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.
