Yes, you read that correctly - Nabaztag has been seen busking on the streets to raise more money for the CBO (Customer BuyOut):

Help to spare him this humility and to ensure that he is not silenced in early September - and become part of the company that saves him from extinction!

Go to savenabaztag.com and pledge as much as you think you can comfortably afford to help raise the funds we need. Everybody who pledges funds will become a shareholder in the new company should the buyout bid be successful!

This is a serious venture and one which is being worked on by knowledgeable professionals and people like you - Nabaztag owners.

There's not much time left before September!

Thank you.

Some disturbing news hit the wire this week: Violet SA, the French company who produce Nabaztag and maintain the servers required to enable communication to the device, have filed for bankruptcy and are seeking a buyer.

It seems that maybe their thrust towards RFID-enabled products may not have caught the imagination of consumers as well as expected, or well enough to keep the company afloat. According to the information I found on this site, their earnings have certainly dropped instead of climbing in the last year, despite the new products launched.

It's a sad time for talking Rabbits all over the World - and may be followed by a somewhat sadder time in September if a buyer or recovery plan of some sort cannot be secured.

Due to the fact that I have neither won the Lotto or been extremely careful with money all of my life to date, I am not able to raise the funds required to step in and help to rescue Nabaztag.

If anybody reading this is interested in backing the plans of a 100% convinced geek who knows he has an approach that may just work, then let me know! You'll need probably at least 2,000,000 € if estimates are anything to go by.

Otherwise, those wishing to help but only able to pledge smaller amounts can either contact me or go here and pledge your money. Anybody pledging funds will, of course, receive a share of the new business, should a bid be successful.

Also, check out and feel free to join the Facebook group here...

Let's save those bunnies from a fate of silence!

I posted a snippet of code the other day which enables you to make your Nabaztag report any visitors to your website to you. Now, the first thing that happened after I published that post was that my rabbit proceeded to chatter away and relate to me the locations of all of my marvellous readers

Amongst the visitors where a large number of "visitors" from Mountain View in California... hm. Knowing that this is the homeplace of that friendly web spider Googlebot, I thought it better to add some more code and single it out for special treatment.

For those of you who know your PHP this may appear trivial. For those of who don't know this yet then here's a further little snippet to show how you can pull out such web spiders and send out a special message from your Nabaztag when they visit:


$agent = $_SERVER['HTTP_USER_AGENT'];
if(strpos($agent, "Googlebot") === false ) {
// put the normal notify code here
} else {
// put your special "Googlebot is visiting!" notify code here!
}


The strpos function simply looks for any occurrence of the string "googlebot" in the user agent reported by the visitor and singles these visits out for special treatment.

The User Agent string for Googlebot is typically something like this:


Mozilla/5.0 (compatible; Googlebot/2.1; +http://www.google.com/bot.html)


You could, of course, use this code for all sorts of things and also single out other spiders or visitors (if they pass on anything useful in their user agent strings).

Have fun!

Robert

ps. Post corrected: Note the User Agent string is now correct

Do you have a rabbit? I don't mean the cute fluffy things that eat lettuce, but rather the (even cuter) Nabaztag variety:

If you don't, you're missing out on some fun and another useful way to bring the networked world into your home or office. You can find out more about them on the Violet website (link above).

Meanwhile, my rabbit as already told me that you're here. Thanks to a little piece of code and the easy-to-use Nabaztag API I've given my Nabaztag:tag the ability to tell me every time a visitor comes to this blog.

How's it done? Easy.

Assuming you have a Nabaztag or Nabaztag:tag then follow the steps below:

1. Log in to your Nabaztag "My Burrow" and click "My Preferences" to enable API access for your rabbit:

   

   Nabaztag API access enabled
2. Note that you can also see your rabbit's token and serial number here. Note these down
3. Now, wherever you want to add code to make your rabbit notify you of a website or blog visit, for example, you can use the following code send it a message using the API. Here's an example of a website visitor notification, in PHP:
   
$ch = curl_init();
$message = "new website visitor";
$timeout = 5;
curl_setopt ($ch, CURLOPT_URL, "http://api.nabaztag.com/vl/FR/api.jsp?token=<your token here>&sn=<your serial number here>&tts=".urlencode($message));
curl_setopt ($ch, CURLOPT_RETURNTRANSFER, 1);
curl_setopt ($ch, CURLOPT_CONNECTTIMEOUT, $timeout);
$file_contents = curl_exec($ch);
curl_close($ch);


   Note the third line. Here's where you need to subsitute your own token and serial number to make your own rabbit talk.
4. Test it by opening the page you've embedded the code in - that's it!

I've used CURL to make the call to the API URL simple. You could, of course, use other approaches but this is nice and unobtrusive and leaves the visitor on the page without redirecting with "Location", for example.

This can be taken further by adding in information about the location of the visitor or even adding such code to a web shop and adding information about the product(s) ordered. The applications are practically endless and the motivational effect of hearing how often your site/blog/web shop/etc is visited is not to be under-estimated.

Add to that the possibilities for moving your rabbit's ears, controlling light sequences and even streaming MP3s programmatically and there are many ways in which you can extend the usefullness of these cool little creatures. More information about the Nabaztag API can be found here...

Have fun coding!

Robert