Personal Dashboard from Ambient Devices

Both the US$149 Stock Orb and the US$179 Weather Forecast beacon work almost identically, and can actually monitor a range of information other than their name implies.

The Ambient Orb slowly transitions between thousands of colors to show changes in the weather, the health of your stock portfolio, or if your boss or kid is on instant messenger. The Orb is delivered to the US consumer pre-set to track the Dow Jones Industrial Average, glowing more green or red to indicate market movement up or down, or yellow when the market is calm.

To make it work is just a matter of plugging the orb into any standard power outlet as it immediately begins monitoring a (US) nationwide wireless network with no internet connection required. If the purchaser has other information they wish to monitor, the Orb can be customised to a set of free channels, such as market indices or weather in major cities or they can upgrade to access premium channels, such as a particular set of stocks (your customized portfolio) or to track opinion polls and elections.

Personal Dashboards

Ambient Devices announced its third product, a line of "personal dashboards", at the International Consumer Electronics Show earlier this month. The personal dashboards show up-to-the-minute customized information from the Internet on meter-like displays with a needle that fluctuates as information changes and are designed to be as easy to read as an analog clock.

The Ambient Dashboard uses swappable analog display faces to show digital information being broadcast from Ambient's nationwide wireless network and is designed to reduce the daily barrage of emails, SMS messages and proactive internet searching we do to monitor the information we need in our lives, without having to do anything more than glance. It will also aid considerably in reducing clutter from the advertising so often associated with this critical information.

Three initial models of dashboard will offer customers the opportunity to track the information they care about most:

The "Executive Dashboard" tracks traffic congestion on your route home, stock indexes, trading volume and weather forecasts.

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