• Ambient
• Ambient Orbs
• Desktop "dashboards"

Lighting up the Future

Walk around with David Rose in his Cambridge, MA, home on any given morning and you'd think he had a small computer lodged in his brain. Without ever opening up a newspaper or touching his laptop, Rose knows things. He knows how his stocks are doing; he knows if traffic is bad; he knows whether there's enough wind to call in sick to work in order to go sailing.

His secret? A handful of frosted-glass, LED-illuminated orb lights in every room. The gadgets, each about the size of an ostrich egg, are made by Ambient, the 4-year-old company Rose heads. Ambient is spearheading a stunningly simple yet genius trend in technology: Orbs that turn colors according to any online data you'd like (they can be programmed simply by registering a serial number via the phone or Internet). They cost about $100.

Using the same technology, the company also makes umbrellas that pulse when it's going to rain and desktop "dashboards" that can report traffic, bank balances, and more.

"If you look around someone's home, you'll see lots of displays of information that seem to be more home-friendly than objects you normally think of when you think of technology," says Rose. "For instance, you see beautiful clocks, picture frames . . . these are typically simple, nonintimidating, good-looking devices that convey information."

So are orbs. You can program them to use color to tell you pretty much anything that can be found on the Internet. The balls light up in shades to correspond to everything from the NASDAQ being up to how many e-mails you have in your in-box to how the Red Sox are doing.

There are more serious uses, too. Hospitals have used Ambient orbs to stay on top of the number of patients in a building, and, in a recent effort to conserve electricity, Southern California Edison and Pacific Gas and Electric had success with putting them in people's homes to show customers at what time of day utilities are least expensive.

"We call it the 'Third Wave' of the Web," says Rose. "The 'First Wave' was to put everything in a browser and make it accessible. The 'Second Wave' was making information mobile. The "Third" is about distributing it to dozens of devices around your life - devices that don't require complex interfaces. The information is just quietly waiting for you to attend to it. A computer or a cell phone demand your attention. These are devices, on the other hand, that are kind of more polite."

 

Posted on May 22, 2006