Be Connected - Electronics

Malcolm Gladwell would love this. The orb sits in your room and gives you a visual indicator of any data that can be sent from the web. Some of the standard channels (pdf) include weather, traffic, the S&P, but what excites me is the ability to set up my own channel.

This could easily convey information that is useful for taking action right now. If you set it up for weather, the orb can tell you whether you’ll need your umbrella today. If you set it up for tracking the stock market, the orb can tip you off on whether to buy or sell right now.

My excitement, however, is over the benefit of seeing the orb change over time. Having this in my room would allow me to subconsciously pick up on interesting trends and it would allow me to come up with predictions based on some knowledge of an event. For example, if I set it up to track visits to my band’s MySpace profile, I can easily see the effect of gigs and various promotional campaigns (flyering, e-mail announcements, mentioning it in this blog). Of course, you could simply accomplish this with data mining and charts and graphs, but who wants to do that? I adhere to the principles of Smart Laziness. Also, what data mining couldn’t accomplish is the ability to make connections that can’t be captured with online statistics. Maybe people come play our music as an escape when there are depressing stories in the news? Only I would be able to make that connection over time with my Ambient Orb.

I’ve thought of plenty of other great uses for it:

• Volume of visits to my MySpace profile

• Daily price of gasoline within a range
• Number of Google news stories about the war in Iraq today
• Remaining balance in my online checking account
• Number of e-mails in my inbox
• Probability of the Red Sox beating the spread tonight based on a number of factors I specify and track
• The number of beers left in my fridge

AJ