Did We "Scoop" The Times?

Well, we use "Scoop" loosely, but it’s still kinda cool that this was in last Saturday’s Times, ELEVEN whole days after we put a very similar post up here on “The Biz."

We questioned the Dark Side WEEKS ago...

While we hope that this means the venerable folks at America’s “Paper of Record” are reading us, we also realize that this story is growing and have to tip our hat to what the reporter, Randall Stross, has brought to the coverage.

We also had a lot of questions about how competition would affect OpenTable’s less-than-benign hegemony in the market that they seem to have created and Stross uses his space in the paper to introduce us to RezBook, a newly-minted offshoot of IAC’s (read: Barry Diller’s) UrbanSpoon that is aiming to take a bite out of OpenTable’s pie (food analogy… cute, right?).

But RezBook, according to Stross, does not seem to be straying too far from the original business model, charging similar prohibitive fees that are passed on to the restaurateurs. It would seem to follow that either (A) this model is the only one that works in this sector, or (B) Diller and Co. are looking to capitalize on OpenTable’s ongoing demonization with a site that does the same thing, with the same drawbacks, under a different name.

We’re currently on the lookout for local joints that use or don’t use OpenTable, so stay tuned for Updates…