Why, after 20 years spent building online virtual worlds on the French minitel, then the Internet, Rafi Haladjan realized in 2003 that time had come to jump out of the screen and take the physical world as the new frontier. How Violet, the company he co-founded decided to start connecting everything, to get out of the lab and make actual products with a Darwinian view of the advent of ubicomp...and why among all things he is convinced that the Internet of Things should start with a Rabbit.

Having listened to showman scientist Kevin Warwick I was just struck by the thought that it isn't language - written or spoken - that we should try to replace by new forms of wetware communication.

Rather I'd suggest we combine the wifi-enabled Nabaztag rabbit with Kevin's research, and perhaps implant rabbit ears as well as colored lights, to be able to receive (and send out) the sort of background information and data that the Nabaztag rabbit is supposed to - email alerts, RSS-feeds, weather forecasts, stockmarket movements, etc.

It would also add to the fun if he wasn't working with Terminator-looking tech gauntlets but rabbit ears and blinking lights :-)

Why we invited Rafi to LIFT
Rafi's career is very bright and original (coming form the Minitel entrepreneurship world), we were interested in his perspective about current development in technologies, especially about ubiquitous computing. He has indeed an original stance in the way he proposed to develop his company; somewhat like "we don't know what ubiquitous computing is so let's try something and see how people do out of it", leaving some space in his Nabaztag product to customization or hacking.

What will Rafi speak about
Rafi will talk about his latest start up venture, his approach towards entrepreneurship and what led to the creation of the Nabaztag. This cute little communicating animal is permanently connected to the Internet. It sends and receives a myriad of messages, indicates your mood to the outside world with its ears or lights in its belly, tells jokes, has performed in operas in France and the US (NY) and that is not all it can do. For more information check out Rafi's interview with Benjamin Gauthey on YouTube about Nabaztag or Rafi's LIFT Profile.