in the game, Delivery.com launched a redesigned site today along with a number of new features. The site, which Betabeat (a long time New Yorker and big time Kozmo fan) had actually never heard of, did gross revenues of $50 million last year and expects to double that this year, but wouldn't disclose profits or margins except to say that the "lion's share" of its business comes from restaurant delivery.

Unlike competitors, which spend on aggressively signing up new locations, Delivery.com has a network gives commissions if you recruit a restaurant to their site, which might be why they're growing slower, with 10,000 restaurants listed (compared to Seamless's claim of 40,000).

The redesign lets users see relevant content based on their location, view recent orders, reorder favorite orders with the push of a button, and more. Then comes the new features...

There's a virtual punch card for discounts! Loyalty points that can be directed to charities! Delivery.com Office for group ordering! A partnership with Verizon FIOS to let you order from your TV! Service to let you order from your hotel room! And did we mention the daily deals!

"What’s hot in the environment is deals," Jonathan Mark, VP of marketing told Betabeat over the phone. Hey, if you're competing with everyone else, might as well add Groupon and its clones to the mix.

(thedeliverybag.com)

New York City-based online food ordering service Seamless, born SeamlessWeb during the dotcom boom in 1999, has purchased Menupages from New York magazine publisher New York Media for $15 million and the right to sell advertising against MenuPages content for a year, Betabeat has learned.

New York Media Holdings CEO Anup Bagaria, who would not disclose the price but said it was "significantly more than we bought it for," said the reason for selling MenuPages, which "has actually grown 100 percent since we’ve purchased it" in 2008, had to do with New York Media's reluctance to invest in growing the business beyond advertising revenues.

Mr. Bagaria says New York Media started thinking about a sale at the end of the first quarter of 2011, when an undisclosed buyer approached with an offer for MenuPages. The unsolicited offer could have come from a long list of related companies, but Betabeat's sources think was most likely either Zagat, which was exploring the possibility of adding menus to its reviews before it was acquired by Google; or the London-based Just-Eat, which raised $48 million to expand globally around the same time.

The offer inspired New York Media to find out who else might be interested. By the time the publisher was done, a source familiar with the situation says, it had spoken to a number of companies including Google, the publicly-traded reservation service OpenTable and Just-Eat.

For Seamless, the MenuPages acquisition is the latest in a string of aggressive moves spurred by fierce competition in an increasingly-heated market. Seamless has maintained a serviceable but increasingly stale product since it was bought by corporate caterer ARAMARK in 2006. But in June, Seamless spun out from under ARAMARK, raising $50 million in outside investment. Now, after years of complacence, Seamless is going after the consumer market with renewed vigor. Seamless's fiercest competition comes from GrubHub, a seven-year-old Chicago upstart that completed a parallel purchase last week: the acquisition of Dotmenu, owner of online ordering site CampusFood and menu library AllMenus.

MenuPages actually approached GrubHub about an acquisition earlier this year, but "we couldn’t come to an agreement on price," GrubHub CEO and co-founder Matt Maloney said. However, one source points to the timing of GrubHub's Dotmenu acquisition, which was likely already in the works.

The rivalry between Seamless and GrubHub started long before the bidding war over MenuPages, however.

Seamless was founded in 1999 after New Yorker Jason Finger, a lawyer for all of six months, discovered the tyranny of reimbursement paperwork. Lawyers, investment bankers and other white collar workers spent hours of overtime for which they are given a food allowance--in many cases, employees front the money for their food and have to fill out oodles of paperwork to get reimbursed later, a annoyance for overworked employees and a headache for the accounting department. Mr. Finger and a few friends came up with the idea for SeamlessWeb, which made it easy for employees to order online. SeamlessWeb paid the restaurants and billed employers later for the tab.

SeamlessWeb signed up investment banks and law firms one by one, explaining how it would make their lives easier and their employees happier. The best part was that Seamless didn't need city-wide coverage--it only needed a few dozen restaurants in the immediate vicinity of its corporate clients. The company grew slowly until it blanketed the city.

By 2004, Seamless was flying high. Inc. magazine named it the fourth-fastest growing company in the country, reporting its revenue as $29 million and its year-over-year growth as 2,608 percent. In 2006, Seamless sold to ARAMARK, a Philadelphia-based corporate catering provider for what was rumored to be a fabulous price, reportedly producing a thirty-fold return for Seamless's investors. ARAMARK's statement at the time--"the system streamlines billing and reimbursement processes, helps improve expense control, and reduces administrative overhead"--revealed its intentions to use Seamless to bolster services for its corporate clients.

Meanwhile, two entrepreneurs in Chicago were facing their own struggles with online food orders. GrubHub was conceived as a listings site where users could enter an address and find food delivery options around them--from there, online ordering was a natural extension. It was three years before GrubHub secured its first round of funding. But the company raised a total of $70 million this year and has been growing by leaps and bounds in part thanks to a technique that could be considered either resourceful or spammy. Unlike Seamless, GrubHub lists restaurants with which it has no prior relationship. The site shows the restaurant's hours and menu, and offers a phone number for the restaurant. GrubHub later calls the non-participating restaurant, cites the number of referrals, and offers better placement in the listings, and a promise of two or three times the business, if the eatery sings up.

The gambit is reminiscent of how Airbnb seeded its listings by scraping Craigslist--and it works. As Seamless stagnated under ARAMARK, GrubHub was scooping up restaurants, customers and partnerships and creeping on Seamless's territory, moving into the delivery grandaddy's stronghold, Manhattan, in 2008, and the rest of the New York area in 2009. "GrubHub really came out of nowhere and really surprised everyone," said one entrepreneur familiar with the space. "Seamless wasn't worried about CampusFood"--another early online food ordering service, arguably Seamless's biggest competitor--"they were worried about GrubHub. Dotmenu wasn't worried about Seamless, but they were very worried about GrubHub. So it was funny because everyone in the industry wasn't worried about everyone else, but they were all worried about GrubHub."

Earlier this year, GrubHub started targeting corporate accounts via a loyalty program launched in partnership with the deal site OO.com.

Meanwhile, executives at Seamless were starting to realize that while corporate business was steady and reliable, the general population was a much bigger prize. Seamless's system worked just as well for individuals as it did for corporate account holders and the consumer market could scale much quicker. Unfortunately, what followed was the typical indigestion after a corporation eats a startup, and innovation at Seamless slowed to a crawl. Mr. Finger quit last year to "explore other challenges." Wiley Cerilli, who had run sales at Seamless since its inception, quit around the same time.

But then in June of this year, Seamless broke free under the leadership of Jonathan Zabusky, who replaced Mr. Finger as CEO, and raised $50 million from private equity firm Spectrum Equity Investors, which now holds a minority stake in Seamless. Now that it has its own board of directors and fresh capital to spend, Seamless is moving at rocket speed. The company changed its name, redesigned its website, ramped up advertising and threw huge resources behind its mobile effort, an area of explosive growth. Seamless is hiring "for everything," Mr. Zabusky said. The company is moving into a new office in the fall, somewhere on Madison Avenue in the 30s, that will be "conducive to brand we're building," he said. "We're going to have food permeating through our environment."

The food fight seems to be coming to a head with GrubHub's recently-announced $50 million raise and its acquisition of Dotmenu/Allmenus. One source familiar with the space alleges that Allmenus database is built around a collection gathered primarily three to four years ago. GrubHub CEO Mr. Maloney says differently. "The Dotmenu acquisition that we did just supercedes the Menupages business so strongly in terms of menus, in terms of traffic," he said. "Allmenus is just a stronger website than MenuPages in all facets, if you look at traffic, if you look at menus, if you look at markets. So I’m actually glad that when we were talking to Menupages we decided not to, because that actually freed up our attention for the bigger prize that came down the road a little later."

MenuPages's history is strikingly similar to that of Seamless. Menupages, founded in 2002, engineered a highly-efficient menu transcription process and was bought in 2008 by New York Media. The publisher saw its new asset as a way to beef up its restaurant listings--and as a source for content against which to run ads. While MenuPages was profitable, its new owner lacked the appetite for risk it would take to develop a product that was outside its core editorial business. Although MenuPages launched a mobile app, refreshed the site's look and maintains an excellent reputation among consumers and restaurants in New York, it is only available in eight cities in the U.S. and has largely stuck to its core features. "There was a point where MenuPages was the most prominent restaurant site on the internet," said one person familiar with the company. "Then Yelp came along and Yelp became prominent. Now there's a plethora of them. Yelp, Foodspotting--MenuPages could have been all of these things."

In addition to growing 100 percent over the past three years, Mr. Bagaria, New York Media's CEO, said MenuPages "has been a very profitable transaction for us." Indeed, it'll be "business as usual" for the next year, he said, as New York Media will continue selling ads for MenuPages. But New York Media could see the next logical step for MenuPages would be online ordering or reservations, and it wasn't eager to jump into that fray. MenuPages would have needed "more than advertising revenues to get to the next stage," Mr. Bagaria said. "It was really, do we spend the investment dollars to do that or do we sell?" A source familiar with the situation points to New York Media's recent expenditure to develop in its entertainment blog Vulture and its fashion blog, The Cut, which released an iPad app in January. There was some internal frustration within MenuPages about New York Media’s unwillingness to invest, the source said.

MenuPages ended up going with Seamless--not surprising given Seamless was already powering MenuPages's online orders. With the MenuPages acquisition, Seamless says it will cover more than 50 cities in the U.S. as well as London, with 40,000 restaurant menus and more than a 1.5 million unique visitors a month. "Combined, we're more than 50 percent ahead of the closest competitor doing both of these things," Mr. Zabusky said. All of MenuPages employees will be asked to join Seamless, he said.

GrubHub says it's in more than 50 markets, with more than 14,000 restaurants, more than 250,000 menus, and more than three million unique visitors a month--more than twice the traffic and more than seven times the menus of Seamless, Mr. Maloney said. "I typically don't talk this much about Seamless because we don’t view them as incredibly strong competition for what we’re doing," he told Betabeat. "Seamless fundamentally is a corporate catering business. They were founded years and years and years ago to do just that. And they’re still best in the business for corporate. They recently got into the consumer and residential pick-up and delivery. And they do it well in New York, but they really have zero business anywhere else. We dont even consider them competition anywhere other than Manhattan specifically."

Now, Seamless is pushing its mobile effort forward at full speed--in two separate interviews with CEO Mr. Zabusky, the CEO mentioned the word "mobile"  The company already has had more than 800,000 downloads of its iPhone, Android and BlackBerry apps, and has an iPad app in development.

Disclosure: Nitasha Tiku has previously worked for New York Media's online property NYmag.com as a blogger for Daily Intel.