Cliq takes social data and makes it social knowledge, according to Alex Khorram. The new website, now in beta stage, aggregates all your Facebook, Foursquare, LinkedIn and Twitter friends' and friends of friends' recommendations to deliver a whole new kind of information about local business, products and brands.
"I bought a house in January. It became important for me to have a trusted source to touch base with prior to making a decision about a contractor," says Khorram, CEO of Cliq. After looking at Angie's List and ServiceMagic, Khorram sat down to build a product to create a reliable system for peer recommendations. "Facebook is a great white pages, but they've done a subpar job in terms of the yellow pages," says Khorram.
Cliq, already written up in
Mashable, is based in Center City with seven employees, and is now seeking at least three engineers to join the team. At the moment, Cliq is public with restaurants only. A search for, say, Tony's Baltimore Grill in Atlantic City, NJ tells me that six friends have liked or commented on the old time establishment, that there are over 6,000 check-ins and likes across social networks, and Cliq also displays buzz on the joint culled from Facebook, Foursquare and Twitter comments.
In Cliq world, each listing is customized to each human. Cliq scans millions of social network pages and delivers results directly from direct and secondary contacts. Any further out and results are too diluted, according to Khorram.
Why not Google search results? "They're a web engine with crawlers. Now, if you type in plumber in Philadelphia, you'll get a certain result, and most of it is anonymous stuff. We've already built a database of several million businesses. Our goal is to index every business in the world that has a social presence."
Khorram, who reports that Cliq is funded by angel investors for an undisclosed sum, expects to go global, with pages in Mandarin, Farsi and Hindu. As far as monetization, "We see Cliq as the last place you'll check prior to making a purchase decision. That gives us great leeway and we can work with partners like Expedia or Hotels.com. Finally, the internet meets word of mouth."
Source: Alex Khorram, Cliq
Writer: Sue Spolan