russell's rabbit

Which of us hasn't realised that the missing link in their life is a wifi-enabled rabbit? Well, my life is now complete. This rabbit arrived a few weeks ago and I've been trying to get it to do various things on and off since then. It's French technology so it's, well, quirky. I love it but I suspect Nabaztag might meet with the same global success as Minitel.

So far I've got it to:

1. Tell me the time every hour (well, about 8 minutes after the hour, it's French)
2. Tell me when I've got an email
3. Flash a bit, make some funny noises
4. Read messages out that I type into my computer. Sometimes startling Anne when it reads them out after I've left for work

But I've completely failed to get it to read RSS feeds like it's supposed to. Or do Tai Chi. But it's got something of the future about it. I'm going to persevere with it, because

1. It's important to support and explore technological artefacts that aren't products of Japan or California. Its Frenchness is part of its charm, its provenance, its quirks are part of the point.

2. Information, communication has to get out of computers and into objects if it's going to be any use. Ambient devices aren't getting to Europe quick enough for me to play with, so the rabbit it is.

If you're a fellow rabbit owner send me a message - the 'pseudo' (which seems to be the French equivalent of username, perfect) is archibaldleach. And his email address is archibald at russelldavies.com

Comments

[Alex]

We can't get ours setup through the corporate environment. Sad really.

I was looking forward to my first (and last?) experience with cutting edge French technology.

Maybe I'll take it home and set it up.

[Amanda]

Have you got it's ears to wiggle yet? All we've gotten it to do is to sigh and have it's belly blink at us. As Alex says, the corporate environment is limiting the bunny's magic. And I want some technological, ambient magic here! Especially from something that looks like a bunny...sigh!

[russell]

I think maybe there's an analogy here about corporate environments - are they places where you can really wiggle your ears?

[ant]

I have been experimenting with one of these for a while.

plusses:
+ it's SOOO cute.
+ it's odd and french

minuses:
- i bought it under the assumption that the open source community of cool geeks that got these rabbits would be producing tons of useful plug ins and widgets for it, but this hasn't happened. (yet)

- as you describe, even keen tech savvy people like us can't actually get it fulfil even a tenth of it's potential

I reckon the company that make this rabbit should release everything open source, encourage people to hack the rabbit, and forget about revenue from their walled garden rabbit services. Do things like give free rabbits to prolific tech labs, nerds at MIT and set nabaztag coding challenges.

It would increase the quality of product by leaps and bounds, and the PR generated by people hacking the rabbit to do things that the parent company never dreamed of would be phenomenal. I think.

Like the lego mindstorms case study we keep reading about.

As it stands, though, I can't recommend the rabbit to anyone. Which is a shame as I like it a lot.