Smart Web Blog

BooRah on TECH Close Up

This aired on local TV channel yesterday.

PS: BooRah mention towards the end

Free Restaurant Promotion Tools on BooRah

Today, we released features on our website BooRah that allow Restaurateurs to easily update their Restaurant information. We have a large number of user reviews for various restaurants on our website that cater to consumer needs and helping them make a good dining decision. A large number of updates and comments on website also come from restaurateurs. To streamline this process and enable the restaurants to be engaged with the community they serve, we've started to integrate "restaurant generated content" with "user generated content" which we hope will be a great benefit for both parties. We've started off with simple features such as :

1. Upload Menus (links and PDF) for various meal occasions
2. Upload Pictures
3. Extend any promotions such as coupons or gift certificates
4. Write a brief message to consumers or enhance your business description

If there are other features, you'd like us to incorporate, let us know by sending an email to
feedback@boorah.com

Restaurateurs  - Search for your business on http://www.boorah.com/restaurants and click on "Manage Your Restaurant" link.

Restaurant Recommendations from the Community

So far, BooRah has been a geeky company.  We realized technology was our core strength, and pushed along in  that direction. We are now incorporating social aspects into our site, it's our first try at something social, so bear with us till we get it right. We explored the facebook integration but without a complete use case and with a large number of applications out there, it seemed like Twitter was  better platform. I started seriously exploring Twitter about a month ago and thanks to help and suggestions from gurus like Shel Israel, it took a persistent effort to stay engaged in the twitter community and follow some folks who would ultimately make it worthwhile. I follow @loiclemeur, @chrisbrogan, @davewiner, @jowang and a few others who seem to have perfected the art of getting their followers engaged and involved. The challenge of course was how does one balance between trying to build a real business while not spending a ton of time on goofy sites experimenting all sorts of interesting experiments. Twitter benefits were straightforward -

• Keep it simple
• Broadcast and subscribe to channels of interest
• Consumer Opt-in/opt-out
• Community support for tools and extensions

Of course, the biggest challenge was twitter stability and still continues to be. So I started prototyping a simple application using Twitter4J and Terraminds APIs. We just launched the first incarnation of this application on our website this morning. You can check this by clicking here

Here's a simple scenario -

a) Users on BooRah website search for a restaurant, e.g Fiesta Del Mar in Mountain View
b) They can see the related twitter conversations on a widget on the page, they can post a question and wait for any responses the twitter community may respond back with.
c) The system posts the responses as 'boorah' user on Twitter and people can send replies to @boorah to display them back on the website... it's more like answers.com(only more lively, we hope).

Our challenge will be get people to subscribe to @boorah and come up with "social rewards" that are interesting. We'll incorporate "twitter profiles" on our website, so twitterers can easily route the conversations at a personal level than through our system. In the meanwhile, if you're on the road and need a dining recommendation, sent a tweet to @boorah and leverage the twitter community.

In the longer run, I also believe, the ability to deliver useful functionality on Twitter Platform will also result in a business model for Twitter ( they may not need one to exit though..). We appreciate all your feedback and comments. Happy Tweeting..

Twitter Help Needed?

We're about to launch a simple application on our website BooRah . Here's a description of the application:

BooRah users search for restaurants and best dining options on our website. We've built a small plugin that allows our website visitors to ask the twitter community for recommendations or suggestions. Since twitter is a broadcast medium, we'd like to keep the conversations fairly loose, therefore all the questions from the website will be initiated as a single user. Users will be offered an option to provide their twitter profiles in future and interact directly through the personal account, but for now, we'd like to keep it simple.

Here's the question: What is a good Twitter Screen Name to allow the twitter community to participate?

A few options are

• BooRah ( Name of the company )
• BooRahUser ( signifies a user on boorah site)
• BooRahMember ( same as above)
• askBooRah
• food_sensei
• others

Any ideas or thoughts are SINCERELY appreciated...
Winner gets lunch for 2 at Cascal in Mountain View ( as a token of appreciation, really...)

Meta Data Feast

User generated content provides different types of meta data. "Social Graphs" are a big topic of discussion today ( Scoble's adventure today). Social graphs use structured user data such as user profiles, usage history, click patterns and interactions with friends/community to derive very relevant information. However, the amount of information that anyone wishes to share openly with a community is limited by privacy concerns and anonymity preference that most of us have ( I could be wrong?) on the Internet. BooRah has  been looking at other ways to extract relevant meta data from user generated content such as reviews and ratings. These  pieces of information do not require extensive personal information, but can be highly relevant to one's information needs.

Last night, we released a new version of our details page on BooRah that exposes semantic meta data in different forms.  As you can see on this page for Foreign Cinema in San Francisco , you can discover how many people liked food (Hurrah's) and didn't like the food( Boo's) at this place. Similarly, you can not only get specific comments about service and ambiance but also browse relevant recommendations based on the concept of "people who liked this restaurant also liked these other restaurants". The semantic meta data ( ability to extract relevant information from plain english text through natural language processing) provides a dimension that can provide a very good user experience using very little user profile information.

Testing Limits for Google

Happy New Year - 2008

I always thought Google was system as big as universe. I've always been more impressed with their response time and keyword indexing than the pagerank itself ( not denying that pagerank was a revolution). Lately I've been experimenting with some large Google adwords campaigns for BooRah partners. Today, I came across this "Alert" on my dashboard - Am I reaching google's adwords limits or am I doing something really stupid?