My question: Won’t Facebook Graph support this kind of thing natively?

The app is basic and beautiful, providing a gorgeous full-screen window into the restaurants you and your friends visit, with large images, a map view, and simple ratings capability. You can share recommendations, discover new spots, and yes, memorialize your inner gourmet.

Source: OpenTable

Places I’ve Eaten

What it makes me think, however, is: Why now?

Why is OpenTable, probably the largest restaurant reservation service available, with its 27,000 restaurants and 400 million users, releasing a Facebook app? Sure, Facebook is the place where well over a billion people get together and talk about their day, including where they ate, but that’s been the case for some time now.

My guess — and it’s just a guess — is that Facebook Graph has a lot to do with the genesis of this app.

Facebook Graph has the potential to replace a huge swath of the local-search, local-events landscape that OpenTable, Yelp, various Yellow Pages incarnations, and other companies service. Places I ate at would be a simple search in Graph, as would places my friends ate at. Implementing this potential, of course, is a whole other thing. And exploiting the financial opportunity is yet another.

So Facebook has a long way to go, and partners will continue to be important for the social network for a long time.

But make no mistake: Facebook is the big kahuna in social, and Graph is the path that will help it monetize that status. As such, services like OpenTable and Yelp and at risk.

Which I’m pretty sure is not lost on them.

photo credit: » Zitona « via photopin cc

OpenTable and GrubHub own the app-based food ordering space, right? So how does a small startup break into the market?

If you’re Richard Btaiche of Fastgrab, you compete by creating your own space. Fastgrab is a “quick service” food ordering app, and the company is just graduating today from FounderFuel in Montréal, Québec. I’m in town to cover the accelerator’s demo day, so Btaiche and I carved out a little time to chat.

“We’re a platform for restaurants,” Btaiche told me. “We connect restaurants and customers with an app for people to order food, and an iPad app for restaurants that is the first tablet point-of-sale system specifically for quick-service restaurants.”

Fastgrab has a slick iPhone app — Android is coming “soon” — that connects to the restaurant’s iPad app. Select what you want, tell the restaurant when you want to pick it up, and pay, all in a couple of minutes. Fastgrab remembers what you’ve ordered in the past, so it’s easy to order your favorite — and to track how much your guilt little falafel habit is costing you on a monthly basis.

Ordering via Fastgrab is easier for users, but it also has a major benefit for the quick service restaurants, which are, as Btaiche says, “rush-hour businesses.” Serving a client at the counter takes an average of 39 seconds. Serving a Fastgrab client takes an eighth of the time … just 5 seconds.

But why not add delivery?

The answer to that question ties into how Fastgrab plans to carve out its own market space. Delivery, Btaiche says, is a relatively small market. The market he wants to serve is much larger: all quick service restaurants. That adds a point of differentiation from GrubHub, and it also separates Fastgrab from OpenTable, which is aimed more at sit-down restaurants.

The service charges restaurants a small fee and commission for inclusion, and plans to leverage property managers to scale quickly across the U.S. and Canada.

“Most restaurants lease their space from property managers, and there’s only a few players there,” says Btaiche. “Four companies own 46 percent of the food courts in the United States.”

FastGrab, as a soon-to-be-graduate of FounderFuel, has a $25,000 investment from the accelerator, and is opening a $500,000 seed round today. It will also likely be taking advantage of a $150,000 convertible loan offered to most FounderFuel graduates by BDC, the Business Development Bank of Canada.

Image credits: Fastgrab

OpenTable, the online restaurant reservation company has filed to go public, making it the first technology company initial public offering in many months. It comes, counterintuitively, at a when people are cutting back on expenses — and eating out less.

The company works with more than 10,000 restaurants, using a combination of software and hardware to allow people to make online and mobile reservations. It made $41.3 million in revenue through September 30 of last year, a sharp increase over the previous year, according the IPO filing (available here, with excerpts below).

Indeed, last June Matt Marshall conservatively estimated the company was making nearly $15 million a year with the potential to be a $100 million company based on its growth. It charges $1 per diner seated through its web site, and $0.25 per diner if the OpenTable reservation is made through a restaurant’s own site, along with other reservation-related revenue streams.

The number of shares and the price range have yet to be determined. The bookrunning manager will be Merrill Lynch & Co. with co-managers Allen & Company LLC, Stifel, Nicolaus & Company, Inc, and ThinkEquity LLC.

San Francisco-based OpenTable brought in Paypal and eBay executive Jeff Jordan in 2007, to help “take the company to the next level.” Despite the current economic downturn — which is hitting restaurants as hard as anyone — OpenTable has few competitors and an established brand. The company aims to raise $40 million by going public, according to the filing.

Founded in 1998, it has previously raised $50 million in funding from Benchmark Capital, Impact Venture Partners and Integral Capital Partners.