Hotel booking giant Priceline.com will acquire OpenTable, the online reservation service for restaurants that provides Siri’s table-booking functionality.
Priceline is set to pay a massive $2.6 billion as part of the all-cash deal, which breaks down as $103 per share — or 46 percent above the publicly traded OpenTable’s closing price Thursday.
Apple first integrated OpenTable into Siri starting with iOS 6 back in 2012, giving iOS users the ability to make restaurant reservations using Apple’s digital assistant. It’s not yet clear how the Priceline deal will affect OpenTable’s working relationship with Apple.
Who knew that getting your phone to reserve restaurant tables for you was so valuable?
Source: Forbes
Luke Dormehl is a UK-based journalist and author, with a background working in documentary film for Channel 4 and the BBC. He is the author of The Formula: How Algorithms Solve All Our Problems, And Create More and The Apple Revolution, both published by Penguin/Random House. His tech writing has also appeared in Wired, Fast Company, Techmeme, and other publications. He’d like you a lot if you followed him on Twitter.
