We recently acquired a Nabaztag - a WiFi enabled bunny rabbit from French firm Violet.
The rabbit is configured via a web site, and will then tell you the time, weather, news, stock prices and even read RSS feeds.
Whilst on the face of it it's little more than a toy, it does give some idea of what the future might hold in terms of ambient computing and the ambient Internet. And at only £80 it's a great way to start exploring the potential of the technology. And it has a nice simple REST based API, so within hours of getting it we already had it doing things that weren't on the box.
We'll be developing a few Nabaztag ideas over the coming weeks and months, and will post the best of them here. We think there must be some real potential with children, elderly and visually impaired users. In the mean time here is a video (1MB WMV) of Nabaztag reading the BBC TV schedule (our first API experiment).
Click here or on the image above to play the movie (1MB WMV)
If you have a Nabaztag you can send the schedule to your own rabbit from the Nabaztag BBCTVAPI application page.
You can hear our news items read out on your Nabaztag, if you're lucky enough to have one, by clicking on the button below:
If you want to send a message to Flexx, our Nabaztag bunny, just use the button below.
Buy your own Nabaztag from firebox.com
