Urbien is New York city as an online world. Everything is real in it, buildings, events, places, businesses and inhabitants, yet you can buy and sell any part of the city. Game and reality, gossip and opportunity were never merged like this before. Once upon a time the city was split into online and offline. This age is coming to pass. Unification is looming. Enter Urbien, the cyreal city.

*** Facebook merge ***

Urbien joined its database to the Facebook Graph. All city places and events are Open Graph objects, and user activity at those places shows up on the Facebook Timeline. Urbien takes city data and makes them open for editing, augmenting and interlinking by any user with enough Urbien karma points (reputation). Interacting with real life city objects on Facebook at such a scale has no known precedent.

*** Residents ***

Residents in Urbien can participate in building communities in their neighborhoods. Neighbors ask each other for favors, exchange tips (favorite plumber via ServiceMagic.com, a product on Amazon.com, a craft on Etsy.com) and help during the times of trouble. To become a resident you must claim your living space, e.g. an apartment at 300 Central Park West, like Billy Preston did, as seen in the Urbien video. Urbien will verify your residence, so that the girl next door can trust you to be a real person. If users purchase products by following links on your recommendations, the affiliate fees go the Urbien apartment owner. Yes, you get the glory and the rich, as always, gets richer. Wait, you can become rich too!

*** Micro entrepreneurship ***

Unleash your entrepreneurial spirit, start safe and small-scale and monetize your expertise and hobbies, without leaving your job. Urbien shows what is happening around places so that the entrepreneurs can connect the dots. A marketing professional can buy an Italian restaurant in the Village, gaining ownership to the restaurant's Urbien and Facebook pages. This allows him to negotiate coupon deals with the restaurant and organize on those pages the campaigns to lure more people to the deal, e.g. by inviting meetup groups and other live events. A lover of the city can buy monuments and market Sunday walking tours. A public safety enthusiast can buy and manage the bathrooms. A handyman can buy a piece of Home Depot and help you with replacing the faucet, cause last time you tried it, you ended up with an extra light fixture. A fashion lover can become a real estate tycoon by buying an apartment building and inviting residents to share their personal style and great finds, making money on the affiliate fees. A board game addict could start buying subway stations to set up as parts of city wide board games.

*** Employees ***

Users can join their company network as employees. They sign up with their company email or with their Facebook account and add the work email later. Employees of the company enjoy a secure enterprise social networking environment. Each employee gets a profile, a feed, a wall, an ability to add news, personal and company blogs, and have them reposted to personal or company Facebook and Twitter. They can act like micro-entrepreneurs and bring business for their companies in the playfulness and safety of the cyreal. They get perks in the form of personalized offers near the workplace, e.g. for business lunches. After work employees can engage in micro-entrepreneurial activities to build up their publicly-verifiable professional history to secure their places in a tough job market.

*** Apps foundry ***

Urbien is based on a powerful Web Database, which allows user activities to sprout on a trunk of city data. Apps grow naturally and iteratively as the data model evolves and urbiens participate in real-life activities. The Web Database also allows app developers to model new data as needed in a simple declarative format. Thus city data and commercial data is quickly validated, extended and enriched to act as true apps. In addition external third-party apps can access all Urbien data via one uniform Web API. The Web API grants full access to public data, and secure access to user-specific data (OAUTH2-compliant). Urbien.com generates a Web user interface specific to the device, desktop, tablets or smartphones.

Note 1. Users of the Urbien app use the Web, the Web on mobiles (smartphones and tablets), and the Email (for registration, notifications, as well as an email marketing component).

Note 2. You must register with your Facebook account to see the screenshots below the video on Urbien.com. They lead to the real pages from which screenshots were taken. Some things shown on screenshots will be missing as you have no privileges to view some data, e.g. parts of the user profile. Logins with additional priviliges can be provided upon request.

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