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I have not, does he write about the Aibo development history ?

The toy itself is not very fun. Even pretty annoying sometimes (like the stupid daily calibration task). It has no brain, you have to dedicate a smartphone to this. It's a very wrong move I think, though I understand the cost benefits. But the worst part is that almost every interaction with the robot goes first through the smartphone UI (like triggering a request for a game). It totally kills the experience, and makes it painful for parents of small kids, too young to have a phone. I have read somewhere that they hired some expert game designers and hollywood concept artists from Wall-E to design the actual experience. My harsh feeling is that it's the worst idea ever, it feels very much like a bad hollywood blockbuster, no subtlety but only misplaced costly special effects and tricks. I had little expectations though, I bought it to tweak it (someday). It uses a python SDK, you have to connect a dedicated smartphone to your computer, and the python SDK connects to the Cozmo app on the phone to send commands. Apparently the SDK is good, and the team seems serious about supporting this.

I own both an old ERS-7 and a Cozmo. It's striking how much Aibo is a likeable thing, full of surprise compared to Cozmo. I really noticed it when I got Cozmo. It's a shame given the amount of computational power Cozmo gets from the smartphone, and its way better camera. But I guess the constraints forced Aibo engineers into a more subtle and intelligent design. I'm disappointed, I really hoped for something unbelievable like Aibo was ten years ago.

It's actually a feature. It saved you one day of your life. And if this free service just disappears some day, you are just one day away to build your own. You got your number from Twilio, there is no lock-in.

I don't live in the US, so Google Voice is not available, and I don't know much about it. Using Twilio seems right to me, because it's basically a low level phone number provider, you don't feel that locked.

It's hosted on a paid Heroku instance, our own company number is served by this. The server didn't break a sweat with this HN traffic.

Thanks ! I'll fix this.

You keep control over your number, which you bought on Twilio.

I once tried to find interns for my startup at Epitech (42 is a copy of Epitech). Their level in mathematics was abysmal. I mean they didn't even understand how to use basic trigonometric functions. There is a very good reason if the best engineering schools in France only admit students after a 2 years curriculum of pure math/physics/chemistry.

I'm currently reading all your old posts on factor. It's so sad that it seems almost dead, it's incredibly good and mind bending. Have you lost interest for this language ?

The name has an history, but the fact that UK (and US) have a problem with it is probably the very reason why it's been kept like this. After all "bit" in french has exactly the same meaning as "cock" in english. french devs deal with it. I guess it's some kind or revenge...

Anything to do with Aurora ? https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=L6iUm_Cqx2s

Absolutely. It's not a trick, it's an official system to help entrepreneurship. You need to have worked at least 2 years to have unemployment right though. So as hartator said, you don't get it straight after college.

Nope, it's totally ok. Tested for 4 years with a control from a government agent lately with 2 engineers and a 3D artist without any engineering degree. CIR is way broader than what people think, and it has been made even broader this year (you can now include tasks from pilot programs). This is really super undervalued, CIR and other grants is totally a game changer in assessing if France is a good country to start a tech business.

You don't need to hire PHD at all. Engineers are fine, and not even mandatory. You can do a lot of tasks on tax credits, even graphic design or testing.

Any serious entrepreneur in France can double the company income or raided funds with the help of national and local R&D grants, funds and tax credits (Crédit Impot Recherche). Add to that two years of salary for the founders paid by the agency the help unemployed people. It's super easy to get ramen profitable in France, and you don't really need to get angel funding. This is huge and often undervalued.

Oh right, I thought it was today ! Maybe I'll be in Paris !

Cool ! Too bad I'm not in Paris ! You guys are real geeks, doing a tech meetup on the French Music Day !

I'd love to see such a meetup in Lyon.

Awesome idea !

Isn't this an exact copy of the Startup Weekend concept ?

The whole idea of this is to allow large groups events. Think 20+ participants. Using 3D allows us to spatialize the event, while staying very dynamic. Groups can form, change, recreate just by moving. The sound is spatialized too, so it could scale to hundreds, thousands of persons. Just using regular voice would make an awful noise. 3D splits group very naturally, while staying dynamic and most of all, intuitive because it's very similar to regular networking events. It could obviously be done by creating voice groups on a "flat screen", but we strongly believe in the power of real world analogies, to make it immersive and help people understand how to behave in this.

An interesting aspect of Assemblive for you, hackers, is that you can embedd a 3D+VOIP widget into any web site. You can add realtime interactions and self awareness of your visitors with only a few lines of code. Here is a screencast of it (sorry for the french accent ;) http://aworldforus.tumblr.com/post/287534616/assemblive-widg...

Unity3D is much more mature and full featured right now (and even more when we started working on this). We are looking into WebGL too, to soon for prime time but promising.

Yes, we use Unity3D, a web plugin to run hardware accelerated 3D in the browser. They don't support Linux yet, but now that they raised a huge amount of money from Sequoia they might work on it (if they want to support ChromeOS they'd better hury)