Violet is the company behind the nabaztag, the funny abstract rabbit that reacts to electronic impulses by blinking, talking and moving. Today at PICNIC the co-founder and chairman of Violet, Rafi Haladjian, talked about how the nabaztag was their first effort at connecting, well, everything. One of his slides simply showed:
“Goal: connect everything
step 1: connect rabbits
step 2: connect everything else”
His only comment for that slide was “We got step 1 covered and now it is time for step two” to much amusement of the audience.
Turns out Haladjian wasn’t joking. Within a few weeks Violet will start offering the Mir:ror. A simple device you can hook up to your computer via USB with a built-in RFID reader. It will be able to read everything you already own which contains an RFID chip but also comes with a bunch of ‘ztamps’.
These stamp-like pieces of adhesive plastic will also contain RFID chips and you will be able to tag the “7995 other items in your house that don’t know how to communicate, yet”. Apparently we all own about 8000 items of which only 5 know how to talk to the rest of the world. Violet’s goal is to make them all smart and connected.
This means you will be able to tag your umbrella and then hold it up to the mir:ror which will automatically launch your favorite weather report sites. Hold up your car keys to the mir:ror and it will give you traffic conditions and your calendar.
The possibilities for using the mir:ror and Ztamps are endless and really challenge everyone’s creativity.
What would YOU use Ztamps for?
I’d place one above the garbage can, and then let the app make a shopping list of everything i throw in. Alltough it would cost me a lot of Ztamps…
I’ll put one a stamp at the bottom of my coffee mug, then place the mug on the mirror to have it open all of my morning-reading blogs and news sites
I’ll put a stamp on each of my business cards, so that it can open my site for people with the mirror (ok, I’ll wait until everyone has a mirror to do this). :)
This is really cool, but why not just have stickers that have a drawing on it and a quick scanner that can read them? It’d be cheaper no? Something like what Google is trying to do (I forget the link)
I would add one to every suit I own and let it post my suit to a calendar so I know which suit I wore and when. Then, if I have a meeting at a company I can decide to wear a suit I never wore before. Or always wear the same suit to confuse them. ;-)
Could be handy for less tech users, like your grandmother or perhaps kids (on a second thought kids are actually better with using computers then most of us)
Just imagine you handle your granny an envelope and you say, just put it here and you can read your email ;) and that is a key you can use to see you bank account
Sounds like exactly the talk and the slides from this year’s LIFT Conference in Geneva (February 2008).
Also, tikitag (from Belgium), a subsidiary of Alcatel-Lucent, is about to internationally launch as well with much of the same proposition: http://tikitag.com