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, Calif., March 21 /PRNewswire/ -- 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:
 
     -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
     -Adds reviews from multiple sources - reviews from across the Web: Palo
      Alto Weekly news staff, consumers, other professional critics and
      bloggers
     -Adds a new community user-generated element to the website - allowing
      local residents to contribute and write their own reviews
     -Introduces advanced searching functionality
     -Delivers complete maps & driving directions
     -Offers online reservation bookings through OpenTable
     -Gains highly useful website functionality with complete implementation
      simplicity
     -Facilitates future higher-value contextual advertising
     -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, California. Visit
 www.boorah.com for more information.
     About Embarcadero Publishing Company and Palo Alto Online
     Embarcadero Publishing Company, headquartered in Palo Alto, California,
 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.
 
 

SOURCE BooRah