Purple Cow : Ambient
_Data doesn’t have to be dry. We’re used to seeing online information delivered as boring numbers, dense charts, or incomprehensible tables. This is dramatically different from the way we think about the analog world. We know if the pond is frozen from the color of the water. We can tell the status of the gas in our car by glancing at a simple gauge. The smile on a friend’s face is all we need to know a lot of complicated data about whether we’re doing something right or not.
So Ambient is trying to bridge that gap by creating a series of analog devices that measure digital data. The first is the Ambient Orb, which receives signals to change color. It can be red, blue, or green, or somewhere in between.
Logging onto Ambient’s Web site, one types in the serial number of the Orb and tell it what to track. It can show tomorrow’s weather or the status of the stock market. If the Dow is up, the Orb glows green… in a bear market, it’s red, red, red. ..And yes, Ambient sold out their entire production run last Christmas, with more goodies to come.
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