Mother - Hackdot

Re:Mother by nostromo on Tuesday January 14, 2014 @06:59PM (#7060698)

Wait, is this real? It seems like commentary on the current zeitgeist, not a real product.

> Mother. Mother knows everything.

> She's like a mom, only better.

> Sense: the meaning of life®

edit: I see they are based in France, so perhaps the branding didn't translate well.

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Re:Mother by mortenjorck on Tuesday January 14, 2014 @07:21PM (#7060798)

Even allowing for a language barrier, this has to be the most overtly Huxleyan branding I've seen on a consumer product. It's unnerving.

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Re:Mother by brazzy on Wednesday January 15, 2014 @03:05AM (#7062191)

Hm, my candidate:

A couple standing in front of an ATM, she ovviously pregnant, on the screen there is an image of a house, speech bubble "Oh! How does it know we were thinking of moving to a bigger home?"

Saw this on a wall in the conference room of an ATM maker, about 10 years ago...

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Re:Mother by catshirt on Tuesday January 14, 2014 @07:55PM (#7060946)

considering Futurama's "Mom" character, it's even more uncanny.

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Re:Mother by allochthon on Tuesday January 14, 2014 @11:03PM (#7061601)

this has to be the most overtly Huxleyan branding I've seen on a consumer product

Which isn't necessarily a bad thing for the product they're selling, which is both cool and odd in a 1984 kind of way.

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Re:Mother by mmanfrin on Wednesday January 15, 2014 @03:47AM (#7062295)

1984 was Orwell. Huxley was Brave New World.

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Re:Mother by sneak on Wednesday January 15, 2014 @08:21AM (#7063152)

Also, it seemed to me that the dichotomy set up in BNW is that "natural is good and right, artificial or new is bad" - one that has soured me on Huxley basically since when I first read it.

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Re:Mother by romaniv on Wednesday January 15, 2014 @11:10AM (#7064120)

The author commented on that in his foreword of later editions of the book. He said something along the lines that if he was writing the novel later in his life, the dichotomy wouldn't be as pointed.

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Re:Mother by makmanalp on Wednesday January 15, 2014 @03:51AM (#7062313)

I think "mother knows best" would have been much less creepy.

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Re:Mother by catwork on Wednesday January 15, 2014 @11:47AM (#7064326)

Except for kids and parents who saw "Tangled."

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Re:Mother by cocoflunchy on Tuesday January 14, 2014 @07:47PM (#7060916)

I read the French page and I can tell you the branding was translated just fine.

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Re:Mother by austinl on Tuesday January 14, 2014 @08:09PM (#7061015)

I laughed out loud when I read "Did you take your pills? Mother knows everything." +1 for zeitgeist, embedded systems seem to be very popular these days, but this is a real product

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Re:Mother by inglor on Wednesday January 15, 2014 @01:25AM (#7061952)

It's a shame too - the name is very catchy but I quit it after looking at it for 5 seconds and not "getting it". Not what a landing page should do.

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Re:Mother by dlwiest on Wednesday January 15, 2014 @12:27PM (#7064618)

Agreed. What problem will this solve for me?

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Re:Mother by s7ephen on Tuesday January 14, 2014 @08:08PM (#7061004)

Agreed. The branding is terrible. There are other in this space it seems...similar but not exactly the same: "Twine", and "Ninjablocks. my favorite is Tally http://www.tallyyourworld.com but it's not out yet.

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Re:Mother by bloaf on Wednesday January 15, 2014 @01:04PM (#7064884)

I honestly couldn't tell if this was a real product or some sort of parody at first. I half expected it to be produced by Aperture Science. I don't blame you.

I don't think the issue is the data collection. I think most of us here would admit that slicing and dicing data about yourself is fun (e.g. see [1]) and that an unobtrusive tool to help collect that data is a good idea. The problem is their deliberate overt anthropomorphism. I'm perfectly comfortable with a system for recording data points about my life in some database on my computer, I'm significantly less comfortable with someone monitoring me and telling me about my life.

[1] http://blog.stephenwolfram.com/2012/03/the-personal-analytic...

I don't think it is a coincidence that at least three different franchises have used "Mother Brain" as the name for their malevolent AI.

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Re:Mother by gala8y on Wednesday January 15, 2014 @06:11PM (#7066900)

It gets better. On PACK page you get this on hover over picture of 'a monther':

"A white Mother \ with everything you need to connect her."

Whole branding seems wrong here.

Edit: Found also "No need to pay a subscription fee to live with your Mother." on INSTALLATION page.

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Re:Mother by ElliotH on Tuesday January 14, 2014 @08:13PM (#7061033)

I read it as a jovial way of describing a real product.

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