This is nifty.

http://www.ambientdevices.com/cat/dashboard/index.html

They've had these over on Thinkgeek.com for a while, and I have to admit that I just don't "get it".

As much of a gadget whore that I am, why do I want an ugly box thing with three horribly inaccurate analog needles indicating some factoid?

I guess it depends on how flexible the custom channels are.

My first thought is it would be nice to be able to glance at it and see how many lines of code my Indians have checked in during the last hour, how many users are connected to the VPN, and some other similar metric.

The compromise between push and pull is interesting.

How many rows of corn have the immigrants harvested today perhaps?


edit: Spaced out while typing, fixed it.

Now why didn't I think of that.

edit: Well, work just paid for me to order one. So, we'll see.

my only opinion about this is a hearty, "meh"

I still have no idea what its supposed to do.

Click on the "30 Facecards included" thing. Explains a little better what you can set it up to do.

Does it make thousands of julian fries?

I still have no idea what its supposed to do.
The idea is simple. We're all so used to using "ambient" information sources like this, we don't even think about it.

Imagine if you couldn't find out what time it is without going through some process of requesting the time whenever you wanted to know what it was. Just as bad, imagine if all your clocks sent you new email each time they updated. As silly as both of those scenarios sound, those are the inefficient models we use for the vast majority of our information these days.

For example, I'm setting the first one up to reflect a number of sales, returns, and ratio of dollars sold to dollars returned over a rolling 30 day period, for one of our sales managers. We already have that information available, of course, but it is underutilized. I think providing it in this ambient method could be very powerful.