"If you can connect a rabbit, you can connect anything"
February 7, 2008 - 16:38 — Daniel Demel
The first afternoon session on thursday is about "Stories" and is starts with a talk from Rafi Haladjia, founder of french company Violet, which produces the little white wi-fi rabbit Nabaztag.
After working several years bringing real world things to the screen, he founded Violet in 2003, and now wonders how to make the bridge from the Flinstones to the Jetsons to fulfill the dream of "calm-computing". Rafi talks about the bandwidth of attention as a critical factor of receiving information and about Moore's Law and the natural evolution.
Violet's strategy is to make affordable products, products that are fun, usefull, which give new images to technology, empower the user and open it to the community which can help to generate killer apps.
But why a rabbit?
"If you can connect a rabbit, you can connect anything"
Rafi then gives a short description of what the Nabaztag does: it gives information through light, speaks, plays music, reads, moves and sniffs objects through RFID. This functions are used tho give reports, read rss feeds...
The second stage of Violet started last christmas with Gallimard Jeunesse, when they launched a RFID-enabled children's book which could be read by the Nabaztag. In this way books could still remain in the old form but be enabled to connect to digital media and get enhanced by this.
The next product they are going to launch is Ztamps. This is going to be a widespread of RFID tags, so people can stick them to every objects and create new applications.
To boil down what Violet wants to do: connecting everything to everything.
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Comments
Nabaztag: a failure? ...and
Nabaztag: a failure?
...and by the way, at least 4 people pointed out Nabaztag as a UbiComp technology failure in the yesterday's LIFT workshop on UbiComp!!!
I own one and beyond first impression I believe that it is a useless object as long it is not (really) open and easily configurable. After one year I'm still waiting for the RFID stickers... Support is bad and the web site (Terrier) sucks (slow, boring, unusable, etc.).
The social networking capabilities are rather basic and it does not integrate with any other social network... Most interesting features are not free. Basically is an expensive useless toy!
The only good thing is the "cuteness" of the object that you might like to see on the bookshelf and have the feeling of being somehow "connected"...
Unfortunately, there are no other companies that sell similar product and one has to stick with the rabbit... Hope things will evolve and make my funny rabbit more useful.
Vincenzo
But now that we can make our
But now that we can make our rabbit read books to our kids, we as adults will have plenty of time to develop meaningful applications of connected things for a bright jetsonlike future ;-)
If you want to hack one the
If you want to hack one the way you like to (with a lovely snaky language) there is the Tux Droid (http://www.tuxisalive.com/). But this one is less cute and more noisy unfortunately.