Geocology: Geography and Commerce

Getting Noticed

This was the week for getting noticed.  Not asked-out-on-a-date noticed or someone-came-up-and-talked-to-us noticed, nothing that serious.  Just the new kid in town, "Hey there's a new ginger-haired one over there with freckles" noticed.

Geohana Restaurants

A few weeks ago, we stuck our little toe in the Great Widget Waters, creating a Geohana Restaurants finder widget from our whiz-bang API and quietly submitted to WidgetBox. With no promotion, at this writing Geohana Restaurants is the third-highest ranked widget in WidgetBox (from 6000 widgets). Here's what WidgetBox staff members had to say:

This is one of the more useful widgets I've ever seen.  The functionality is really deep and well thought out. moses on Mar 8, 2007

This is a great mashup widget! Nicely done. I really like the use of the tag-aware feature as well. george on Feb 24, 2007

Well, thank you WidgetBox, you made our day!

National Science Foundation Grants

Astute watchers (do we have any watchers?) may have noticed we've received NSF grants.  You might not realize we'd be dead without NSF. Normally, tech startups assume they should put on their best make-up, wander over to Mount Olympus on Sand Hill Road, knock on some doors and see what cash gets dumped in their bucket.

But we needed alternate sources of capital, because we started in (take a deep breath) late 2001 (entrepreneurs now exhale reverently "oh no", and the rest of you, well just breathe).  You see, there was virtually no early-stage venture capital in 2001 and 2002, after the dot-com crash.  Dead early-stage startups littered the 2002 landscape, nothing rotting because no oxygen remained.  Only entrepreneurs and capitalists noticed, because the unlucky had to resurrect their resumes and the previously-blessed were taking one-year-long vacations.

I will make our NSF story short:  We saw the death of BigTribe looming in the rear-view mirror, and applied to every damn granting agency. And finally, after many NSF rejections, we got a "Small Business Innovative Research" grant from NSF. It was $100,000.  Not enough to sustain a real company, but enough to make the 3 remaining no-salary employees think we might have something worth funding.

And so, it is with a little pride that I tell you Guidewire noticed us the other day.  Not carry-our-books noticed or did-you-see-their-hot-product noticed, but offhandedly, of-course-you-knew-this noticed.

Some grant recipients are like Dan Greening of BigTribe ... and know how to take ideas to market. But most of these aspiring entrepreneurs are accomplished researchers and/or academics who have come up with compelling technology, but are just at the beginning stages of figuring out how they will turn their discoveries into businesses or commercial successes.

If you get a free moment, hand me a glass of old-vines zinfandel, and ask about how the founders of BigTribe 2.0 got their mojo back.

Our Quiet Corner

Small doses of attention make a big difference to quiet uber-nerds like us.  We don't have the self-promoter gene.  Our nature is to code quietly in the corner, thinking if we develop the coolest mash-up on the planet, someone will notice, then others will notice, and maybe we can finally attract the attention of that cutie in the opposite corner, surrounded by admirers.

If you think I'm highly social, you'd be right, but "social" is the means to the goal.  And I have no choice, it's my job as BigTribe CEO.  By nature, I'm content to read "Analyzing Prose" by Richard Lanham, poetry by Rilke or "Groovy in Action", without speaking to another person for weeks on end. Once in Sante Fe, 15 friends and I, from the Sante Fe Institute's Complex Systems Summer School, walked to a downtown coffee shop, grabbed some coffee, took over all the tables, and quietly read statistics textbooks.  A patron walked into to this holy confluence of mute academics and said, in hushed tones, "Wow."

At Red Herring's Venture Market West in 1995, I dutifully donned a suit, packed my PowerPoint slides, walked into the conference and saw crowds of rich, intimidating MBAs smiling and laughing.  I turned around and walked out.  I walked around the block, wondering if I should get a real job.  I reminded himself of the hard-working engineers depending on me, and walked back in, glad-handing everyone.

We just want to be loved.  God help us if we have to self-promote.  But thankfully, there are little glimmers that love has a chance.  A couple of people have noticed us!

Simplifying Geographic Life

Creating a startup and a product has lots of risk, but sometimes the results are worth the effort.  We're about to find out whether the substantial work we put into Geohana, our geographic affiliate marketing engine, has real value in the marketplace.  I invite you to visit our demo pages at BigTribe Beta Demo Pages to explore more deeply. You might also like to check out Aloha Campers, where you can find campgrounds, golf courses and traveler services. If you visit Alberts Realty and click on Listings Map, you can see homes for sale, and some services around those homes. 

Geohana has three stakeholder groups: vendors supply services around geography, publishers provide content, and consumers purchase and use the services. BigTribe wants to make each stakeholder happy. 

Vendors want to reach the broadest possible audience, to increase their revenue. Ideally they can reach consumers when they are ready to purchase or use their services. Click-and-mortar vendors have a strong interest in reaching consumers when they are about to visit an area. Consumers indicate that they want to visit an area by visiting a web site, looking at a map, or looking at a review.  They might be planning a vacation, looking for a nearby store, putting together a night on the town, considering a move, or thinking about a job.  Of course, if we can supplement their experience by offering a variety of vendor services in proximity of their destination, all the better.

Today, we offer multiple "verbs", including restaurant reservations, golf tee-time reservations, weather, invitations and others.  We have great plans for future offerings, and if you are a vendor we invite you to call us.  We "play well with others," investing our own talents to incorporate your services in our publisher offerings.

Publishers want to communicate better, and ultimately get paid for communicating well. When a visitor uses commissioned Geohana services (restaurant reservations and golf tee-times today), the publisher receives a commission from BigTribe. Geohana offers many useful services to publishers. Not only can their visitors perform proximity search to find nearby vendors, but publishers can also "mash up" their own reviews, third-party content, maps and images to make for a rich visitor experience.

One great thing about Geohana's publisher interface is its simplicity.  With a few lines of Javascript, a publisher can add enormously rich proximity search and geocoding capabilities to the simplest of web site: even static HTML and blog sites.  Geohana also has a lot of flexibility.  Our biggest challenge at BigTribe is balancing flexibility with simplicity, but we think we balance on that tightrope pretty well.

Consumers want to get stuff done on the web, with a minimum of hassle.

Having to enter the same starting address in different web sites to plan activities is a hassle.  Geohana-enabled sites eliminate that hassle.  You can visit a restaurant review blog, type a starting address, and make a restaurant reservation. You can then visit another Geohana web site, and it remembers your previous starting address: just click on "Menu", then click on the top item in the list. Your past history is not shared with a publisher unless you select it on their site.

Having to remember details of an upcoming event is a hassle. Geohana has a built-in "invite" verb, letting you share the details of your plans with your friends. You can even publish recently selected locations and services on your own personal "Geohana page", and share it with your friends.

We hope you like Geohana. We've put a lot of loving care into it.