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Nabaztag the WiFi Bunny
carre4 writes "A French company named Violet, the smart object company, has come out with Nabaztag, a 23 cm tall WiFi-enabled bunny that tells you about the weather, traffic jams, new emails through flashing lights and moving its ears. They have a Flash demo with Nabaztag's different messages. The company also makes 'La lampe Dal', a lamp that changes colors based on the weather and 'Le Pad Osmooze', a USB device that releases an aroma when you receive an email from a loved one."
I have one at home. And well, let's say i don't use it for email. Again, i suspect that since you focus on the email part you haven't really looked at the flash animation which while midly annoying, shows some very nice potential. :) There are some nice possibilities with this. I can already imagine adding a service for the open source game i am developping, like help we are being attacked on the bunny, if you have one.
While I appreciate the services it can give (weather, traffic, time, stock, messaging through songs, etc......), i am far more excited by the API they plan to make available at some point. So far, they have published a small API not that great, but which allow you to do something with your bunny.
As soon as i can program my bunny, i will appreciate it even more
On their website they are also asking for new ideas. So, instead of talking about an email notified, go watch the animation and try to use your imagination on how you could program that thing.
Nabaztag = Rabbit in Armenian
Nabaztag means rabbit in Armenian
It doesn't, it sounds stupid and retarded. At least in english it reminds you of booze
"The way we can tell it's C# instead of Haskell is because it's nine lines instead of two." -- wadler
A designer from work was beta testing one this summer. I had to troubleshoot the thing because it takes for granted that your wireless network is wide open (but it isn't too bad: the bunny has his MAC address stuck to his rear end).
I didn't have much fun with email and weather notification, but sending audio clips to the thing had its moments. They have a fast selection of stuff on the site, and also pre-recordered female voices with a super cutsy accent saying super custy stuff about love, relationships, etc, it seems like the French interpretation of what Japanese schoolgirls find "kawaï".
What really got on my nerve is that under the oozing fabricated cuteness, they charge you for every audio clip you send to the bunny. You get 10 or 15 free ones to start off with, but after that you have to pay. Basically, all the bunny does is poll a server and download highly compressed audio clips and other data, and play and display them. Paying for simply using the damn thing seems like a ripoff to me (you have to buy the object first). So the mix of pseudo cuteness and greedy commercial behaviour didn't work for me.
I was on the verge of setting up a proxy to analyse the traffic, and possibly create a free gateway as a webservice (blabla), but I guess they probably encrypt the traffic, and it wasn't worth the effort.
In one word : yawn. Then again, I'm certainly not their target.