Smart objects are good. Objects plus services are better.
I’m sure you won’t be surprised to hear that I love the idea of this umbrella. Living in Minnesota, there are many days when leave the house in brilliant sunshine only to be drenched by an unexpected thunderstorm hours later. An umbrella, smart enough to know that it’s going to rain would have saved my ass on many occasions. However, it seems to me that the Ambient folks have only gone half way with this concept so far. Instead of just adding intelligence to a product, they also have the opportunity to build services around it.
A web site built around being able to stream different types of data notifications such as new emails, birthdays, appointments, or other stuff like that, would make this umbrella exponentially more useful. Equally, because this umbrella clearly knows approximately where you are, allowing this umbrella to broadcast location and usage back to the web and using that information to deliver more services would send it over the top.
In making this object smart, they’ve already done the hard technical work. Adding increased value through services is simple part yet creates its unfair share of utility for users.