Online restaurant reservation site OpenTable has hit a milestone today, seating one million diners via its mobile apps. And the site says that based on an estimation of a $50 average check per diner, OpenTable believes that diners using its mobile applications have generated more than $50 million in revenue for its restaurant partners.

OpenTable allows diners to find and book reservations at more than 11,000 different restaurants in multiple countries via mobile applications for the iPhone, Palm, Blackberry and Android. Other smartphone users can book reservations through OpenTable’s mobile-optimized Web site.

This year OpenTable filed for a healthy IPO, despite recessionary conditions in the markets. OpenTable is a solid internet company that has a viable business model. On the restaurant side, OpenTable delivers reservation management software to establishments through a Web browser and collects monthly subscription revenues, similar in theory to the offerings that software companies like Salesforce sell to clients.

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Sure everyone brings up LinkedIn and Facebook as the potentially huge homerun IPOs in the wings, but a lot of the companies queuing up look more like OpenTable.

The reservation Web site deserves props for making it out in a tricky time— the weekend it was picking its bankers one declared bankruptcy and another sold itself to a competitor. And yes, the price has impressively stayed above the $20 opening. But take a closer look at the deal: Only three million shares were floated to the public. No wonder the price has held– hardly anyone is in the stock. With a whopping 18 million still owned by insiders and investors, OpenTable looks more like a private company that just did another round of funding than a public company.

Given that insiders of other private companies are increasingly cashing out shares in later private funding rounds, is there practically a lot of difference returns-wise between a heady Series E or a small IPO with such a tiny float?

OpenTable’s real test will be what happens once insiders start selling to get liquidity.  CEO Jeff Jordan addressed that in his first post-quiet period interview, shot last week for my Yahoo show, TechTicker. (Clip below, around the seven minute mark.)

Jordan also notes at the two minute mark in this clip that since OpenTable priced, he’s been getting a flood of calls from Valley CEOs who are thinking about filing, so expect the mini-registration boom to continue. Actual returns for the beleaguered asset class, however, will be a different story.

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Another small sign that the worst of the recession may be behind us: IPO registrations are clawing their way back from the shadow of the valley of death (also known as the first quarter if 2009, when there were zero IPOs registered with the SEC). So far in July and August alone there have been 14 IPOs, as many as in the previous three quarters combined. These numbers and the chart above are based on the number of IPO filings tracked by Hoovers as of yesterday. Renaissance Capital counts 16 IPO registrations in July and August, and if you look on the SEC’s Edgar site it looks like a few more filed today.

Registering for an IPO doesn’t mean that the company is actually going to go through with it, but the volume of filings is a good confidence index for startups. Most of the companies filing are not technology-related (Hyatt Hotels, RailAmerica, Bayview Mortgage Capital), although Ancestry.com did file on August 3. In terms of actual IPOs, we saw five venture-backed companies start trading in the second quarter, including OpenTable, which is still trading above its $20 offering price.

All this means is that more companies are willing to take a shot at going public, which is encouraging in and of itself. But don’t expect the actual number of IPOs to recover for at least another year.

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After four quarters in which venture-backed IPOs have been dead in the water, a handful finally poked their heads up in the second quarter. The National Venture Capital Association counted five IPOs during the quarter, including DigitalGlobe ($279 million raised), SolarWinds ($152 million), and OpenTable ($60 million). A total of $721 million was raised. Just for a little context, two years ago during the same period, there were 25 IPOs which raised $4.15 billion.

So don’t call it a comeback just yet. But any activity is a sign of hope. And this was the most active period since the fourth quarter of 2007. Will it keep building, or will IPO candidates duck their heads back under water?

On the M&A front, the pace remained lackluster. There were 59 venture-backed acquisitions in the second quarter, which was down from 84 deals a year ago (and 62 deals in the previous quarter). The total value of M&A deals was $2.6 billion.

The average M&A deal size shot up to $198 million, no doubt boosted by Intel’s $884 million acquisition of Wind River Systems and NetApp’s $1.5 billion acquisition of Data Domain. However, Internet deals still represented 29 percent of the total count, with lots of smaller deals such as AOL’s purchase pf both Going and Patch.

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Who might need such a service? A lot more services and individuals than you may realize. While most services have some sort of scheduling system, many aren’t optimized, and can’t adapt on the fly to openings/changes. Massage therapists, dentists, doctors are all perfect examples of who could use such a system, founder Ryan Donahue tells us. He notes that health and beauty has been a particularly hot area.

He knows that because the service has actually been around for a little while, but it was formerly know as HourTown. But BookFresh is a much better name for the service because, “appointments are much like produce items in a grocery store, it’s a perishable thing,” Donahue says.

And a name change isn’t all that in-store for users. BookFresh wants to be the main platform for all online appointment booking on the web. As such, they’ve created APIs to let developers of sites take advantage of their tools. But you don’t have to be a developer to implement the service, anyone can do it with a simple line of code added to their site. This is important because a lot of people BookFresh is targeting are one-person or small operations, that probably don’t have a web development team.

Donahue likens the idea of BookFresh as an appointment platform to PayPal as a payment platform. (And he should know, he used to work at PayPal — incidentally with Jeffrey Jordan, the CEO of OpenTable.) He notes that just like a lot of sites out there don’t want to go through the hassle of building their own payment system, they also don’t want to have to make an online booking system. Sure, it’s not as complex, but it’s still a hassle — and might as well be impossible for little shops/services.

And BookFresh offers some nice things with its platform. One is the ability for businesses that use it to get calls when a customer is requesting an appointment time. From your phone, you can opt to accept or decline the request. That’s perfect for someone like a plumber, who may be always on the go and not able to get to a computer to confirm appointments. And the offers easy integration with Google Calendar and iCal to place appointments in your own personal calendars automatically when you accept them.

Alongside the name change, BookFresh is announcing a partnership with Webs.com, one of the largest sites for building free websites out there. A lot of small business owners are already using it, and now they’ll have one click access to install BookFresh if they choose to.

In terms of monetization, the service is free for the end user, but businesses/individuals who wish to use it will pay a month fee that starts at $19.95. If larger sites choose to sign-on, there are other deals such as revenue sharing that can take place.

In terms of competition, there is Appointment-plus, but their service forces you back to their servers to handle everything. BookFresh’s platform allows users to stay on the page they are already on to set everything up, Donahue says.

One service that BookFresh won’t be competing with is OpenTable. They have no interest in getting into the restaurant space, Donahue says.

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Is the IPO drought over? Not quite. But OpenTable’s successful IPO today will give tech startups and VCs a sign of hope that you can still go public eventually if you have a real business. On a day when the Nasdaq is down 2 percent, OpenTable is up 40 45 percent from its offering price of $20 (which itself kept moving up from $12 to $14 initially). The stock opened at $24, and was trading at around $28 $29 last time I checked. With 21.6 million shares outstanding, that gives OpenTable a market capitalization of $605 $626 million on its first day of trading. (The company itself cleared $60 million in the offering). Update: The stock closed at $31.89, up 59 percent from the offering price, giving the company a market cap of $689 million at the end of the trading day.

This is an extremely healthy IPO. Opentable is not a blowout Internet company. But it is a solid Internet company that matters. It pulled in $55.8 million in revenues last year and a net loss of $1 million (largely due to expansion-related costs). In the first quarter of 2009, it managed to turn a net profit of $366,000 on revenues of $16 million. (For a deeper financial analysis, see this earlier post).

OpenTable delivers reservation management software to restaurants through a Web browser and collects monthly subscription revenues. In that sense it is in the same class of software companies as Salesforce—selling software as a service over the Web to business customers. But it also has a friendly (free) consumer-facing side. It is yet another example of enterprise and consumer apps merging in the cloud.

So what does it take for a tech company to IPO these days? If OpenTable is the new measuring stick, a company needs at least $50 million in revenues, have at least one quarter of profits, customers with proven loyalty, and solid growth potential. In other words, it needs to be a real business.

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Why is it that you can book a table at a fancy restaurant through OpenTable, but you can’t book the bar for a corporate party? That is the question that a startup in New York City called Pogby is trying to answer. Barely in beta, Pogby is an event booking service founded by Joshua Gooch, who used to run JetBlue’s Website and helped build its TrueBlue customer loyalty program. Pogby aims to become the OpenTable of events, where corporate event planners and others can find and book venues for parties.

Pogby is one of the finalists competing in a startup competition at NYC Entrepreneur Week, where I was a judge today. The site is really not much more than an online demo right now, with only a half dozen venues in New York City on the site. But Gooch and his VP of sales Duane Lawrence plan to sign up 50 to 100 restaurants, bars, and other event spaces in short order. They are focusing on New York City to prove the concept. (This is really early stage—the company is still looking for seed funding). Each venue on Pogby gets its own page with pictures for each available event space, along with a calendar showing availability and a booking engine. Gooch knows a lot about reservation systems from his time at JetBlue, and you can see some of the design influences on Pogby.

it’s a fairly simple concept. Find a venue, check pricing and availability, and book online. Pogby plans to charge venues an 8 percent commission fee for any bookings and eventually will introduce a $99/month subscription fee. A typical event can cost $4,000 or more, and event spaces typically go unused 70 percent of the time. So any extra events a restaurant or venue can capture is worth the fees. Why hasn’t anyone done this already?

There is an obvious need for this service. Pogby however faces a few challenges. First, it needs to sign up a critical mass of popular event spaces before anyone will take it seriously. Second, it needs to make it easier for venues to sign up themselves in a self-serve fashion (this is coming, but to appear on the site right now involves too many manual processes). Third, it needs incentives to prevent people from looking up availability on the site and then calling up on their own to strike a better deal. (A discount would be good). Fourth, it needs to give event planners a way to negotiate prices and other terms on the site. Fifth, it needs to look beyond New York City.

But the biggest threat might come from OpenTable itself, which could add event booking a sa feature fairly easily since most of its restaurants rent out spaces for parties as well. Until they do, Pogby has an opportunity to carve out a niche for itself.

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OpenTable, the online restaurant reservation site that was founded in 1998, is hoping to raise as much as $40 million in an IPO, according to a filing with the SEC (embedded below). The prospectus offers a detailed look at the company’s finances and operations.

Revenues through the nine months ended September 30, 2008 were $41.3 million, a 41 percent increase from the same period in 2007. The company makes money from the restaurants, which pay both subscription fees (54 percent of revenues) and reservation fees for each diner that shows up through the system (42 percent of revenues). It also makes a small amount on installation fees (4 percent of revenues).

The company lost 149,000 in net income, but turned an operating profit of 261,000. That is a rather slim margin, however, it appears that the company was spending as much as it could to grow and take market share, especially internationally where it is just getting started. Operating income in North America for teh period was $6.8 million, whereas the company took an operating loss of $6.5 million internationally. Those are startup costs, since it is just getting its foot in the door at restaurants outside the U.S. and Canada.

As of September 30, 2008, OpenTable offered reservations at 9,709 restaurants worldwide, 8,788 of which were in North America It seated 25.5 million diners the first nine months of last year, up 45 percent. It employed 292 people, and had $17.4 million in cash.

I have a feeling any IPO money will go towards international expansion. A successful IPO would be a coup for CEO Jeff Jordan, a former eBay executive who is well regarded in Silicon Valley.

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Some of the most useful set of apps on the iPhone are the restaurant apps that tell you what is to eat nearby. There’s UrbanSpoon, Yelp, and LocalEats, among others. But once you find a restaurant, you still have to call to make a reservation. Now, you no longer have to use up those minutes. Online reservation service OpenTable released an iPhone app today that lets you not only find nearby restaurants, but book a table as well. You don’t have to call and wait on hold. The app uses OpenTable’s online reservation system to book and confirm a table. It will even give you directions to the restaurant from wherever you are.

You are shown only nearby restaurants, and cannot filter by type of cuisine or refine your search as easily as you can on the Website. But the app is perfectly functional. The key is that it only shows you nearby restaurants that have open tables for the time when you want to eat.

OpenTable is especially great for reserving tables at high-end restaurants. If you are on a business trip, or wandering about town with some friends and want to make impromptu dinner plans, I could see this app becoming indispensable. I’m a big fan of OpenTable, and already have an account there, so for someone like me it is a must-have iPhone app.

The app is free and you can download it from iTunes (link opens up iTunes).

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OpenTable, the web-enabled restaurant management provider, has introduced a new mobile feature that lets users make restaurant reservations from their from their phone’s browser. The new site, which is available here, supports the 8,500 OpenTable restaurants scattered across the country.

To book a table, users specify the date and the restaurant they wish to dine in, and the site presents a list of available times. Alternatively, users can request to see all available listings for restaurants in the area – a feature that will be a lifesaver for those last-minute anniversary reservations. A quick run through the site on an iPhone worked well, allowing me to find an available restaurant and book a table in less than two minutes.

OpenTable offers restaurants a reservation management solution that allows prospective diners to reserve tables from the web. Since its launch in 1999, the site claims to have booked over 70 million diners across its 8,500 restaurants.

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Restaurant review sites have long been plagued by polarized opinions – most of the people that take the time to write something have either loved a place or hated it. These sites also have to deal with reviewers who share their opinions, regardless of if they’ve ever visited the restaurant in question. Today OpenTable, the web-enabled restaurant reservation manager, has introduced a new set of restaurant rankings that they hope will skirt most of these issues.

The new rankings, called “Diners’ Choice”, are based off of surveys that OpenTable distributes through email to recent diners. OpenTable says that visitors to their site tend to take a certain amount of pride in food, which will motivate them to complete the reviews, even when they might not feel particularly strongly about a restaurant.

While this assertion is debatable, OpenTable does offer something that is unique to the review space: confirmation that every review came from someone who actually dined at the restaurant. This is made possible by OpenTable’s unique reservation system, which can monitor which patrons have actually been seated.

Unfortunately, OpenTable is currently only displaying the results of these reviews as ranked lists – there is no way to see what each individual reviewer had to say (only the restaurants themselves receive this data). This is surprising given the site’s purportedly increased accuracy, and it may lead many readers to turn to more thorough review sites like Yelp instead.

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