Written on February 7, 2008 – 4:19 pm
Ernst-Jan Pfauth, editor in chief
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You probably already heard of Nabaztag, the smart Wifi-enabled rabbit with its famous moving ears. Its Facebook app was a real hype, and thousands of users fell for the rabbit’s charms. While most people might see this rabbit just as a funny gadget, its inventor Rafi Haladjian told during LIFT08 that there’s a lot more to it.
Haladjian is founder of several Minitel start-ups and Internet providers in France. His latest venture Violet is the company behind Nabaztag. One day, he was sitting behind his desk, thinking about how he could promote his Wifi services. His eye fell on a rabbit and he had his eureka moment. “With creating Nabaztag, we wanted to make a statement”, Haladjian said, “If you can connect a rabbit, you can connect anything.” Just imagine we made a Wifi-enabled frisk. People would have said, ok, so you can connect frisks now. Yet by connecting something absurd as a rabbit, people think: you can even connect rabbits now”.
After explaining his choice for a Wifi rabbit, Haladjian told about the functions the electronic animal has. I would like to highlight one, namely the speech function. Nabaztag for example updates you on the statuses of your Facebook friends. “Nabaztag tells you about things that are good to know, yet now worth the effort of looking up. The typical Web 2.0 info”.
Nabaztag tells you about things that are good to know, yet now worth the effort of looking up
It’s a great idea. By taking Web 2.0 data -such as Last.fm shouts - off the screen with an Ambient Information Device like Nabaztag, they become more accessible for people who are now only interested in content that IS worth the effort looking it up. Haladjian is also using it as a filter for his RSS reader: “Nabaztag is reading the RSS headlines out loud. I look up the ones that sound interesting.”
We’ve learned yet another lesson at LIFT08: next to the fun-factor, gadgets like Nabaztag also have the potential to change the way we use the web.
Written on January 30, 2008 – 1:15 pm
Ernst-Jan Pfauth, editor in chief
Every week we publish an interview with a start-up. We ask five questions, hoping the answers will give you inspiration and new views. Well, actually six questions, since we also ask the start-up to who he or she is passing the mic to.
This week we’re interviewing Charles Nouÿrit, founder and CEO of French start-up MyID.is. Since Matt Colebourne from CoComment asked us to do so.
MyID.is aims to certify your digital identity and to allow you to claim all your websites, blogs and on-line profiles. So that you can manage your on-line reputation. They we’ll be going in private alpha pretty soon.
How did you come up with the idea of MyID.is?
“Well, I was at a family dinner with my parents and sister. While we were eating, my father asked me what would be hot in 2008. I told him video, microblogging, social networks and since it was at the time that Kathy Sierra had her death threats problem, I came out with Digital ID Certification. As a matter of fact any attempt to certify digital identies so far was very complicated and couldn’t be deployed on a larger scale. So the idea just popped-out like that. I stayed at the dinner for another 30 minutes, then I left in a rush to put my idea on paper.
After 15 days of checking the validity of the certification process with two friends that became my partners in this new venture, I came out naked on my blog on April, 1st announcing what I was willing to do. I was amazingly surprised by the response of the French community that started talking about it everywhere, so it became imperative to create the company and start developing the platform. After eight months of development and wasting four other months with UK banks, we’re almost ready to launch the private alpha version in a few weeks.” (more…)
Written on January 28, 2008 – 2:15 pm
Boris Veldhuijzen van Zanten,
Jean-Noël Jeanneney, the president of the National Library of France, is French. And it must be noted that the French are, well, different when it comes to culture and language. So it shouldn’t come as a surprise that Jeanneney has written a book about Google’s potential to misrepresent, or even damage, the world’s cultural heritage. Jeanneney argues that Google’s unsystematic digitization of books from a few partner libraries and its reliance on works written mostly in English constitute acts of selection that can only extend the dominance of American culture abroad.
He is concerned about Google’s role in the world and fears that Europes identity and culture is under attack by the English oriented focus of Google. He also challenges Google’s assertion that its venture offers a source of universal knowledge. Jeanneney finds such a claim spurious and utopian. I think it is a bit ambitious to call your own venture ‘a source of universal knowledge’ and a little ambition never killed anyone is better than no ambition at all.
Jeanneney pleas for the European community to create their own search engine to counter Google’s which is I don’t have much faith in. There have been several attempts to start competing search engines. In fact, not a day goes by without the launch of another ‘Google Killer’. In reality people haven’t been very interested in local search engines.
We attended the launch of Accoona, a very ambitious project to build THE European Search Engine, in Paris last year. Accoona has lots of cash ($100 million in funding!) and is headed by Eckhard Pfeiffer who is the former CEO of Compaq Computers. Among the guest were Clinton (via Live video feed) and Kasparov, a whole bunch of journalists and enough champagne to get us all drunk, twice.
The service was launched as THE European answer to Google with local version in every county in Europe. I don’t remember much of the party but I do know it was the last time I ever heard of Accoona. So much for Europe’s Search Engine.
Either way, I suggest you read ‘Google and the Myth of Universal Knowledge‘ and get a fresh look at Google and its claims to become the source of universal knowledge and this excellent and more in-depth review of the book.
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