BooRah - Inside the Buzz

Last month, We announced the list of top restaurant bloggers which is compiled automatically by our semantic crawling platform. Simply put, it associates blog posts from various bloggers to specific restaurants and ranks the contributing bloggers. We are seeing great interest in our technology since launch and have gotten some very good feedback. Today, we are launching a feature that enables the contributing bloggers to claim their blog profile pages on BooRah and show case the ranking. Here are a couple of examples:

• Anna Haight of mtkilimonjaro.blogspot.com
• Jo Boston of jobostonisafoodie.blogspot.com

As we gather new blog posts and content from other bloggers, these rankings will dynamically change to reflect the latest ranking. We hope you will find this feature interesting and valuable to showcase your BooRah generated rankings. The process to claim your blogs is very simple. We’ll give you a piece of code that you can drop into your blog. To get started here’s a link to the list of all the top restaurant blogs. You can click on your blog and start the claim process. Here is the top 10 list currently, and you can use the link from here as a shortcut:

1. mtkilimonjaro.blogspot.com - Anna Haight
2. ocmexfood.blogspot.com - ChristianZ
3. pleasurepalate.blogspot.com - pleasurepalate
4. foodandthings.blogspot.com - Food and Things
5. foodhoe.wordpress.com - foodhoe
6. kikimaraschino.blogspot.com - Kiki Maraschino
7. what2order.blogspot.com - kewlio
8. bestburgersfbay.blogspot.com - Scott Kline
9. jobostonisafoodie.blogspot.com - Jo
10. foodieuniverse.blogspot.com - Foodie Universe

At this time, we do not have a easy search tool for other bloggers not listed in this list, but if you will leave a quick comment, we’ll get back to you with your rank and a link to claim your blog.

If you have other thoughts or comments, don’t hesitate to drop a note here.

Last week was a big week for us. We announced the expansion of our restaurant reviews and rating service to 5 additional metro areas. With this announcement, we have now launched over 3000 cities and 225,000 restaurants in 15 metropolitan areas. Since we started our expansion plans early this year, we’ve been able to expand quickly, thanks to our maturing platform. So here’s our current progress - by the numbers:

• Since Late January, we launched 12 new metro areas, which is approximately 1 new metropolitan area/week
• Our restaurant service is now available across 3,000 cities in 16 different states.
• We have added about 500,000 reviews this year bring our total review count to 1,110,000+ reviews.
• In the San Francisco Bay Area, our first metro, we have reviews for 13,500 restaurants (65-70% of all restaurants in the metro area)
• Our review sources not only include popular review sites but also long tail content from bloggers and other influencers. Infact, we analyze over 100,000 blogs and extract reviews and posts dedicated to restaurants. The process of analyzing 1000’s of blog entries every day is completely automated and a result of our patent-pending semantic entity extraction system. See “Top Rated Restaurant Blogs” for more information.
• Our crawler extracts related attributes such as tags, cuisines, pictures, etc., We’ve also integrated with a few strategic partners to offer menus, reservations, takeouts and discounts. To date, we feature -
  • 45,000 Restaurant Menus
  • 35,000 Pictures for Restaurants
  • 4,000 Restaurants with Online Reservations
  • 8,500 Restaurant Discount Coupons and Offers
• Our NLP engine extracts “Boos” and “Rahs” from user reviews and has identified over 10 Million sentiments from the reviews todate. This meta data powers our summaries and ratings which you see on the website.

Today, we’re announcing the launch of our restaurant guide in Washington-Baltimore, Philadelphia, Las Vegas, Phoenix and Miami metropolitan areas. This brings the total number of metro areas covered to 15 and we are working on introducing our service to other parts of the country as well. Here are quick links for a couple these metro areas:

Restaurants in Washington DC - Baltimore Area
Restaurants in Philadelphia

In launching Las Vegas Restaurants, we encountered some interesting technical challenges in our crawling algorithm. It turns out, that most of the restaurants (atleast the popular ones) are located inside the hotels/casinos and do not have proper address and contact information in the yellow page listings. We had to tweak our entity-mapper to incorporate additional fuzzy heuristics. This will turn turn out to be very valuable in aggregating content for businesses that only have a PO Box or 1-800 telephone numbers as we expand to other categories.

We have also reached some significant milestones on the content side, a demonstration of the scalability of our semantic crawler and sentiment extraction platform. I’ll share additional details with some technical analysis today/tomorrow.

Today, BooRah is launching a new program that can benefit charities such as Sankara Eye Foundation, Children’s Tumor Foundation and America’s Second Harvest Food Bank. We’re requesting passionate people to sign up as BooRah members, invite their friends and families to participate, and thereby help these deserving organizations. Being a small company with many financial constraints, this is an option that lets us spread the word about our company while contributing to a worthy cause.
In early 2000, I came across a couple of my Indian friends who were volunteers at a relatively unknown charitable organization called Sankara Eye Foundation. As I saw their passion and dedication to realize a dream of “20/20 by year 2020″ in India, I felt compelled to participate and contribute. Today, they perform about 70,000 free eye surgeries every year and continue to expand. While their donations continue to grow, it is the grass roots efforts of their members that have made the organization vibrant and a model for many.

Locally, we continue to struggle with overwhelming burden of sub-prime mortgage melt down, inflation and threats to national security. People are turning to food banks and soup kitchens for help with basic necessities. According to the March 20th Wall Street Journal, local food banks are struggling at a time when more and more people are having trouble making the ends meet. The federal government and a number of corporations such as Walmart are stepping in to help in a big way.

Each year, 1 in 3,000 children throughout the world are born with a genetic disorder called Neurofibromatosis (NF). NF causes tumors to grow anywhere on or in the body, and can lead to severe forms of brain tumors, learning disabilities, and deformities. There is no cure. The Children’s Tumor Foundation is dedicated to ending NF through research and to improving the health and well being of those affected by NF.

We at BooRah, want to make a difference, in our own small way!

Tell your friends to join BooRah today and sign up to contribute to one of the above charities. In exploring BooRah, we hope that you’ll also have a found a new destination on the Internet for you to pick a restaurant for your next dining occasion.

BooRah will contribute $.10 to the charity you select, for you and for every new BooRah member referred by you through BooRah’s “donate to charity” program between March 23 and April 30, 2008 - up to $1,000 in total contributions. We’ll make the contributions during the month of May 2008. You must use BooRah website for us to process your referrals correctly. You can sign up for “donate to charity” program at http://www.boorah.com/restaurants/signup/charity.html