Commerical collaborations: Tools, Things and Toys, Rafi Haladjian of Violet

As promised yesterday, Gavin Edwards of LBi is doing a spot of LBiQ.net guest writing.

Here he is on Rafi Haladjian, creator of Nabaztag and - if you believe Gavin - a man who’s next venture (the Mir:ror) is a steal of something that Gav did at college…

Rafi stands here today touting a long and successful career in technology, starting in the 80’s when he helped develop France’s first ISP. All of this experience, as he tells it, led to just one question: “What’s next? What’s beyond using the internet to access networks?”

The answer he arrived at? It’s all about pervasive networks and smart objects - the ‘internet of things’.

Rafi is one of the brains behind Nabaztag, the friendly internet Rabbit and he sells it harder than Watership Down sold Art Garfunkel. He didn’t just engage the PICNIC audience with archetypically geeky stage charisma, he also managed to place his ‘connected rabbit’ in a contextual history of the last 15 years which proved that - as technology adoption, subconscious need and conscious need converge - a similar convergence of device technology, functionality and service occurs.

You ought to be aware of Nabaztag. (We can’t avoid it at LBi - Luke, who runs the show, has been banging on about it for ages), but if you haven’t fallen for its rabbity charms by now then you’re obliged to check it out here.

Where Rafi gets more interesting, though, is in his next big move - the development of the Mir:ror. DISCLAIMER: The following viewpoint may seem bitter - Mir:ror is about 99% identical to a contextual design project I produced at university in 2002… That said, Rafi and his team at Violet have pulled it off beautifully. It’s a great looking product and has the potential to drive properly disruptive behaviours.

Mir:ror isn’t using new technology. It’s RFID - just in a different context from its normal retail applications (such as those the guys over at LBi IconNicholson in NYC are leading the market with). But that’s ultimately not the point. What Rafi and the Vision team have done so well is to implement the solution elegantly and appropriately.

In particular, the concept of an RFID ‘stamp’ to be read by the Mir:ror reader - which pays elegant homage to the original use of stamps to drive communication - is a perfect mechanism to pull contextual services into the orbit of real world services as defined, curated or edited by the user.

Honestly, I never ‘got’ Nabaztag myself, but maybe that’s the point. This is a physical interface into our virtual-selves and communities. As (the surprisingly still relevant) Gropius believed, ‘form follows function’ and in this, the Rabbit is a great choice, it was just never one targeted at me.

Mir:ror, however, is something I can grasp: making technology friendly (Nabaztag’s explicit mission) is one thing, but integrating it properly into day to day usage is a far harder challenge, and one that Rafi and the guys appear to have delivered on to perfection.