Raveable is a year-old Seattle-area startup that launched its hotel review summarization website in May. If there were a Raveable entry for Raveable itself, here’s what it might say:

Ranked 116 out of 340 tech startup websites in Seattle.

The good: Team is ambitious and knowledgeable; large market; useful technology; fun interface; customer focused; strong word of mouth.

The bad: Relatively new; pre-revenue company.

Best kept secret: Gaining attention from angel investors and VCs.

The idea of Raveable is to help leisure travelers quickly make sense of all the user reviews out there on the Web, and choose a hotel that’s right for them. So the company aggregates reviews from sites like TravelPost (Kayak), MyTravelGuide (Priceline), CitySearch, Yahoo Travel, and VirtualTourist, and provides a bullet-point analysis of the pros and cons of each hotel—for 55,000 establishments and counting in the U.S.

The company was founded by Philip Vaughn and Rafik Robeal, former Microsoft veterans with expertise in database applications, data synchronization, and mobile social networking. Raveable grew out of difficulties they’d each had in booking hotels quickly; they found they were sorting through dozens of reviews on multiple sites, without having a top-down view of how various hotels stack up against each other.

“We want to make it really easy to make a decision,” Vaughn says. “We were really frustrated by ‘Everything is 3.5 stars, everything is above average, everything is good.’”

The technology behind their approach is semantic analysis of text—an area that’s been in research for decades, but is increasingly being applied to Web search and corporate software. The goal is for the software to understand the meaning of sentences in user reviews—including the topic, the context, and the sentiment. So if reviews say the rooms are great, beds are comfortable, or parking is expensive, that’s pretty straightforward. But if they say the service could be faster, rooms get cold, the view is sick, or the place is in good need of repairs, say, the software relies on statistical models (trained and updated by the founders) to ascertain whether the sentiment is positive or negative.

Vaughn gives a sense of historical perspective, pointing out that Raveable fits into the trend …Next Page »

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Website Seeks Credibility From Readers

A new website is using a twist on popularity rankings by asking readers to score it on credibility. NewsCred, which just launched its beta version, lets users score its news stories by how credible they are, an attempt to add a new level of involvement to news sites, Reuters reports. The site is mostly in English, but plans to expand its Spanish and French content.

Google to Host Bloggers at Political Conventions

When hordes of bloggers join the swarms of delegates descending on Denver next week for the Democratic National Convention, and on Minneapolis for the Republican version the week after that, Google will be there with open arms, Internet access, and snacks. Google, which wasn’t a significant presence at the conventions four years ago, will set up a two-story, 8,000 square foot headquarters for bloggers in Denver, with something similar planned for the Republicans, the Wall Street Journal reports. Along with Internet-equipped workspaces, couches for napping, and free smoothies, the company will offer a closing-night party.

Democratic Platform Addresses Internet

The Democratic party platform, to be discussed and voted on at next week’s convention, takes special notice of the role of the Internet in modern life. The platform calls for a national broadband strategy. Wired says this is very different from the Bush administration’s stance, which has left issues of broadband access in the hands of the private sector.

Stem Cells Produce Blood in Lab

Blood drives may one day be a thing of the past, thanks to work at Advanced Cell Technology of Santa Monica, CA, the University of Illinois, and the Mayo Clinic. As the Los Angeles Times reports, researchers there say they’ve used embryonic stem cells to make blood. The team says they’re still several steps away from making blood suitable for transfusions.

Is Data Fusion a Boon or a Bust?

Data fusion, the process of linking several databases together to create a single, wide-ranging profile of a person for such purposes as preventing credit card theft or chasing down deadbeat dads, promises efficient use of personal data but seems like a nightmare to privacy advocates. But as it turns out, Scientific American reports, these databases may contain too many errors and meaningless coincidences to actually be useful.

Stolen Data For Sale Online

The Security Fix blog at the Washington Post continues its look at the tools of the trade for cyber criminals. Today, it talks about websites where thieves can purchase stolen credit-card data. The average price for such information is $1.20 per card number, along with names, addresses, and phone numbers.

LEDs May Light Up New York Streets

Long-lasting, energy-efficient LEDs have already become ubiquitous in traffic lights around the country. Now they may be poised to take over streetlights as well. According to the New York Times, New York City will conduct tests of new streets lights, complete with new pole designs, based on LEDs. If the tests are successful, the city could eventually replace all 300,000 of its streetlights with LED versions.

Bloomberg Proposes Wind Plan for New York

Windmills could top New York City skyscrapers and bridges, or supply power from the waters off Manhattan, if Mayor Michael Bloomberg has his way. Speaking at the National Energy Summit in Las Vegas, Bloomberg cited studies predicting that wind energy could provide 10 percent of the city’s electricity needs within 10 years, says CNET News. Most of the installations would likely be small turbines on tops of buildings. Well, after all, old New York was once New Amsterdam.

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The Cluetrain Manifesto, the classic book on how the Internet has changed the way consumers relate to corporations, was published in 1999. The word “blog” appears nowhere in it. (While the term “weblog” had been coined a couple of years earlier, it wasn’t until late 1999 that the short form “blog” caught on as a noun and a verb.) But if you had to boil down the “95 Theses” offered to corporate marketers by Cluetrain authors Christopher Locke, Rick Levine, Doc Searles, and David Weinberger, the summary might be: “Get a blog, and keep it real.”

Consider some of these gems from the manifesto:

• “Companies can now communicate with their markets directly. If they blow it, it could be their last chance.”
• “Companies need to lighten up and take themselves less seriously. They need to get a sense of humor.”
• “Getting a sense of humor does not mean putting some jokes on the corporate web site. Rather, it requires big values, a little humility, straight talk, and a genuine point of view.”
• “Markets do not want to talk to flacks and hucksters. They want to participate in the conversations going on behind the corporate firewall.”
• “If you want us to talk to you, tell us something. Make it something interesting for a change.”
• “We know some people from your company. They’re pretty cool online. Do you have any more like that you’re hiding? Can they come out and play?”

The idea that companies need to communicate with their existing customers and potential customers in authentic, human voices—crystallized so clearly in Cluetrain—has now had plenty of time to sink in. At many firms, the natural response has been to launch a CEO blog, and/or to allow lower-level employees with the blogging bug to publish their own views. And here in Boston, quite a few corporate execs have come out to play.

A few of these writers still don’t get it—they want to hawk all that’s good about their company or its products. They don’t communicate when they screw up, and they sound too much like their own PR firms. But there are also some who seem to take to the medium naturally—who understand that a blog is more like a conversation than a lecture.

Some of the best business bloggers find ways to focus consistently but not nauseatingly on their own companies, using their blogs largely to give readers a look under the hood. In this category, one of the most worthwhile local weblogs is Chuck’s Blog, written by EMC vice president of technology alliances Chuck Hollis. In his frequent, very conversational posts, Hollis shares revealing insights into EMC’s short- and long-term corporate strategies—blogging recently, for example, about the company’s intentions in the cloud computing space.

Other local executive bloggers write more about their industries than about their own organizations—Paul Levy and John Halamka, the CEO and CIO of Boston’s Beth Israel Deaconess Medical Center, respectively, are prime examples, frequently writing about the big issues that affect healthcare. And still others write about whatever new product or service happens to catch their fancy, even if it’s from a competing company. Here, The Next Big Thing from Don Dodge of Microsoft’s Cambridge outpost is one of the grooviest local examples.

Though the Boston Business Journal declared in a March article that “The Corporate Blog’s Dying Off,” there’s little real evidence of a dropoff in executive blogging. It’s true, as the article pointed out, that blogging takes more time and commitment than many executives have to give. But if anything, with mainstream media readership and viewership continuing to drop, it’s clear that companies have to engage with their markets through other channels, including the blogosphere. That’s especially true in the high-tech world, whose customers dwell largely online and have learned from high-profile corporate bloggers like Sun Microsystems CEO Jonathan Schwartz and former Microsoft employee Robert Scoble to look for human faces inside the companies shaping the computer and Internet industries.

“Blogs allow corporate bloggers to converse with their audience directly,” writes Arlington, MA-based marketer John Cass in his 2007 book Strategies and Tools for Corporate Blogging. “Such online conversation can demonstrate a company’s ideas, abilities, and, in the final analysis, brand to customers and the world.”

[Click to the next page for our list of Boston-area executive bloggers.] …Next Page »

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