Tailorable blog

From Russia with love…

Today we have the last day of the final meeting of the RUSMECO project. I’m having mixed feelings about it: it is always nice to finish a project, but I’m also sad this one will soon be over. The project is/was about improving the competitiveness of innovative Russian SMEs by helping them start a Community of Practice to share knowledge and experiences. Apart from the management and design challenges, the project provided me with many opportunities to get to know many interesting Russian people and helped me gain more insight in the Russian culture.

The project has resulted in three connected communities: one in Moscow (Zelenograd), one in St. Petersburg and one in Ekaterinburg. These communities of iSME members meet regularly face-to-face and have an online platform for sharing content, having discussions, performing self-assessment tests and even following trainings. According to the other project members, the project has also resulted in our marriage and little Alexander - but we have to see if those deliverables also end up in the list towards the European Commission

Anyway, the project was a great source of experiences, a lot of fun and I hope to work with these people again soon! But for now, back to the last items on our to-do list.

Lucky timing and surfing the hypecycle…

Funny to see that my story about the virtual Nabaztag was picked up in the press. I guess the Easter bunny and the interest of the press in Second Life helped me. My employer, the Telematica Instituut, made a short press release about how this virtual Easter bunny acts as a watchdog for your Second Life store. Also my main point, using the plastic rabbit as an ambient display for information you like to be aware about in the background, was fortunately picked up. I had a nice interview with the local newspaper, the Tubantia, and the story was published in Hotspot, Computable, Winmag, and ComputerIdee.

As some people asked about it -
Hereby a bit more technical info about how to configure the SecondNabaz (currently version 1.4). The configuration is done via the notecard that is included. Once you rez the SecondNabaz in Second Life and you press “Edit”, the contents should include a notecard you can modify. This notecard has an entry for a serial number (sn=0000000000). Replace the zeros with the MAC address of your bunny (without spaces), as indicated on the sticker on the bottom of your Nabaztag.

The second number in the natecard (token=000000000000000) represents the token you receive when you go to www.nabaztag.com -> my nabaztag -> tools -> api. This number is needed to avoid bunny spam.

The third number on the notecard is the radius (in metres) at which the virtual bunny should detect visitors (min 0 - max 96 meter). Set this number for instance to 25 to make sure your bunny actually detects people, without them having to bump into it.

Just in case you did not know: Violet, the French company that created Nabaztag, is in no way affiliated with this SecondNabaz.