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OpenTable will pay $10 million for Foodspotting app

The next time you are on Broadway and craving dim sum, OpenTable Inc’s newest app will show you what your lunch might look like at the Golden Unicorn versus Joe’s Shanghai.

The online restaurant reservation company said it will pay $10 million to buy Foodspotting, an application for finding and sharing photographs of dishes at restaurants.

The acquisition underscores OpenTable’s push into mobile, which it expects to spur its next round of growth. In October, the company introduced a free service that would make it easy for restaurants to optimize their websites for mobile devices.

The app will allow users to search for a type of dish or a specific restaurant, and show user-uploaded photographs of various meals, letting users recommend food and see what others suggest.

Foodspotting started in 2010 and has raised about $3.75 million. More than 3 million dishes have been photographed and shared through the app.

Tech wrap: Google’s appetite for local grows with Zagat buy

Google bought Zagat, the popular dining recommendations and ratings authority, jumping into a niche Web market alongside the likes of OpenTable and Yelp. The 32-year-old Zagat, which polls consumers and compiles reviews about restaurants around the world, will become a cornerstone of Google’s “local offering” and work in tandem with its mapping services and core search engine, the Internet search and advertising leader said.

The Zagat acquisition also marks Google’s first foray into original content creation. Google had been accused of poaching user reviews from the likes of Yelp for use on Google Places pages, without providing a link back.

Only about half of Twitter’s 200 million-plus registered members log on daily but the microblogging website is chalking up growth of 40 percent every quarter in mobile device usage, CEO Dick Costolo said. Twitter is gearing up for a hotly anticipated initial public offering. But Costolo told reporters they would do so only on their own terms. Twitter.com now sees about 400 million unique visitors every month, a 60 percent leap from 200 million at the start of the year.