BT's ambient WiFi orb
Maybe they've never heard of the Ambient Orb (or they have and are just copping its style), but BT's Research Labs has been showing off an ambient device that uses WiFi to wirelessly pull down data off of the Internet rather than a proprietary FM sub-carrier network that requires a subscription. Otherwise they're about the same, you can have information like the weather or stock prices or whether you have any new email represented by different colors. BT's device (which is still just a prototype, near as we can tell) also has built-in speech recognition software, so if you want it to pull down data about another topic, like say, the weather, you could just say the word "weather" and it'll grab that data for you, rather than force you to log on to the web and manually adjust its settings like you have to with the Ambient Orb.
