Springwise news…

Springwise has just send out their weekly newsletters and I found these two newsarticles interesting – thus sharing them here:

White label platform helps anyone build a gaming site

Much the way Magnify helps web publishers create niche video channels, Danish Nonoba enables anyone to create a branded gaming site that’s customisable with more than 4,000 games and can be translated into 26 different languages.

Nonoba’s first offering was an independent site where gamers can play both single- and multiplayer games for free. Nonoba Gamerise, however, is a fully functional, white-label content management system that lets anyone create a Flash gaming site of their own complete with all of Nonoba’s community features but entirely customisable in look, feel and targeting. Sites built using Gamerise can be run on any domain; hosting and operations are managed by Nonoba, leaving the partner free to focus on content and monetization. Available features include a catalogue of more than 4,000 games; messaging, forums, chat and friend lists; and news feeds based on friend activity. Visual design and branding can be modified for both the site and any emails sent from it, while all phrases and texts presented to the user can be rewritten or translated into up to 26 different languages, including Chinese, Hebrew and Indonesian. Features are also available to enable site owners to control advertising.

More than 100 partners have signed up since the launch of Gamerise in March, including game portals in the Netherlands, China, Belgium, Portugal and Slovenia. By providing an easy-to-use platform for such developers, Gamerise is much like “Ning for gaming sites,” as Nonoba cofounder Oliver Pedersen explains. One to try out, partner with, or otherwise get involved in…?
Website: www.nonoba.com/developers

Hotel finder distills reviews from across the web

Good hotels can be hard to find, but not for lack of candid advice. The sheer number and dispersed nature of reviews on the web are what can make the process difficult, and that’s where Raveable comes in. Zeroing in more narrowly than the likes of TripAdvisor, Raveable aims to provide a comprehensive view of hotels across the United States by aggregating and summarizing millions of reviews from sites far and wide.

Drawing from more than 35 million reviews of some 55,000 US hotels, Raveable analyzes and condenses such opinions into rankings for hotels nationwide. The company begins by collecting basic information from the hotels themselves. It then gathers travel reviews from all over the internet, including well-known sites like TripAdvisor, Expedia and Travelocity as well as lesser-known contenders such as individual travel blogs. Taking into account factors including the quality of the originating site, the date of the review and the reputation of the original author, Raveable then creates colour-coded rankings for each hotel using a weighted combination of all the factors it considers. Room quality, service, value and the extent to which patrons would recommend a hotel all get individual rankings, while overall rankings compare the hotel with those in the same price range as well as all others in that city. Finally, going beyond numbers, Raveable’s patent-pending technology uses semantic analysis to analyze and distill reviewers’ comments about each hotel, summarizing the good and the bad about its rooms, location, service and overall. Free for users, Raveable earns revenue each time a visitor books a hotel through one of its booking partners.

Indeed, it’s the smart hotels that are turning transparency tyranny into transparency triumph by welcoming the spotlight when it shines on them and using it to grow, to improve, and to win new customers. Then there are the facilitators like Raveable, which stand to earn a pretty penny making it all happen.

Website: www.raveable.com