Reviewed by: Innovation & Business Architectures
Ambients Orb is a thin-data product that tracks one (and only one) piece of information. The Orb picks up a very little bit of data from the wireless pager network that covers more than 90 percent of the US.
The Orb then displays different colors depending on the status of the one piece of information that it’s tracking. For example, if the Orb is tracking the Dow Jones industrial average, and its red, then the Dow is down; if it’s green, the Dow is up.
You can track the state of the weather, forecasted pollen counts in your region, or the number of email messages in your account, among many other streams of information.
As a mass market product, Ambients Orb may provide too little information for the resources that it uses.
As Ross Rubin, the director of industry analysis at NPD Techworld, noted in November:
“Those interested enough in their stock portfolios to drop $150 on a 21st Century lava lamp for their desks are probably going to go the extra few feet to a PC or Blackberry and find out how much their net worth shifts with the colors.”
Ambient is moving on. The company is offering the wireless weather forecaster that will be sold through Radio Shack. Using the same pager network as the Orb, it provides 5 days worth of local weather forecasts.
Interest in thin-data devices picked up during 2004, when Microsoft’s MSN Direct service started to make use of the same pager network as Ambient had to send data to watches.
While none of these products made much of an impact this year, the amount of activity in the thin-data area is picking up.
http://www.ambientdevices.com/cat/orb/orborder.html
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