Nabaztag
A white plastic rabbit from Paris that connected to your Wi-Fi, wiggled its ears, lit up its belly and read your email out loud. Violet launched it in France in 2005, had sold 50,000 across Europe within a year, and then watched its servers buckle at Christmas 2006 under the weight of new owners trying to register.
The Nabaztag was invented by Rafi Haladjian and Olivier Mével and built by their Paris company, Violet. The name is the Armenian word for rabbit, chosen, Haladjian said, "because it's the word for rabbit in Armenia, my parents' country." The shape was an accident: "by pure chance, there was a toy-rabbit sitting on my desk when we brainstormed about a non-intrusive object that didn't need a screen." The result stood 23 centimeters tall and weighed 418 grams, with two motorized ears, a ring of colored LEDs and a speaker, and no screen at all. Haladjian's slogan was that there is life after the PC. It went on sale in France in late June 2005; by September, Violet reported that 4,000 had sold and that it had ordered 20,000 more from its Chinese suppliers.
Out of the box it could read the weather forecast, stock reports and news headlines, work as an alarm clock, flag incoming email, follow RSS feeds and play MP3 streams, either speaking them aloud or signaling with its lights and ears, and an API let owners program it themselves. By June 2006 about 50,000 rabbits had sold in Europe, at high-end retailers and online for $150. That year the sound designer Jean-Jacques Birgé and the behavior designer Antoine Schmitt staged Nabaz'mob, an opera for 100 rabbits, at NextFest in New York; it later won an Award of Distinction at the 2009 Prix Ars Electronica. A second model, the Nabaztag/tag, arrived on December 12, 2006, with a microphone for voice commands, internet radio and an RFID reader that could recognize tagged children's books.
The design had a flaw. Every rabbit was a client of Violet's central servers in France, and when a wave of new owners tried to register their Christmas presents in December 2006, the servers could not handle the demand. Registrations stalled, services were switched off and responses that should have taken seconds took hours. The company eventually went bankrupt, and on October 20, 2009, the software publisher Mindscape bought it. Mindscape's own bankruptcy followed. It shut down the Nabaztag/tag web service in late July 2011 and released the rabbit's source code.
That left thousands of rabbits silent on shelves. Volunteers wrote replacement server software, OpenNab, and later a package called NabaztagLives that runs on a Raspberry Pi, so a rabbit could be brought back to life at home. Mindscape's third-generation successor, the Karotz, lasted until its servers were switched off on February 18, 2015.
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