Thanks to our very active members Dave and Mike (learn more about their venture HOLSTEE), another member-based initiative has taken place in New York City’s Central Park last weekend.

Around great food, covering everything from home-made Humus to Mike’s self-brewd special Pina Colada (which we hope to market at some point), and a beautiful panorama the Sandboxers discussed topics from social entrepreneurship to Sandboxer Lucian Tarnowski’s mega-event One Young World.

The high activity of the NYC chapter was also shown by the high quality of follow-up events, such as the one organized by the exciting entrepreneur Marissa Shrum around her new project IfWeRanIt.

During his week in NYC, Christian had the chance to meet a number of extraordinary young achievers, and while he’s still amazed by the visions and passions of these (potential) Sandboxers, he’s trying to focus and will write a note about it soon!

Christian is the Head of Business Development at Sandbox and simultaneously working on his PhD at the LSE in London. Currently he is visiting New York.

As Nico and I attended Picnic in Amsterdam, we had the chance to meet Rafi Haladjian, a serial entrepreneur who has founded Violet, a french company pioneering the Internet of things.

Violet’s mission is to make our life easier by connecting the objects around us with each other and to the Internet. What if tomorrow, by choosing a book in your library, you could choose between reading it on paper, on your Kindle, or listening to it as a Podcast? What if your Nespresso machine would order coffee itself before you run out of caps? And if your scale would send the daily progress of your diet directly to Weight Watchers Online?

But instead of starting to connect useful things like books or coffee machines, Violet has chosen to connect plastic rabbits. Why rabbits? Simply because Rafi happened to have a toy rabbit on his desk when he decided on the project. The rabbit was named Nabaztag, just because it is a complicated name to pronounce (the second version which is being sold today is called Nabaztag tag).

And what can a plastic rabbit do if you connect it to the Internet? Pretty much, actually: Every Nabaztag has a mouth (a loudspeaker and a synthetic voice), ears (a microphone and two rotable ears), blinking lights and a nose (an RFID reader). With this, it can do pretty much anything: read your emails, wake you up in the morning with your favorite webradio, move its ears when your shares go up or down or blink blue if you have to take an umbrella before leaving home. You can even connect two Nabaztags to make their ears move together, which is a cute way to say that you are thinking of someone.

The strategy that Rafi presented in his keynote at Picnic was very simple :

1. Connnect the rabits
2 Connect everything else.

The rabbits now being connected, Violet is working on connecting the rest. To quote their homepage: «We spend the greater part of our life in a physical world that is tough, unfair, inflexible and devoid of magic. The objects that surround us have reduced, rigid, limited functions; they are unaware of our presence and are unable to adapt to us or to other objects. We can seldom define “preferences” or “options” in the real world, unlike what we are used to in most software. You can visit Amazon.com twice and it will recognize you and provide relevant and personalized advice. You can live in the same house for all your life and you will always be a foreigner. »

To me, this statement is very true. The Internet of things opens a whole lot of new possibilities and I find Wifi rabbits fascinating. And you? Which objects would you want to connect to the Internet?

* french proverb