Aggregating a Revolution (Updated)

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

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

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™

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

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Mirascape.com ALPHA Release is Now Live (Android)

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

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Mirascape™ is coming soon...

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.

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