Quick note about Nabaztag, launched in 2005. I found some figures that might be of interest: 50,000 rabbits sold as of June 2006 (Source: Libération) 135,000 rabbits sold as of May 2007 (Source: Le Monde) It's a pity the figures are only for France, but it gives an interesting picture of how this t...
Urban hacking
Exposing the secret city: Urban exploration as ‘space hacking’ is an intriguing deck of slides by Martin Dodge. It's about urban exploration of "secret spaces, abandoned buildings, and other obscure, overlooked, underused, forgotten, unsafe, and disconnected built structures". Dodge, a geographer, ...
Feel the ground
Walking in Geneva this morning, I walked up some stairs near the Rhône river on which there is a message on each steps. One of them says "Depuis quand n'avez vous pas pris contact avec le sol?" ("since when haven't you feel the ground?"). This made me think our behavior towards the ground is very n...
Intriguing spam
Spam received 5 minutes ago: "You're just too ignorant to see the hundreds of explanations for why it's not that simple." This is a nice quote, maybe the remark is true given the complexity of the problems to solve? ...
Robotic lamp
Via Fabien, AUR: a Robotic Desk Lamp by Guy Hoffman (MIT Medialab Robotic life group): "AUR is a robotic desk lamp, a collaborative lighting assistant. It serves as a non-anthropomorphic robotic platform as part of my Ph.D thesis on human-robot fluency and nonverbal behavior. The lamp's design was ...
Why studying ubicomp applications?
What to expect from studies about ubiquitous computing applications is a topic I dealt with the other day in my presentation. Reading "Control, Deception, and Communication: Evaluating the Deployment of a Location-Enhanced Messaging Service" by Iachello et al., 2005, I found this very interesting q...
Semi-inhabitants of the city
Spotted two days ago in Marseille, France: This looks like "On the Passage of a Few Persons Through a Rather Brief Unity of Time" to use Guy Debord's formulation. What happened to the other halves of their physical presence? What does that mean? ...
Social software about things
Not really concerned by the web2.0 frenziness, I still have a look at all these social software that pops up everyday. Recently, two of them caught my interest: Mythings and Wakoopa (what a name!). Let' start with the former: "MyThings is, an online service that helps keep track of belongings—when ...
My talk at the seminar in Marseille
Here (.pdf) are the slides I used this morning in my talk at the Villes2.0 seminar. This talk was about showing which kind of topics I find interesting in my work about the relationships between technologies and space/place (as a researcher in human-computer interaction). Roughly speaking it's: un...
Seminar Villes2.0 in Marseille
Today was in Marseille (France) for a multi-disciplinary seminar about "urban research" and IT that gathered social scientists, companies (transportation systems) and managers form the public sector (city council, region, the "State", funding bodies) led by french think tank FING. Discussions were ...