Benjamin Ellis on the Web

Ah… the Nabaztag Rabbit. I’d forgotten how badly I needed one of these until I saw a post on Girly Geekdom that reminded me about them. The Nabaztag (Armenia for rabbit apparently) is a cute looking WiFi enabled smart device, which has recently been updated with lots of new capabilities. It can indicate the status of pretty much anything by moving or wiggling its ears. It can also read (speech to text) and listen (speech to text). It has a flashing tummy as well. What more could you want? Oh, ok. It has an RFID now reader too… Shame the website is such a slush of flash, I would love to just get a speck sheet!

We will see a lot more intelligent devices as the underlying technology gets cheaper and more compact - increasingly these kind of devices can be build with a single chip. It is a much faster way of checking your email that firing up your PC to find nothing is there, apart from the usual SPAM of course!

I’ve been a long-time fan of the Quiet PC folks, from the days when they were based down the road. However, I’m in a bad mood with them now, as they just emailed me details of the Zalman 2D/3D monitors. You need the appropriate 3D glass and nVidia card (and not Windows Vista as the drivers are XP only right now). It is almost enough to make me fire up the old PC instead of the Mac, almost.

Two things that save me hours when I go to London:

• The Transport for London web site - brilliant design and v.useful.
• The National Rail site - design not so good, but it functions.

Between the two I can usually work out which train to get into London, and when.

I first found out about BugLabs via a post on Scoble’s blog. They have a fantastic uber-gadget, which is essentially a submicrocomputer base with USB ports, ethernet and so on, running Linux, into which you can plug various modules. There are about 80 gadgets on their roadmap such as screens, cameras, motion sensors and the like.

You take the base system, then snap on the compentents you need, creating your own unique gadget in real-time. If my eldest son sees this thing, I am in big trouble, he’ll want a dozen and would have ideas for a hundred more modules! There is an SDK to develop apps and BugLabs are driving the growth of a development community around it. The APIs and connections are open, you can download the specs from their site, so anyone can create modules and applications for it.

If you want to see more, here are a set of videos of Scoble interviewing BugLabs CEO and the marketing guy (is than a new industry job title?)

• Video one, introduction.
• Video two, final shipping plastic.
• Video three, open hardware.

I can see how you could end up with a few hundred of these around the house doing everything from security to environmental monitoring.  Their viral videos and blog are quite cool too!