Jennifer Zaino
SemanticWeb.com Contributor

Startup BooRah is using its proprietary semantic technology to drive its business to a new arena: restaurant reputation management.

The idea, not yet formally launched, is that restaurants who sign up for the service will be able to get a compilation of automatically generated data about the sentiment around the web as it relates to their eating establishments. The data will be drawn from BooRah’s natural language processing technology that enables the system to match consumer entries to specific businesses, and extract attributes (on comments ranging from food quality to ambience) from the web pages in a scalable manner.

So how did the private, venture-funded company get the name? Think “boo” for the bad restaurants, “rah” for the good ones.

BooRah has been exploring a relationship with a partner to market the new service, says CTO Nagaraju Bandaru. It tested its capabilities over six weeks at the end of last year, generating 50 to 75 sample reports in a semi-automated fashion. Its potential partner, which Bandaru is not ready to disclose, put some of its sales staff in four top metro markets on the case, reaching out to find potential customers and get their feedback.

“They went through their top down channels on their side on what they did and didn’t like, and came up with a value proposition for acquiring merchants and downstream revenue potential,” says Bandaru. “It’s sufficient validation that a significantly large player in the space with billions and billions in revenue would take things down to that level of validation to say we had a product here.”

The short-term biggest revenue potential is via partnerships and building a brand that lets the BooRah technology cut through the clutter. BooRah’s focus over the next few months will be finessing the finalized product so that it can be rolled out on a fairly large scale as a resold service through its potential partner. There are also possibilities farther down the road of retailing the service to segments of the restaurant industry, and equal potential for using the web to acquire customers for the service, by working closely on search engine optimization. As CTO, that would fall into Bandaru’s bailiwick.

“When [restaurant owners] search for these things, what does it take for us to be the first three or four links on Google, and that is automatic branding,” he says. “There’s nothing better than showing up in the first page on Google — that drives awareness.”

Finding their way to BooRah, “then they are in an optimal mode where we can reach to them directly.” For example, once they opt-in they might be able to get some free data, and BooRah can make signing up for the premium service just a click away. “So the cost of acquisition is going down and you are being more efficient.”

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