Still waiting 25 minutes later in a chilly, damp fog, I regretted my decision.

If I could have frozen time at that “make or break” moment, I would have:

1. Pulled out my iPhone
2. Clicked my Nextbus bookmark and navigated through no less than 4 links to find the right stop and check the arrival time of the next bus (the routesy iphone app might be faster)
3. Convinced my 2 friends to run!

In reality, that would have taken at least 2 minutes and the bus would have been long gone. So…we needed an ambient computing technology that understood my intention to catch that bus. It should deliver the “run or don’t run” response in a split-second.  Complex stuff, but a reasonable guess could be made by these tidbits of information:

• I took public transport earlier in the day to the Bluegrass festival in Golden Gate Park
• I just finished dinner and at 10:30 PM, was likely heading home (in fact, I told that to my wife on the phone just minutes before)
• Neither of my 2 friends had a car
• We were walking towards a popular bus route

Not sure what this ambient technology might look like, but it probably involves my phone, some communication protocol with the incoming bus, and maybe some supplied context on my part.  Probably not through high effort keyboard input, but maybe a quick voice command like “taking N-Judah home”.

I’d hope for a response like “run now! Next bus won’t arrive for 30 minutes” or maybe an orb-like display color coded with green for “take your time” or red for “run now!”.

• booking restaurant reservations
• golf tee-times
• hotel rooms
• inviting friends to events
• checking weather conditions
• finding interesting places nearby

Our product is called Geohana, its name inspired by taking Hana, which means “family” in Hawaiian, for a geographic spin. A central vision for Geohana is to give people tools to communicate more effectively and act socially based on their location.

You can play with Geohana right here on this blog! Check out the Geohana widget with the map on the right side of this page.

In addition to adding relevant geographic content on your website, you can also earn revenue with Geohana. By embedding Geohana on your site (with minimal javascript!), BigTribe shares commissions with you whenever a user on your site makes a restaurant reservation or a golf tee-time. We call this Geographic affiliate marketing and you can read about it at the BigTribe website.

It is easy to add a Geohana widget to your blog or website. Follow this link to customize its functionality and the way it looks. You can personalize your widget to:

• Ask the user to enter an address
• Start off with a specific address
• Display a list of your favorite locations
• Choose the location based services made available to your readers (restaurant reservations, golf tee-times, hotel rooms, weather)

If you are technically inclined, Geohana comes with a full API with which you can closely integrate Geohana web services into your page. You can build store locators and display your own location based content (reviews, ads, etc) by catching Geohana Javascript events. Check out some examples in our demo section.