I invented this beautifully simple lamp that tunes into online information to help people track the thing that matters to them the most through subtly changing colors. It was the first product of many for my company Ambient Devices, funded by Nicholas Negroponte and Hiroshi Ishii of the MIT Media Lab. The product won awards, garnered an incredible amount of press, and found distribution in catalogs and at the MoMA store in NYC. We made the first batches in the U.S. with a $300 retail price, and eventually moved manufacturing to China, where we were able to reduce to price to $100. I’m proud that we realized early on that the data API should be open, to let people track anything. And they did: Chris Sacca (then at Google) tracked surf heights, Bloomberg tracked sales-team performance, Massachusetts General Hospital used it to help people with diabetics monitor blood sugar levels, NextBus used it to increase ridership, PR firms gave it away to their customers to track media hits, and Ned Johnson who started Fidelity has one on his desk to track the stock market.