Amazon.com sells cookbooks, gourmet foods and — at least in the Seattle area — groceries. Now the online retailer is taking a bite out of Foodista, a tiny Seattle online recipe site that launched last December.

Amazon.com recently led the startup company’s $550,000 financing round, a sign that the online retailing powerhouse may be getting serious about the distribution of recipes. That has implications for a number of Seattle companies in the online recipe space, namely AllRecipes.com, Big Oven and RecipeZaar.  

Foodista co-founder Barnaby Dorfman — who spent seven years at Amazon as a vice president of A9 and a director of IMDb — confirmed the financing in an interview with TechFlash today.

But Dorfman didn’t offer specifics about Amazon.com’s specific interests in Foodista, an online encyclopedia of food that also includes thousands of recipes and information about cooking tools.

Best described as a Wikipedia for food, Foodista allows community members to upload recipes, photos and other information. Like Wikipedia, community members also can edit pages about meatballs, zucchini, apple pie or thousands of other foods or recipes. Dorfman said the goal is to eliminate the duplicate entries typically found on other cooking sites – 40 or 50 similar recipes for paella or halibut or eggs Benedict.

"We haven’t completely solved this problem," he said. "Kind of like Wikipedia, if you can imagine if everybody had a version of the history of the Civil War — writing a separate article  — it would be pretty useless. We are still finding that line between what is unique and what is repetition." 

Dorfman declined to offer metrics, but he said Foodista has been growing quite nicely since its debut four months ago. (Compete.com shows Foodista at about 17,000 unique visitors for the last month.)

"Just generally, I think that with the recession people are looking to cook at home more than they were before," said Dorfman, who before joining Amazon worked at Marsee Baking in Portland. Other Seattle area recipe sites – including AllRecipes.com and BigOven — have noted that trend.

As a result of the investment, Amazon.com’s Jorrit Van der Meulen has joined the startup’s board.

Dorfman said it made sense to take the investment from Amazon.com, since it has a number of food-related businesses. In addition to cookbooks and Amazon Fresh, it sells an extensive collection of cooking tools.

Foodista had planned to raise the money after the product launch in December, with Dorfman saying that Amazon.com contacted him. He still knows a number of people at the online retailer.

"It was a good fit and we certainly had a history with them," said Dorfman, who talked to other investors as well. "Amazon has a lot of food-related things going on, so we are just excited about the potential to work together on those areas."

Foodista employs three people, with staffers working from the Giraffe Labs space in Pioneer Square. Given the recent decision to close that co-working space, Dorfman said that they plan to move to new offices soon.

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and F5 revenues take a dip  

F5 Networks, one of Seattle’s largest publicly-traded technology companies, today reported weakness in sales for its second quarter. The maker of networking equipment and software reported revenue of $154.1 million, down 7 percent from the first quarter and off 3 percent from the same period last year.

"Continued weakening in the global economy impacted sales across all regions," said F5 CEO John McAdam in a statement. F5 posted net income of $19 million, compared to $21.4 million for the previous quarter. The company is now targeting revenue of $148 million to $157 million for the third quarter, and net income of 22 cents to 25 cents per share.

It finished the quarter with $119 million in cash and cash equivalents.

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and Apple disses ‘junky’ netbooks, cites its own ‘interesting ideas’  

The netbook market is one of the bright spots in the personal computer market nowadays, as more PC buyers gravitate toward the small, Web-oriented computers. Asked about netbooks today, Tim Cook, Apple’s chief operating officer, made it clear that the company isn’t impressed. 

"For us it’s about doing great products. When I look at what’s being sold in the netbook space today, I see cramped keyboards, terrible software, junky hardware, very small screens, and just not a consumer experience and not something that we would put the Mac brand on, quite frankly," Cook said on Apple’s quarterly conference call. "So it’s not a space — as it exists today — that we’re interested in, nor do we believe customers in the long term would be interested in. It’s a segment we would choose not to play in."

But then he added a big caveat that will no doubt get some attention.

"That said, we do look at the space and are interested to see how customers respond to it. People that want a small computer, so to speak, that does browsing and email might want to buy an iPod touch, might want to buy an iPhone. So we have other product to accomplish some of what people are buying netbooks for. So in that particular way, we play in an indirect basis.

"And then, of course, if we find a way where we can deliver an innovative product that really makes a contribution, then we’ll do that. We have some interesting ideas in this space. The product pipeline is fantastic for the Mac.

"As we look back over the last four-plus years, 17 of the 18 quarters of the last four-and-a-half years we’ve exceeded the market rate of growth. To exceed it in this horrendous economy I think is quite an accomplishment, especially when you look at these very low-priced netbooks — I think it’s a stretch to call them a personal computer — that are really propping up the unit numbers from the industry as a whole."

TechCrunch previously reported that Apple was working on a large-screen iPod touch that would be able to run iPhone and iPod apps, and fill the gap between the company’s portable devices and Macs.

Earlier: Mac sales dip 3 percent, but iPhone keeps Apple on a roll

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Mac sales dip 3 percent, but iPhone keeps Apple on a roll  

In another sign of the economy’s effect on the personal computer market, Apple this afternoon reported a 3 percent decline in Mac unit sales for its recently completed quarter. However, Apple overall trumped Wall Street’s estimates, thanks in part to rising iPhone sales. The company posted revenue of $8.16 billion and earnings per share of $1.33 — well above analysts’ expectations.

The 3 percent decline in Mac sales compares with a 7 percent decline in the worldwide PC market for the quarter, according to data released by the IDC research firm last week.

The overall trend is expected to factor significantly into Microsoft’s quarterly earnings Thursday afternoon. The Redmond company relies heavily on sales of Windows preinstalled on computers.

Apple’s portable devices came through for the company. Unit sales of iPods were 11.01 million in the quarter, a 3 percent increase over the same period last year. Sales of the iPhone were 3.79 million units — a 123 percent increase over the same quarter last year.

Follow-up: Apple disses ‘junky’ netbooks, cites its own ‘interesting ideas’

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