Julie O’Grady
O’Grady Communications, LLC
Phone:650-321-6919
Cell: 650-269-9989
Fax: 650-618-8697
BooRah and Embarcadero Publishing Partner to Enhance the Local Dining & Online Experience
BooRah Launches Syndicated Reviews Platform — New Service Delivers a Summary of Local Restaurant Reviews and Enhanced Contextual Advertising
PALO ALTO, CA — March 21, 2007 — Today BooRah, the ultimate personalized review guide, and Embarcadero Publishing Company unveiled their new online restaurant review guide, providing a smarter way to find great restaurants throughout the San Francisco Bay Area. With this partnership, BooRah also launches its new Syndicated Reviews Platform extending its advanced restaurant review guide capabilities to partner sites. Palo Alto Online is the first of six local media sites from Embarcadero Publishing that will incorporate BooRah’s technology platform and service. This new guide helps consumers achieve their ideal dining experience by viewing a comprehensive listing of local restaurants and reviews, detailed ratings based on location, type of food and specific dining criteria as well as the ability to write reviews on local restaurants. This service offers users a quick and easy way to find local restaurants, and provides restaurant owners a new way to promote their business.
“Embarcadero Publishing and Palo Alto Online have long been a trusted source for local information in the area. We’re now giving the community access to a ‘one-stop shop’ of local restaurant review information,” said Lisa Van Dusen, director, Palo Alto Online. “BooRah made it easy for us to offer consumers a way to make sense of all this information, by automatically summarizing the relevant restaurant details – and giving our users a better way to share information and their opinions online.”
BooRah, through its new Syndicated Reviews Platform, enables local newspaper sites like Palo Alto Online, who have historically been at the “center of conversation” in a community, to increase their online reach and leverage engaging Internet technologies.
“BooRah is the only service that can actually transform the millions of online restaurant reviews from Palo Alto Online and across the web into easily read summaries and in-depth ratings,” said Eric Moyer, co-founder and CEO of BooRah. “With this launch, BooRah now enables media sites like Palo Alto Online to quickly and easily capture and participate in the “buzz” that’s going on around town as well as out on the Internet, at the same time delivering relevant content to their users.”
By leveraging the existing community of users that have already been established by sites such as Palo Alto Online and the print newspaper presence of the Palo Alto Weekly, BooRah’s Syndicated Reviews Platform enables a rich, robust one-stop-shop for local restaurant information – bringing thousands of listings, reviews, and detailed ratings to one website. Additionally, a “write a review” feature allows local residents to contribute both to the community and to the online presence of the Palo Alto Online site. This enables users to meet their neighbors online and share their expertise.
This new platform is designed to tackle the challenges of building and scaling quality local content as well as the cost of selling advertising to local businesses.
With this launch of BooRah’s Syndicated Reviews Platform, Palo Alto Online: 1) Adds full access to more than 15,000 restaurants in the San Francisco Bay Area and 60,000 in New York and Los Angeles, in addition to the more than 800 restaurants on the Midpeninsula
2) Adds reviews from multiple sources – reviews from across the web: Palo Alto Weekly news staff, consumers, other professional critics and bloggers
3) Adds a new community user-generated element to the website – allowing local residents to contribute and write their own reviews
4) Introduces advanced searching functionality
5) Delivers complete maps & driving directions
6) Offers online reservation bookings through OpenTable
7) Gains highly useful website functionality with complete implementation simplicity
8) Facilitates future higher-value contextual advertising
9) Enables new selling opportunities and revenue streams for their local business sales force
This is BooRah’s first of many media partnerships where technology, combined with local media enhances the community and enables a richer more valuable user experience.
About BooRah:
BooRah is the ultimate personalized review guide, providing a smarter way to find great restaurants. BooRah’s patent-pending summarization technology automatically condenses a comprehensive collection of online reviews from bloggers, professional critics and consumers, and synthesizes these results with users’ specific search criteria. BooRah’s technology analyzes and understands the language that humans use naturally. By capturing the community vibe and social essence of existing online groups, and comparing the result to individual search criteria, BooRah delivers unsurpassed relevance with the broadest community reach. Founded in 2006, BooRah is privately held and based in Palo Alto, Ca. Visit www.boorah.com for more information.
About Embarcadero Publishing Company and Palo Alto Online:
Embarcadero Publishing Company, headquartered in Palo Alto, Ca., is the parent company of six local weekly newspapers throughout the San Francisco Bay Area and an online division. It was founded in 1979 by Bill Johnson, President, and a group of local investors.
Palo Alto Online is the online destination for information about the Palo Alto area, including continuous local news coverage, comprehensive arts and entertainment information, community calendar, real estate and much more. Launched September 1996, the award-winning Palo Alto Online continues the tradition of the Palo Alto Weekly, which was the first newspaper in the United States to publish its entire contents on the web in 1994. Palo Alto Online’s Town Square is a lively user forum where residents engage in online discussions on topics ranging from schools to leash laws to local history. In addition, Palo Alto Online provides access to the entire contents of the Palo Alto Weekly and its sister newspapers The Almanac and Mountain View Voice. Palo Alto Online currently has more than 250,000 unique visitors and 10 million page views per month. Visit www.embarcaderopublishing.com and www.PaloAltoOnline.com for more information.
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