Hard to tell if these folks and I are thinking along similar or divergent lines. Don’t yet have a clear picture of what they are hoping to create.

But it’s clear they can see a future of connected things too.

http://test.tag4m.com/

Bought one of these from ThinkGeek, and it would make a great Arduino project.

Can it be easily retrofitted to create an ambient indicator?  What a nice data visualization object it would make!

How about building the aiosphere gateway into it, and using it to render and animate connections and data traffic traffic between nodes and the gateway and the gateway and the server?