![]() | |
![]() | |
Type of business | Defunct |
---|---|
Type of site | Food Blogging Platform |
Headquarters | Palo Alto, California; Bangalore, India. |
No. of locations | 2 |
Founder(s) | Cherian Thomas, Chris Luscher, Arun Prabhakar, Dan Hauk |
CEO | Cherian Thomas |
Industry | Internet, Web Application |
URL | cucumbertown |
Launched | October 17, 2012 |
Cucumbertown was a food blogging platform. [1] [2] [3] [4] Based out of Palo Alto, California, [5] it was founded by Cherian Thomas, [6] Chris Luscher, Arun Prabhakar [7] and Dan Hauk. [8] It was acquired by Japanese recipe network Cookpad in June 2015. [9]
The platform shut down in 2016. [10]
Cucumbertown formerly allowed users to post and browse recipes [11] in its web based platform. It claimed to have made it easy to write recipes in a more structured way, a style opposed to the normal way to publishing recipes through blogging platforms like WordPress or tumblr in blob formats. It also allowed users to write a variation on an existing recipe's page. The website was for some time a library of recipes written by food enthusiasts from different parts of the world, but no data is hosted at the site today. [7]
Cucumbertown was co-founded by Ex-Zynga employee Cherian Thomas, Chris Luscher, a partner at Web development firm Information Architects, Arun Prabhakar, a software engineer, and Dan Hauk, Tumblr theme designer. Cherian Thomas, an engineer based in Bangalore was passionate about food and he kept recording his thoughts on cooking and publishing systematically. Thomas, once, e-mailed Chris Luscher, partner of Information Architects, one of the leading design firms in the world, based in Zurich. Chris Luscher shared his passion in cooking and agreed to partner with him. Thomas then brought on board Arun Prabhakar, his junior at Model Engineering College, and Dan Hauk, a leading American designer. [7] Cucumbertown is named after a mythical town, Vellarikka Pattanam (വെള്ളരിക്കാപ്പട്ടണം) in the Malayalam language. [12] The most of the founders, a team of 4 people across 3 continents, never met face to face [3] [13] [14] until the launch of the company. Dan Hauk left Cucumbertown in August 2013.
In 2012, Cucumbertown was angel funded to the extent of $300,000 [15] by investors such as Naval Ravikant of AngelList, Paul Singh of 500 Startups,[ citation needed ] Farmville co-creator Sizhao Zao Yang, [11] founder of MightyText Maneesh Arora, early Google product guy Richard Chen and Sonique Player co-creator Tabreez Varjee. [8] This was followed by an undisclosed 2nd round of investment by Ludlow Ventures [16] in 2014.
Cucumbertown is a US incorporated company with an Indian subsidiary and with two offices, one in Palo Alto, California, and another Bangalore, India. Cucumbertown has reportedly users from 60 countries, the largest audience, after the US, is from Australia and the UAE. [2]
The Economic Times showcased Cucumbertown as "one of the 14 startups to look forward to in 2014". [17]
In October 2014, Cucumbertown released RecipeWriter, a user-friendly tool to add recipes. [18] From late 2014, the company shifted its focus into becoming a food blogging platform.
In June 2015, it was announced that Cucumbertown, world's only niche food blogging platform, had been acquired by Japanese Recipe network, Cookpad in an undisclosed deal. [1] [16] [19]
Times Internet is an Indian multinational technology company, headquartered in Gurgaon, India which owns, operates and invests in various internet-led products, services and technology. It is the digital arm of The Times Group, the largest media conglomerate in India. Times Internet currently owns and operates 39+ digital products across news, sports, music, video, trivia, spirituality and a suite of transaction-led market-places across real estate, personal finance, education, jobs, table reservation, agri-business, etc.
Palak paneer or palak chhena is an Indian dish consisting of chhena or paneer in a thick paste made from puréed spinach, called palak in Hindi, Marathi, Gujarati, and other Indian languages.
Brian Alvey is an American serial entrepreneur, programmer, designer and blogger. He grew up in Brooklyn and now lives in San Francisco where he is the CEO of Clipisode. He is best known for co-founding the blog publishing company Weblogs, Inc. with Jason Calacanis.
Mouthshut.com is a consumer review and rating platform founded in 2000 by Faisal Farooqui. The company hosts reviews and ratings written by users, on more than 800,000 products and services available in India. In 2012, the company actively petitioned against Section 66A of the Indian IT Act and the Intermediary Guideline Rules, leading to their eventual scrapping and reading down by the Supreme Court of India. The site has reviews across 400+ categories.
Wix.com Ltd. is an Israeli software company, publicly listed in the US, that provides cloud-based web development services. It offers tools for creating HTML5 websites and mobile sites using online drag-and-drop editing. Along with its headquarters and other offices in Israel, Wix also has offices in Brazil, Canada, Germany, India, Ireland, Japan, Lithuania, Poland, the Netherlands, the United States, Ukraine, and Singapore.
Posterous was a simple blogging platform started in May 2008. It supported integrated and automatic posting to other social media tools such as Flickr, Twitter, and Facebook, a built-in Google Analytics package, and custom themes. It was based in San Francisco and funded by Y Combinator.
Yummly is an American website and mobile app that provides users recipes via recommendations and a search engine. Yummly uses a knowledge graph to offer a semantic web search engine for food, cooking and recipes.
Qwiki was a New York City–based startup automated video production company acquired by Yahoo! on July 2, 2013 for a reported $50 million. Qwiki released an iPhone app that automatically turns the pictures and videos from a user's camera roll into movies to share. The company's initial product, an iPad application that created video summaries of over 3 million search terms, was downloaded more than 3 million times and named by Apple as the best "Search and Reference" application of 2011.
Zomato is an Indian multinational restaurant aggregator and food delivery company. It was founded by Deepinder Goyal and Pankaj Chaddah in 2008. Zomato provides information, menus and user-reviews of restaurants as well as food delivery options from partner restaurants in more than 1,000 Indian cities and towns, as of 2022–23. Zomato rivals Swiggy in food delivery and hyperlocal space.
InMobi is an Indian multinational technology company, based in Bangalore. Its mobile-first platform allows brands, developers and publishers to engage consumers through contextual mobile advertising. The company was founded in 2007 under the name mKhoj by Naveen Tewari, Mohit Saxena, Amit Gupta and Abhay Singhal.
Cookpad Inc. is a Japanese food tech company. The company operates "Cookpad", which is Japan’s largest recipe sharing service, with 60 million monthly unique users in Japan and 40 million monthly unique users globally, allowing visitors to upload and search through original, user-created recipes. The firm established its global headquarters in Bristol, UK, and is expanding its business into international markets with offices in the UK, Spain, Indonesia, Lebanon, Brazil, India, Taiwan, Hungary, Greece, Russia and elsewhere. As of 2021, its sites draw around 800 million page views each month. It went public on the Tokyo Stock Exchange in July 2009. As of December 2018, Cookpad had more than 5 million registered recipes.
AngelList is an American software company for fundraising and connecting startups, angel investors, and limited partners. Founded in 2010, it started as an online introduction board for tech startups that needed seed funding. Since 2015, the site allows startups to raise money from angel investors free of charge. Created by serial entrepreneur Naval Ravikant and Babak Nivi in 2010, Avlok Kohli has been leading AngelList as its CEO since 2019.
Jason Harper Shellen is an American internet entrepreneur who was the founding product manager of Google Reader and helped create and launch Brizzly. His most recent software startup is the email app Boxer. He has since 2006 been a member of the RSS Advisory Board, a group that publishes the RSS specification and helps developers with web syndication.
Freecharge is an Indian financial services company based in Gurgaon. It allows users to pay bills such as electricity, gas and telephone, as well as recharge mobile, broadband, DTH and metro cards.
The Daily Meal is a food and drinks website. It is the first site launched by Spanfeller Media Group. Jim Spanfeller is a former CEO of Forbes.com. In 2016, Spanfeller was acquired by Tribune Publishing.
Zoomcar is an Indian carsharing platform, headquartered in Bangalore. Founded in 2013 by David Back and Greg Moran, it currently operates in more than 34 cities.
Musement is an online platform for activities, tours, museums, shows and art events which launched in March 2014. a service initially focused in Europe and then progressively expanding to the rest of the world. Musement aggregates third-party activities and tickets for users to book online. Tour suppliers have access to upload and manage various activities through the platform. The company's offers are available via website, iOS and Android. Once a customer books an activity, they receive a digital voucher or e-ticket for the reservation which can be saved on their device or printed. The company has four major competitors in this market, Viator, GetYourGuide, Berlin-based startup, Klook, Hong Kong–based startup, and Peek.com, a U.S.-based startup. The headquarters are located in Milan.
Mebelkart was an online marketplace for furniture and household goods headquartered in Bangalore, India.
Haptik is an Indian enterprise conversational AI platform founded in August 2013, and acquired by Reliance Industries Limited in 2019. The company develops technology to enable enterprises to build conversational AI systems that allow users to converse with applications and electronic devices in free-format, natural language, using speech or text. The company has been accorded numerous accolades including the Frost & Sullivan Award, NASSCOM's Al Game Changer Award, and serves Fortune 500 brands globally in industries such as financial, insurance, healthcare, technology and communications.
YouTube BrandConnect is an interactive entertainment company founded in 2013 and headquartered in Santa Monica, California.