christophe thinks out loud

A Healthy Glow

Oh, hot damn, I found this again.

A while back, in the Wind and Weather paper catalog, I saw Ambient Device's Weather Beacon product, and snatched up the phone to order it . . . shoot, unavailable, and they didn’t give the manufacturer, so I couldn’t track it down.

Then, out of nowhere, I ran across it again. I love the web.

So, what do the Orb and Beacon do? They take a numeric value (temperature, stock value, etc.), and turn it into a color, which they glow. That’s it. It seems absurdly simple, but the applications are endless, since you can display whatever numeric information you want. (Besides the shape, the only difference I can see betwen the Orb and the Beacon is that the Orb is set up to track stock prices by default, and the Beacon temperature.)

They use a wireless receiver (based on a digital pager’s network) to pick up transmitted data. You can use their web site to configure a variety of streams, but you can also configure it to use a custom data feed, either via the web and wireless, or its serial port. Temperature in your server room? The number of orders that your company is currently receiving? How fast traffic is on your route home? That there are new job or apartment listings? New things on your RSS newsreader? Have it flash red when your remote webcam picks up motion? The possibilities are, as they say, endless.

We live in a constant stream of data, but data are not information. As the data stream gets faster and faster (the “drinking from the firehose” problem), we’ll need more things like this to help us make quick sense of it.

posted 08:19 | trackback