Palore is a browser add-on for finding reviews of local businesses. The company has already launched for the Israeli market, and a launch in San Francisco is imminent. As part of Mashable's YourPitch series, where founders talk about their new startups and features, Palore's co-founder and CEO Hanan Lifshitz explains the concept.
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Here’s how it works - the Palore plug-in identifies phone numbers of local businesses in any web page the user visits, and turns them into links. When the user clicks on a number, Palore opens a small bubble and displays the best reviews available for that business. The reviews are scraped from many sites such as InsiderPages and Yelp, but the innovative twist is that users can define their preferred review sources and see them wherever they go. For example, a user can select his newspaper restaurant critique and all the people he’s connected to on Yelp, and Palore will show their reviews, in any site the user goes to and in the right context. We call this feature Contextual RSS – letting users define their content sources like regular RSS, but showing the data only when needed and in the right context.
Palore also has an integrated VoIP dialer, powered by Kayote, which lets users start a call in any web page, directly from their browser. Our client currently supports IE & Firefox on Windows (a Mac version and a clientless version will be ready soon).
We’ve also got a feature for local review writers, called "Palore To Go”, which improves their exposure and reach. By joining Palore To Go, review writers can create a "To Go" version of their reviews which they can post on their site and send to their friends. The friends would then see the reviews anywhere on the web and in the right context. The idea is that if you’ve got a reviews site, even your most loyal readers sometimes look for local businesses in other sites. With Palore To Go, they’ll see your reviews everywhere… joining is free and takes only 5 minutes to set up.
Palore is different from review aggregators like Google Maps that show reviews from many different sources, in that we show a personalized view of the reviews to each user. This is important since users don’t want to see 70 anonymous reviews – they want to know what their friends / trusted sites have to say. And unlike review sites such as CitySearch, Yahoo! Local and Yelp, that create original reviews, Palore just shows their content throughout the web and drives traffic back to their sites. Yelp has some great social content but I want to see it even when I search Google or read my webmail – Palore lets me do that.
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Palore were wise to aggregate reviews from around the web, rather than relying solely on users to submit reviews (which is useless until you have a critical mass of reviews). On the downside, Google Maps already offers much of this functionality, albeit trapped within the mapping interface - will users relish the simplicity of clicking a phone number on any webpage to see a review, or will they hop over to Google Maps?
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