Speaking of gadgets that change color, Alan Reiter has an excellent entry on the Ambient Orb, which first surfaced last year. The Ambient Orb is a handblown glass bulb that changes colors to reflect different kinds of information, like green if the stock market is up, red if it’s down, and yellow if it’s unchanged. There are apparently all kinds of data it can work with – the weather, pollen count, homeland security, and there are plans for other ambient gadgets like a pinwheel that spins faster or slower depending on how many messages you have waiting for you. When we’d heard about the Ambient Orb last year, we just assumed that it got its data over the Internet and connected to a PC over USB. But Alan gets the goods and reveals that it works with WebLink Wireless’ nationwide pager network, sort of like those new SPOT watches from Microsoft, which receive data over an FM subcarrier network.
