July 9-10, 2013
San Francisco, CA

Early Bird Tickets on Sale

There are plenty of recipe discovery apps and websites, but Edamam is hoping to stand out with its focus on helping you eat better. Now the Edamam experience is even better with the launch of a new iPad app.

The company debuted at the DEMO conference in April with the goal of “organizing the world’s food knowledge.” With its free apps, also available on the iPhone and Android devices, Edamam makes it easy to find intriguing healthy recipes that just about anyone can make.

“We originally wanted to target foodies, but we discovered that the people actually using Edamam were moms,” said founder and chief executive Victor Penev in an interview with VentureBeat. “The Pinterest demographic of 30 to 45 year old women makes up most of our users because it saves them time.”

While Edamam is helpful on smartphones when shopping for ingredients, when it comes to actually cooking tablets are far superior, Penev pointed out. The Edamam iPad app, just like the app for 7-inch Android tablets, is graphically rich and plenty fast.

It doesn’t take much to get started with Edamam: You’re greeted with a massive search interface upon opening the app, but there are also helpful recommendations at the bottom of the screen. The app searches recipes from several sites based on their nutritional information. You can also easily share recipes from within the Edamam app. Within a few minutes of browsing the iPad app, I was able to find several recipes that I wanted to try.

Eventually, Penev says the company will include the ability to take notes and photos within the app. The goal,  of course, is to make Edamam your go-to recipe finder and cooking tool.

Edamam is based in New York City and is currently raising an angel round.

Top photo via Shutterstock

Finding recipes online is not at all hard: There are hundreds of thousands of blogs and websites devoted to making delicious food. But Yummly its trying to round up tons of recipes and make them easily searchable so users don’t have to wade through all those websites.

“Our vision is to make Yummly one hub to find recipes and cook meals,” said Yummly co-founder and chief executive David Feller in an interview with VentureBeat, “We want to improve the [recipe] finding experience and have built a data platform that understands food.”

What makes Yummly stand out is its semantic recipe search, which understands the context of what people are searching for instead of focusing only on the exact keywords. It also makes good use of multiple search filters to hone your searches. Most prominently are the taste filters (shown right) — sliding bars that let you chose which tastes you prefer such as sweet, spicy, or savory —  which narrow down recipes that fit your taste bud preferences. You can also filter by dietary restrictions, allergies, nutritional value, cuisines, type of meal, price of the meal, and which source the recipe comes from, such as Epicurious or AllRecipes.

“We feel semantic search is incredibly important. For example, if you searched for a fish recipe in Google, it might not understand to include results for salmon, like Yummly would,” said Feller, “Yummly doesn’t need to have the specific keyword to find what you’re looking for, it understands the context of what you’re searching.”

The interface leaves something to be desired; it’s simple, but bland. Though compared to one of its competitor’s, Cooks.com, the website is much easier to read and digest. One plus for Yummly is that it provides nutritional information for every recipe in the same format you’ve see on a food package, so you know where to find exactly what you’re looking for.

Yummly’s search engine draws is recipes from 15 food blogs and websites to make up its recipe results, hoping to save people the time they spend Googling a recipe and clicking through to multiple websites.

However, the company does face some competition from Google’s search engine, which is most people’s go-to place for finding information. Google’s plans for its own version of semantic search could make the search engine more intelligent and powerful and make Yummly redundant.

Yummly attracted funding from Physic Ventures, which led the round. Physic Ventures partner Andy Donner told VentureBeat that his firm was drawn to Yummly because of its semantic search process.

“We were compelled by the natural language scientists who really understood how to take unstructured data and make sense of it, said Donner, “Yummly is able to create meaning from recipes by parsing the data and wow users with highly accurate searches.”

Unilever Corporate Ventures, Harrison Metal Capital, First Round Capital, Intel Capital, The Harvard Common Press, and private angel investors also participated in the funding round. Yummly was founded in 2010 and is based in Palo Alto, Calif. The company has raised $7.85 million in total funding.

Strawberry and chocolate cake image via Shutterstock

Search Yahoo for a recipe or gift this holiday season and you might be surprised by what you see. The company is now greeting recipe and product searchers with interactive, image-based windows atop the search results page to save them time on their internet quests.

The new search tools function like guidebooks for recipe and product queries, letting you filter and compare results, and they even let you log in to Facebook from the search page and share your favorite findings with friends.

The search updates are especially interesting because of how much they’re tailored to the searcher’s intent, with a completely different presentation from the usual list of search results. There’s also a lot of social-sharing and discovery baked into each new experience. Recipe and product results encourage the searcher to engage his or her Facebook friends, and entertainment results leverage Yahoo’s partnership with Twitter to create a real-time environment that Google can’t replicate.

• A recipe search — i.e. any food item plus “recipe” query — will now yield a scrollable window of photos representing the recipes of popular choices from food sites. Searchers can tab through top recipes, quick recipes and low calorie recipes, and filter recipes by ingredients.
  For even more recipe options and ideas, searchers can select the new Yahoo recipe search tab. Here they can use the left-hand menu to sort recipes by preparation time, star rating, diet, meal type, occasion or source.
• Product-related queries have been spruced up with a flashy scrolling window of photos too, but with results tailored around the comparison shopper. A digital camera search, for instance, will surface an array of cameras (sourced from Yahoo’s Shopping site) with model, price and retail information. Searchers can also filter results by type and price.
• Yahoo has also enhanced its entertainment results to present searchers with the latest news, videos and tweets on their movie, music and celebrity queries.

“Yahoo has amazing content in almost every major category like sports, finance, local, celebrities, movies, television, music, shopping etc. In the past we have used this content for properties like Yahoo Sports, but never really used it for Search,” Shashi Seth, Yahoo SVP of Search and Marketplaces, told VentureBeat. “Now we have started building a parallel index called the content index, which provides every bit of information about entities. We are using this content index to build these amazing experiences.”

The updates also come at an important time. Holiday recipe and product queries will be on rise and Yahoo’s functionality could help it attract valuable online shoppers away from Google.

Google currently commands 65.3 percent of the U.S. search market, while Yahoo maintains 15.25 percent, according to comScore data for October 2011.

New York-based company launched in early July and is playing in a crowded field because there are other better-established recipe sites on the web. Gojee wants to stand out by offering a more personalized experience for finding recipes. For example, users can identify certain ingredients they “dislike” or “crave” to help the site recommend better dishes over time.

Gojee co-founder and CEO Mike LaValle told VentureBeat that the site will launch new features in about six weeks but wouldn’t let on what those features were. As of now, the site features more than 10,000 recipes and we’d bet it’s in a hurry to add even more.

The $1.2 million funding round was led by Kapor Capital. Gojee also used the opportunity to announce it had added Brad Hunstable, president and co-founder of Ustream, as a company adviser.

Personally, I’m not a huge recipe seeker but I think Gojee looks great. The interface is polished with detailed pictures to make you hungry, and the recommendation engine worked well in a brief test. Some of the first recipes it recommended me were Sriracha Marinara with Meatballs, Mini Black & White Cookies, Texas Hill Country Chili and Avocado Fries with Cilantro Lemon Dipping Sauce. It makes me ravenous just writing about it.

What do you think of Gojee? What’s your favorite recipe site?

The Palo Alto, Calif.-based company makes the task of finding recipes simpler and more personal. David Feller, co-founder and chief executive of Yummly, said the company will use the money to expand its services. He said the company employs a cornucopia of algorithms to help it understand more than 15,000 food ingredients on a variety of levels (from nutritional value to taste). It combines that with knowledge of your own taste. The result is a more sophisticated food search tool with personalized taste in finding recipes. The site, started in 2009, has more than 500,000 recipes.

The seed round of funding came from First Round Capital, Harrison Metal Capital, Intel Capital and angels. Michael Dearing of Harrison Metal Capital and angel investor Marcia Hooper will join the company’s board.

With its focus on doing search for one particular thing, Yummly resembles other successful sites such as Pandora Radio (songs) and Netflix (movies). The site can filter recipe searches by ingredients, allergens, price, prep time, nutrition, holidays and meal courses, diet restrictions, food for vegans and other categories. Users can publish their own recipes and make custom meal plans. You can also make friends with other cooking fans via the company’s own TasteBuds network or Facebook.