Curious Raven

Introducing Sydney!

Robert Rice — Wed, 30 Nov 2011 03:24:59 +0000

We recently adopted Sydney, a black lab mix, from a rescue (I’ll edit in details later). She was found nearly starved to death late at night by a truck driver near a hog farm here in North Carolina. He nursed her back to health (with a lot of work from the vet). She is still extremely timid around people she doesn’t know (almost fearful of adult men), but she has warmed up to us considerably. We had some problems getting her to eat and drink from her food bowls (she was afraid of them), but she is doing fine now.

Sydney is less than a year old, and very gangly (she has long legs). One of the funny things about her is how insanely bendy she is. She can curl into a tiny ball (and usually sleeps this way), or twist her head around like an owl. She also has a funny habit of showing her perfect little front teeth when we get home from being out. It looks like she is trying to smile at us. Holly has been able to get her to do it on command a few times when she is really amped up about something.

Sydney is also a very sneaky thief. One minute she is next to you acting all innocent, and the next second she has a sock or a shoe in her mouth from another room, and you are wondering when and how the hell she managed to teleport around. She hides acorns and other small things in her mouth…I’ve watched her sneak something, pretend like she doesn’t have anything at all in her mouth, and chill out for ten minutes until she thinks you aren’t watching, at which point she spits it out and then starts nibbling on it.

She also likes to move things around. She will rearrange her toys in the living room, relocating them all from one place to another. I came home one afternoon and she had dragged our pillows from the bed in one room into the guest bedroom (where we had the doggie bed at), along with several shoes, miscellaneous pieces of clothes she pulled out of the laundry, and one of the folded blankets on a chair. It was like she decided to build a little fort or a nest.

She is pretty goofy, but very sweet. Welcome to your new home Sydney.

Goodbye Phoebe (2000-2011)

Robert Rice — Wed, 30 Nov 2011 01:27:01 +0000

Barely a few weeks after losing our cat Sicily, we lost our “baby” Phoebe, an amazing black lab on July 15th. I’ve been putting off writing this for months now, and I really need to get through it. I’m not sure I’ll do her justice in the first post here, so I’ll probably go back later and edit it.

Like Sicily, Phoebe suffered a rapid onslaught of cancer. We noticed a number of small hard lumps going in almost a straight line down her back, and initially attributed them to a skin reaction from changing the stuff we used for anti-flea/tick. But they quickly became larger and harder, and then she simply stopped eating. We tried everything to get her to eat (and I mean everything you can think of). The vet wasn’t sure what the problem was, but was concerned about the lumps, so we tried some different meds and food, and he took a biopsy of one of the lumps.

Goodbye Sicily Cat (1998?-2011)

Robert Rice — Sun, 05 Jun 2011 06:47:41 +0000

I lost my calico cat, Sicily, to lung cancer tonight.

I am a dog person, and most of my friends will tell you that I brag about my black lab, Phoebe, all the time. My wife and I love that dog like a child. Some of you will understand this and know what I mean.

We don’t talk a lot about our cat Sicily though. Mostly because, I guess, she has been such a quiet fixture in our lives for almost thirteen years. She was a gorgeous calico cat, if a little overweight, very sweet, affectionate, and pretty damned cuddly. She like lazing around the house laying flat on her back, or curled up on a pile of laundry. I loved Sicily as much as I love Phoebe, but our relationship was different. She was always in the background, napping in a corner, or chasing imaginary prey through the house with her tail fluffed out like it was an afterburner propelling her at light speeds.

Sicily liked to

Empire Avenue

Robert Rice — Sun, 22 May 2011 08:22:20 +0000

Ok, this is pretty cool. Check out Empire Avenue and sign up. Then buy shares in me : )

Think of this like a stock market for people. This is especially cool if you are active in social media. You can link your profiles on twitter, linkedin, flickr, youtube, and facebook.

Aggregating a Revolution (Updated)

Robert Rice — Fri, 04 Feb 2011 07:02:27 +0000

Update: Lead Story on NBC17.com: “Raleigh-Based Website Drawing Attention To Social Media From Egypt” The day after we posted the blog post below on the Mirascape Dev Blog, we picked up attention from local NBC17 and they sent over a journalist this morning to do a story. We weren’t expecting it to be the 7p lead!

Aggregating a Revolution

(Reposted from Mirascape Dev Blog)

How do you aggregate a revolution? How do you give voice to protesters that are being silenced? How do you find out the real story from the people experiencing it, instead of the quick news bits that show up on TV (if at all)? How do you know where to look? If you take a picture or video of something and upload it to flickr, facebook, or youtube, how do you get exposure? Who sees it beyond your friends and the occasional random browser?

You get it Earthmarked.

Like this: Cairo Al Tahrir Square

Let me explain… We have been

Earthmarked! CIA, White House, Rock & Roll Hall of Fame...

Robert Rice — Fri, 17 Dec 2010 04:15:41 +0000

Reposted from dev blog for Mirascape.com:

So, we have been running tests on various features and functionality for Mirascape and Earthmarks, as well as getting some good user feedback on the android app (lots of UI tweaks/fixes are coming soon). We created a few extra Earthmarks of our own earlier this evening as part of a test of the feed aggregation sub-system, and we got some interesting results. Click the titles to see the web version of the Earthmarks at mirascape.com, and then click the feed tab (you should register and create an account while you are at it).

Central Intelligence Agency

Only one tweet within range (from an “Anti Terrorism Equipment Field Engineer”) and no activity from other feed sources. No mentions of WikiLeaks or uploaded photos of Julian Assange. I expected more here…maybe some photos of Russian Spy Anna Chapman

White House West Wing

This one has some really interesting things going on…the twitter feed is picking up stuff from somewhere nearby, and in several languages, and there are some photos from the flickr feed of some protestors (free Julian Assange!), some guy chaining himself to the fence with a bike lock, and some other individual getting arrested (Ellsberg?). Of course, by the time you read this, some entries may no longer be listed in the feed, as they are pushed out by more recent activity. Still interesting to keep an eye on though.

I’m really looking forward to all of our DC friends making a trip over to the White House, taking a bunch of cool photos and uploading them to this Earthmark. I’m also looking forward to seeing what kind of tweets start showing up from the White House Press Corps. It’s gonna be pure comedy gold.

The Rock and Roll Hall of Fame

Lots and lots of activity here. Very happening place, obviously. If you are going to be here soon, make sure you upload some photos directly to the Earthmark (you need our android app)

NASCAR Hall of Fame

Zoom zoom baby. Another popular place with a lot of activity showing up in the feed. Who doesn’t love NASCAR?

Yahoo HQ

Unexpected. Lots of twitter activity in the feed from a handful of people, one of which seems to be a bot repeating a playlist for live Haitian music. Doesn’t seem like a lot of people at Yahoo are doing much, and I haven’t seen a peep about the layoffs.

We will probably be manually creating a few other interesting Earthmarks in the near future (feel free to suggest something), but we generally aren’t going to do this very often. That is YOUR job. Grab out app, get out in the wild, take some photos, and upload them to nearby points of interest and existing Earthmarks.

Don’t forget, that if you are on-site, you can rate things other people submit up and down, influencing the submissions and ultimately affecting the overall reputation of the creator (how cool is that?)

Or, you can sit at home, and poke around the mirascape.com website and watch the site come alive and grow in the near future. I know I keep saying this, but we have a lot of really cool stuff planned and we are just getting started, one step at a time.

Maybe someone out there can go and Earthmark a bunch of VC offices in New York and in the Bay Area, or drop one on top of ReadWriteWeb HQ and TechCrunch HQ. Then again, there are a lot of Sorority Houses out there that are just begging for an Earthmark haha. It is going to be exciting when small businesses start creating Earthmarks and loading them with cool stuff about their shops and products.

One of the guys on our team is heading to Thailand over the holidays, and should be creating a bunch of Earthmarks there with fantastic pictures. Create an account and friend him if you want to keep up.

Robert Rice

@robertrice

Introducing Earthmarks™

Robert Rice — Sun, 05 Dec 2010 20:18:42 +0000

Introducing Earthmarks™

We just launched the alpha release of Mirascape™ for Android and we are very excited about it and what is coming soon in future releases. Probably the most important feature for this release is the Earthmark™ (patent-pending!), which is one of the core foundations of the whole platform as we lay the groundwork for augmented reality and connecting people, places, and things.

So, what exactly are Earthmarks™, and why should you care?

One definition of an Earthmark™ is:

“a point of interest (such as a place on a map) that has socially aggregated and curated media-rich content”

Instead of just “checking-in” to a location, trying to earn cute badges, telling everyone on the Internet where you are, or linking photos to a map like you would do in any number of other apps on the market, Earthmarks™ are a completely different way of thinking about location-based services and connecting with other people.

Without getting into what we are planning for Earthmarks™ in the future, I’ll focus on what you can do with them now.

When you launch the Mirascape™ application, you are presented with a dashboard with a few options. The one you are interested in now is the Scout browser icon in the upper left. When you click that, you are presented with a list of nearby Earthmarks™ and points of interest. When you select one of the Earthmarks™, it will open up and

Mirascape.com ALPHA Release is Now Live (Android)

Robert Rice — Sat, 04 Dec 2010 18:47:46 +0000

This is a repost from our Mirascape Dev Blog:

Mirascape(tm)

The App for Everywhere.

Social, Local, Mobile, Virtual.

Yay! After an amazing amount of work, blood, sweat, and tears from a small and dedicated team, we are happy to announce the release of the ALPHA version of Mirascape™. Android only, sorry iPhone guys.

From the website:

Mirascape™ is the first truly social mobile augmented reality platform and is designed to connect people, places, and things. Our ALPHA focuses on social and location-based features, proprietary Earthmarks™, enhanced QR codes, location-based advertising, and branded promotions through the campaign system. We will be rolling out a number of other cool features in the first quarter of 2011, including 3D augmented reality. Our goal with the current release is to launch the basic framework that everything will be built on, and introduce users to the Mirascape™. We hope you will enjoy what we have created, and we appreciate your feedback, comments, and ideas. Marketing and Ad agencies are welcome to contact us to learn about how Mirascape™ can provide engaging experiences, detailed metrics and analytics, and validated ROI through branded promotions, sponsorships, and campaigns.

The launch is

JFK 5AM

Robert Rice — Sun, 10 Oct 2010 09:00:42 +0000

I’m sitting by Gate 15 at JFK (Jet Blue), by myself in a corner charging up the laptop. I’m struck by how surreal things feel right now. There are maybe two other people (that I can see) here, aside from six airport staff (four of which are struggling with a malfunctioning door alarm. I don’t actually hear the alarm, as I’m wearing a badass pair of Skullcandy Titan earbuds. I made the mistake of taking them out a few minutes ago, and OMG that alarm is piercing. That means the noise cancelling on these $39.99 headphones is pretty damn awesome. I recommend!

Anyway, back to surreal in JFK. I’m listening to some decent tunes…already gone through some Cloud Cult, Jordin Sparks, Cake, Teddybears, Daft Punk, Bomb the Bass, Robyn, La Roux, Hybrid, Gipsy Kings, and Utah Saints (hey, I like variety). I feel a little disjointed, kind of like I’m not really here, or I am only partially here. Time is passing pretty slowly, but also pretty fast. This isn’t the first time I’ve effectively stayed at an airport all night, but it is nowhere as bad as it could be (or has been in the past).

I’m feeling pretty contemplative…thinking back over the panel I was on at Comic Con NYC with Alex Macris and Greg Costikyan titled “I’m From the Future and I

Mirascape™ is coming soon...

Robert Rice — Tue, 19 Jan 2010 08:09:28 +0000

What is the Mirascape™? When is it going to be released? What does it do? How do you get involved?

Many of you have been wondering what exactly we have been working on at Neogence Enterprises and when we are going to launch something. We are planning on a full global launch in October, but we are going to release an open beta around June or July. Even more fun, we are going to release a very early alpha version in a few months. We have an aggressive plan for regular updates and iterations from alpha to full launch, and we want to involve the community. Grow with us.

Head on over to twitter and follow @mirascape if you want to be on the list for early access and some early adopter specials. We aren’t planning on advertising this early alpha access beyond my blog here and a little bit of twitter. I’ll be interested in seeing how many people follow @mirascape (I am fascinated by social networks and the organics of viral word of mouth). We will start doing some announcements and updates on that twitter account once things are ready to open up access. Don’t expect frequent updates though, we are neck deep in development right now, and that has priority.

So, what is the Mirascape™?

Mira: Look! (Spanish), Wonderful or Astonishing (Latin), World (Russian), and Prosperous (Hindi).

The Mirascape™ is the world’s first global augmented reality network, platform, and community. Mirascape™ is about connecting people, places, and things in a way never done before. It is about the convergence of social, local, mobile, and virtual. It is about empowering you, the user, to create and interact with media and the world around you in new ways. It is about engagement and experience.