Robert Scoble Interviewing Hanan Lifshitz about Palore

Who are you?

So who are you?

I'm Hanan Lipschitz. I'm the co founder and CEO of Pelor, which is a mashup that personalizes local search. We launched the service in Israel with about 100,000 users and we're now working with several major US sites on launching here.

Okay, so personalizing, I'm sorry, local search or.

Yeah, local search.

So you're not like Spock, you're like. Or you're competing with.

I'd say we're closer to the Yelp Google Maps. Yah. Local space than that area. So basically, if you're looking for a restaurant here in Palo Alto and you care about vegetarian places that have free WI fi and that are romantic, then what we've basically done is we built a database that has.

That narrows it down to the entire city of Palo Alto.

Yeah.

The McDonald's. McDonald's doesn't fit. Romantic, right?

I thought they do have WI fi and I guess it's true.

Cheap date, though.

True. You want to enter there.

So you're mostly for mobile, right? So you're aiming at the mobile phone or people walking around, or are you aiming at people who are going to do these kinds of searches on their desktop PC?

Well, we've started with a PC and how about I just show you a little demo? That way you can see what we're doing. All right, there we go. Pelor is a browser plugin.

Okay.

So it sits on my browser.

How do you spell it, by the way?

That's P, as in Paul, A L O R E, which is a mix of pal and lore, like your friend's knowledge. Got it. So let me go to Google Maps and search for a restaurant in, say, New York. And here's those. This is simple, basic, Google. And these little icons are pillor. So what we've done is we've scraped several hundreds of sites and we have attributes on businesses from about two and a half million businesses in the U.S. okay, so then if, like I said, you're looking for a business with free WI fi or live music or anything of that sort, we'll scan the page using our plugin, find all the local businesses, check our own database, and then if we know that a place is romantic or has live music or is kosher, we'll add a little icon to it. Wow, that's sort of a mashup.

Does it work on Mac and Window or just Windows?

Well, we've just released it with Windows. Works on Firefox 1.5 and 2i 6 and 7 Mac is on the way. Mobile is somewhat further down.

Safari. Safari's on Windows now too, so.

Not yet. No.

Gotta get all the browsers, right.

Yep, definitely.

And it doesn't cost anything. Right. It's free to download.

Obviously.

On the web, some people still try to charge things, but the business model is going lamelessly.

No, no, we're all free. We're free to everyone except for the advertiser, obviously.

Is there a user generated content play here that I can add in my own content and change the icons on these things or add in a review on top of Yelp? Because going to Yelp, I can obviously leave a review there, but can I add value to the polar experience?

Right. Like I said, we would be categorized to say web 3.0 as opposed to web 2.0 company in that we don't let end users add their own content. We sort of do a mash up from different sites. So you might want to add reviews and do it on Yelp because they've done a tremendous job of doing that. And someone else would create a list of his best bars for going out. And what we do is we take the content from those sites. We're not trying to compete with Yelp or with any other site. We're just leveraging their content that they've already got and putting it on top of Google, on top of Yahoo, on top of anywhere else you're going to. Very cool.

Does this work only with the Google search engine or If I use live.com or AOL?

Search Engine Works everywhere. Let me show you a little bit of it. Go ahead. Let me move a little bit. We're still in the Google Maps page and I was looking for a restaurant and you can see the little icons provide more information. Like this place is romantic and it's got a good wine list and it's regarded as a live music bar. And that helps me find what I'm looking for in a very quick and intuitive way. So if I want more information, because one of the users that we spoke with said that he's a wine connoisseur and he does not walk into a restaurant that has less than 2,000 wines in their inventory. I've never understood that, but apparently that's the meaning of long tail. I guess people want very specific information. So we scraped a site called Wine Spectator and here you can see that this place has an inventory of 3,000 wines. By the way, this is real. This isn't just a demo. And you can see that it's romantic. We know that from Open list. Oh, and this is something that I love. We scraped the New York health site. So for about 20,000 New York restaurants, we know what sort of health inspection they have. So this place apparently have a toilet facility that's not maintained. And sometimes you find the best restaurants have rodent problems and things that you would have never known. And Google doesn't tell you that. So we just add that information on top of Google. You asked about other sites. I'll just do another quick demo with, say, let's go to local.yahoo.com just turn it around.

Yep.

And let's just look for bars.

Bars in San Francisco. There's a few of those.

Yeah, so I hear. So we've got a lot of information also. Some of them are romantic, but I'm looking for a romantic bar here.

Do you hook up to upcoming.org and look for events that are going on in the city?

We've got events from several sites. We haven't scraped upcoming yet, but there are a number of sites in the event space. So definitely, probably in about a month or so when you look for bars, if there's live music tomorrow, if there's a reading in some place, you'll see a little icon that says, hey, there's something going on here.

Because a lot of times in San Francisco, San Francisco has this problem. There's three Web 2.0 events going on at the same time. One at the Swedish American hall and one on Mena street and one at Gordon Bearsch or something like that. And so I always pick whatever's closest. I look up on my map and I'm out at the higher front right now, meeting with Om Malik or something. And I'll go to the. You know, the one at the. At Mina street maybe, because that's pretty close, where the other Swedish American hall is further away.

Yeah, I'm overwhelmed with all the stuff that's going on.

It's totally nuts.

It's actually a good point because I was meeting with a friend. I can't remember. I think it was on Cole Street. And we didn't pick a specific coffee shop. So we're just walking down the street and. And we were looking for a place with WI Fi. And on the storefronts they have little stickers. So Yelp supports us and we have paid WI Fi and there's live music on Saturday night. And some have stickers that we care about, like Zagatrid, things like that. And in a way, what we're doing here is kind of putting stickers on the storefronts. Of different places on the web. So it's very simple, very intuitive. You kind of pass by and oh, they've got free WI fi or they've got a live jazz show. I might want to go there.

Yeah. Do these icons only get added to search or is there a way for me as a blogger to add them? Or in my Facebook, you know, page, if I say, hey, I ate dinner at, you know, what would be a good dinner? You know, at any restaurant really. You know, put the restaurant name in there. Could I add, Could I tell the system to pull the icons and put the icons right next to it?

Yeah, definitely. We'll show you another little demo here. As a user, you can choose whatever icons you care about. So you know what, I've never done this before, but I'm going to do it nonetheless. Let's do a search for Zeitgeist. Oh, Zeitgeist. Obviously it's a bit more broad, but Zeitcast in San Francisco and also bars. So I'm hoping this will work. Well, yeah, look at that. Even in SF Station, a site that we've never worked with specifically just because the phone number has appeared in their page, we already work there. Even if I go into SF Station, that should work as well. So. So it works everywhere where local businesses are.

So it just keys on a phone number. Since there's a phone number there. Does it do a lookup then to see how does it know that phone number belongs to Zeitgeist bar or whatnot?

Well, we have a very big database that has a list of phone numbers and a bunch of attributes and infrastructure wise, instead of building this thing that will work really fast from our own servers, we put it all on Amazon's S3 platform. So, you know, we've got Amazon scalability, performance. I'm getting a check from Amazon later, so. But seriously, they've done a great job and it's very cheap for us to do that.

Yeah.

And you know, we have 100% uptime. We're not worried about performance issues or scalability.

So there's a lot of companies you're building on Amazon services now. It's really, really pretty unique. How do you make money off these little icons?

Good point. Basically.

Not that the world is all about.

Money, but yeah, we haven't quite gotten to that.

It tells me some interesting things about how you're trying to build a business.

Fair enough.

Obviously you're flying here to build a business, not just build a hobby.

True, true. We have a bunch of users that look at Our little icons to get more information to choose which business to go to. Now we can use that interface to either add more icons so we could add a little. Let's go back to restaurants in San Francisco. Restaurants or New York. Okay, go to Google Maps. I always like giving live examples. So this little icon says reserve online. Some of our users said that they want to be able to reserve restaurant online because they're too busy to do it themselves. Now OpenTable. This is specifically taken from OpenTable. So we scraped OpenTable and if I click on this. Let me do it again, just a second. Like if I click on this icon and the little bubble opens.

It's a little slow.

Sorry. Yeah, we're gonna move this to S3 as well. It's gonna be lightning fast.

Well, our WI fi here is a little slow.

So as you can see we've got open table opening it up. So we can cut a fee from their own fees from the restaurant or if you put a little orbitz icon so that users can reserve a hotel online, we get six bucks just for that on the reservation.

Do you do any revenue sharing with the end user or that's all yours?

No, the service is free. But Google doesn't share any revenues with their users.

Well they do with blotters. People are putting that thing on. So if I distribute a bunch of these little plug ins, is there any way for me as a blogger to make some money by.

Definitely affiliate program. We have that and actually one of the major issues here is how do we get distribution, how do we get downloads? Because obviously plugins are a major difficult thing to distribute. So what we've done is we've actually realized that by doing this little service to end users, we also have a great benefit for partner sites all over the US you have many thousands of local sites, your Kansas restaurants online and vertical vegetarian and other types of sites. And we realized that they have a very strong incentive of having their little icon, their logo to appear on the top of Google on top of Yahoo. They can't do that today. They can just do SEO or pay for AdWords and that doesn't put their logo on top of Google. So what we've done is we've built a self serve system where we don't need any biz dev, they don't have to call us, they just go to Pilar and say hey, we've got 20,000 coffee shops with WI fi. We want to have a little version of our own. So we've created a system where they can just join it Takes them five minutes. There's no R and D from their side. It's absolutely free. And then we create a version that has their logo on top of Google and I can even show you that if you like.

That'd be awesome.

All right. Just to show an example of what it looks like, we're working with about 20 sites, some of the major yellow pages sites as well. But I'll show you just a little example from a site across the bay, East Bay Express. It's a little newspaper that we've started working with early on and they added this little button to their site that says add our reviews to Google searches because they've got reviews on East Bay restaurants and when the user clicks on that they go to co branded jam page. The user clicks on that and then they would see the East Bay Express icon whenever they do a search. And let me just show you how that works. So say I look for a restaurant in Oakland and let's go to Google Maps. Actually you can also see it here but there East Bay Express, their logo is on the top. That's pretty exciting for them. How do you do that? Yeah, you go to. That's cool. You go to a self serve. Well this URL is closed so don't try this at home because it's not online.

I can't see any of this. It's too blurry.

Actually I do want to show a little demo where we create a version for Robert Scoble. Oh boy. Yep. So let's say I'm the Scobalizer site. So I click next and we already take your logo. I think you've got the WordPress logo here but let's choose a different one. Scoble PNG. Now it's just 16 by 16 because you don't want to mess around with the users. And here on the side you can see what it looks like. It's very small but this is a picture of you. And if we complete the process and we say this is a Scobo recommendation recommended joint. Okay, this is what it's going to look like. The icon in the tooltip and I'll click on next I'll scopalizer.com put a phone number here. We're adding a little sample of one business. This one is University Cafe and here you can write my thoughts. Just one unit and say service on the right hand side you can see what it's going to look like. Great and great coffee. Yeah. Atmosphere wonderful. Doesn't really matter.

Better than Starbucks which is across the street.

Better Than Starbucks. Is there Starbucks on University?

Oh, yeah, right across the street from University.

Okay, okay. We're going to get in trouble into this, but. And more from sco. They make good lattes. They do.

And good sandwiches and stuff.

They do. I love their cob salad. Yeah.

So you've been there?

I have, I have. It's not kosher, so don't tell my parents, but that's good. Yeah. You're from.

We should cover that. You're from Israel, right?

Yes, I am. And Pulor is from Israel as well. Our R and D is there. Our business development is.

Are you Yossi Vardy?

Cabal.

Yossi Vardy, for people who don't know, because Yossi's popular with certain people here. But he. Well, he was a famous technologist in Israel, but he funded icq, which made him a lot of money or made his kids a lot of money and him a lot of money. Everybody lives happily ever after, right?

Yep, yep, definitely.

But he's very influential in Israel and over here in Silicon Valley. He was just always on campus.

Yes, he is. He's a great guy. He's actually a neighbor of mine. See, I do.

When I hear Israel, I always say, Yossi knows this person. You might not like him, but he knows you and he's tied to somehow.

That's true. Yeah.

So tell me a little bit about Yossi. Tell me a little bit about the tech industry in Israel as well.

Well, it's very big, I think, in terms of venture capital. After the U.S. israel, you know, though it's a tiny country, is getting a whole lot of money after the US There are a lot of startups recently, a lot of Internet startups, and we're.

Seeing more and more of them on TechCrunch.

Yeah. Yeah. So it's very. It's very active. And the funny thing is you can sit in Tel Aviv, drink better coffee, and be very connected to the local scene here. Yes.

You're in sort of in Silicon Valley.

Right. So it's really doing quite well. And there are a lot of talented entrepreneurs and programmers, so it's doing well.

What are some of your favorite companies that you've seen pop up out of there lately? Any names that we haven't heard yet about in San Francisco or.

What's the coolest company I know of? 1. Well, Gigya was founded by a few friends of mine. They do a widget that helps you distribute your stuff to blogs and things like that. Oh, there are so many. And I know that if I'll say one, I'll get in trouble from the others. But there are really a bunch of companies, TinyBoom and Dapper, which is actually also in our space. So there's a lot of things going on.

Very cool. So it's just like a lot of geeks in local coffee shops there?

Very much so. It's quite similar to the scene in coffee shops in Palo Alto. You see people with PowerPoints trying to sell their thing.

Very cool. Back to Pelor, this seems like it really could be a new kind of social network as well. Not just for restaurants, but anytime you see my name, you could add some icons next to my name and drag me over to whatever Facebook competitor you want to build icons onto.

Right? Yeah, definitely.

Doing stuff like that.

Well, we've kind of got our feet on the ground and our head in the clouds, so we've started with local search and there's a lot of money there, and we're going to do that first. But when you look at it from a more visionary point of view, then basically what we do is we add context to things. So right now you run into local businesses, we show you more information. But you could be reading cnn, see a guy's name and have a little that will tell you, hey, you're connected to that guy through Hanan. Or you could see a picture or a video or any other object and have a little contextualizing icon that says you're connected to this through so and so. And we're also thinking of doing something for Nike where, you know, you run into Michael Jordan's name on any page, on any blog, we'll put a little Nike icon and pull you back to their branded content. So our vision is to contextualize a whole lot of things. And there are a lot of companies that have an interest in being there and being associated with Michael Jordan, being associated with other things. And we built the technology that would enable doing that not just for local businesses, but for other things as well.

Starbucks, for instance, if they saw the word University Copycat Cafe on a blog, let's say my blog, couldn't they put a Starbucks icon right next to that and say, hey, come across the street and get 50 cents off?

Yeah, definitely. Yeah, that's what we've done for Nike, although it's still not integrated or anything like that, where you have a store locator feature. So you search for shops in San Francisco, and if a certain shop sells Nike, you'll see a little Nike icon. I can actually show you both.

What do you have there, by the way?

This is the wizard for any site that wants to add a little icon. So we've started with a Scobalizer version and we went through a number of screens. We did the visualization, customization. Here you can add icons that your users will also see. Let's not choose anything. And then that's about it. So altogether it's a five minute process and we're already going to start scrape your site and create a version for you.

So you keep a copy in your database. That's how you do it so fast. Because you know exactly what I've written about. What if I add a new blog that gets indexed? When you hit the blog?

Yeah, you choose how often the blog would be updated. And so if it's an event site, we'll update it every day or so. So we have a very elaborate crawling system located all over the US and we can really scrape a site very quickly on the one hand, but without damaging its performance or anything like that. And let's see if it works. Now we're looking for University Cafe. Yep. On Google. And here you can see University Cafe and Robert Scoble's little picture. So there you are, you're integrated inside Google. Google.

All you have seen up on me now I'm inside Google.

Yeah, definitely. We're dominating it all.

Can I make those icons please? Other kinds of media. For instance, if you click on my face, could I leave a little Twitter gram or a piece of audio or a piece of video explaining why? Like that.

That's a good idea. Well, so far we're doing it just for text. We put a little excerpt of the text and usually the site's interest is not just to put a little content there, but also to pull the user back to their site. So like East Bay Express, they're happy to have their branded logo on top of Google, but they also want to pull the user back to eastpay Express. So we usually put in a little excerpt of the content and a link back. Video and graphics are nice to the agenda, so I hear. Yeah, I was wondering what that thing is.

It would be interesting to be able to pull, to have you click on some pages and see a little video icon video about that thing. That would be interesting.

You know, I think we might have an example of that as well. Let me go back to Google Maps just a second. Because there's a great site called, I don't remember the name, but they have, let's see, restaurants in San Francisco. It's either restaurants or coffee shops where we've got the information for that. Let's see. Yep. See this little video camera?

Yeah.

So you can see a video of the Palace Hotel. No way you would have found it otherwise. So if I click on it and I let the little bubble open. See? Business video. But turn here. Yeah, that's the name of the company. Turn here. Yep.

Turn here.

Does a great job. And voila. I can see a little picture. So that's basically what we're doing. We're taking content from the long tail that's hidden in a lot of different sites, and we're exposing it both to the benefit of end users who want to see that sort of content and for the sites who get exposure, visual exposure, branded exposure, everywhere, Whether it's Google or Yahoo or blogs, we're active everywhere.

So the video, could that be on, like if you search for Pilar, can you have a little icon next to Polar? Or is it just for restaurant sites right now? Would I be able to hook up my video to that just like you did there?

Well, right now we're focusing on local businesses. So the thing that we're contextualizing is the local businesses. It has to be about one of the 30 million local businesses in the U.S. but like I.

So it only works in us on the U.S. websites. It doesn't.

Right.

You don't have a way to do it for Chinese websites or Japanese websites?

We can, but that's not today. Well, We've started with two and a half million businesses. We're going to climb up to 30 million and then the world and other places.

So this business has to exist in your database before it can get these icons on it. That's what I'm asking.

Right, Right.

So Polar probably isn't one. Well, probably you're. You're probably in there.

Well, actually, no, because we don't have a phone number that end users call. We're not in that category of 30 million local businesses.

So you need a phone number on the system somewhere that matches something in your database. That's how it pulls it back out.

Definitely. The next step will be places and names of people. Imagine seeing a little stock ticker and then having a little icon tell you, hey, your favorite blogger has written something about that stock. Or, you know, we're not so good at content. We're not trying to be very good at content. We're just building a platform that other content providers can leverage to expose their content everywhere else on the web. That's what we do.

How defendable is this? Why wouldn't Google just do this? On their own and build this into Google's engine, put you out of business?

Well, Google and Yahoo and the other major search sites, as far as we know, are not focusing on personalization of local search, at least in the next 12 months, period. And we expect that within these 12 months, we will have enough businesses and enough sites that we're working with to have a pretty significant database to work with. And at that point, even if one of them does enter that space, we'll have enough value to either cooperate or be gobbled up by one of them, which is an option.

Can I get some stuff?

Depends on how you edit the video.

I guess the deal's off. Well, really cool. Is there anything else I need to know about your company or you or what you're doing or what's going on in Israel?

Well, there's a lot of things going on with the company, and we're really working with a number of major sites to have some major releases, but I can't talk about that right now. I think that's pretty much it.

Thank you very much.

Thank you much. Very cool.