Apparently not everyone agrees with me that those hi-tech picture frames you bought for your parents last Christmas are probably a passing fad.
Longworth Venture Partners and CommonAngels have just put an additional $3 million into FrameMedia, which provides a platform for delivering content to these frames wirelessly. The round brings the company’s total funding to $5.2 million after a $2 million round in November led by the same investors.
The FrameChannel platform allows users to choose from over 400 FrameChannel feeds for topics such as sports news, traffic conditions, and weather. FrameChannel also supports generic RSS feeds and social media sites such as Flickr and Facebook.
According to research firm IDC, 42.3 million digital frames are expected to be in sold by 2011 (a straggering figure given how few I’ve seen in the wild). It seems that the introduction of dynamically updated content is expected to spur rapid growth, and FrameMedia hopes to use the new capital to establish themselves as a leader in this fledgling space.
See all
Post
Gosh - Internet-enabled picture frames - what will they think of next?!!
Are the frames touchscreen? Or does all the configuration take place on the computer?
Cheers,
Aidan
http://www.MappingTheWeb.com
Are any of these actually good? It seems like all of the wireless frames get bad reviews.
I saw a local real estate office here with a bunch of frames hung in a display window. Each was cycling through three or four ads for different houses.
It was certainly eye-catching.
After being burned by crappy eStartling WiFi photo frames, I’m not to eager to buy any of these. Once they come to the point my mom can set them up they may take off, assuming the prices also come down and the screen qualities goes up.
they are the perfect gift for the gadget inclined with a guilty conscience (here’s your mother’s day gift mom….)
ok, sure they seem a bit cheesy, but i think mostly everything will be internet enabled soon enough. and we won’t think pc when we think internet. and it seems like a natural thing for it to be in such things as phones, picture frames, radios like chumby, mirrors, tables, fridges….basically any surface you might stop and look at and have a minute to be fed with information like mail, tweets, news, and even ads.
are they solar powered? Because I don’t see the point if you need to have them plugged in/need to change batteries once a week
Mike
So what technology do you like for picture frames in the future?
Thanks.
you plug them in. It’s not like you’re carrying them around or anything, you usually keep the thing on your desk.
so I need to take up an extra socket, and have ugly wires running to a highly seen place just to display a slideshow?
@michael so you’ve had a bad estarling experience too? does estarling have a competitor?
Will be cool when those eye-fi cards connect to these wi-fi picture frames! Take a picture from anywhere and it’s sent to various wireless picture frames (ones in your home, your parents’, whomever u allow and vice versa).
Amazing!! they have one certification program also..
Perhaps, but I have my ugly wires covered and operate a PhotoVu frame with the FrameChannel service. My family loves the mixture of family pictures with news and town RSS feeds.
They are the mass market Chumby on a diet.
time to bring back pointcast. (how many remember that ??!?!)
Finally, something usefull to view the 2,000,000 rss image feeds out there.
Hmm, a picture frame that sits out in plain view of friends and family that takes a random picture cached on your computer and displays it. That can’t go wrong….
they’re just selling a TV basically. A portable, cheaper one. Picture frames with news updates, pictures, moving family clips…
just a TV.
I’ve been bullish on this for a loooooooooong time!
If photovu.com were more affordable they would be in every home and on every desk.
Pointcast, remember that! Everyone had Pointcast
I think the digital frames are a good idea but why do you need $ 5M? All of the technology is already available. I guess you could pump it into marketing but that sounds so old-school.
How about being innovative and VIRAL (oh what a word) by feeding Twitter messages of your friends and display them in alteration with their flickr photos. You could also sprinkle in some http://twistori.com/ if you really feel esoteric today.
Sounds like a lot cheaper for a marketing plan.
By the way, just today I bought two fine art prints from here http://www.luminous-landscape.com/alexis.shtml
Although I am all digital, a well made fine art print on first class paper is still something special. And it feels good to treat yourself for a good cause.
It would be cool to have a frame hook up to a flickr account. Stream new photos to mom instantly.
Bah, I built my own out of an old laptop. Only recently have you been able to get ones with as large of a screen as an old laptop has.
Frame Media. Idea for you. Put a Mic on one of these, and push the signal back to the PC’s speech engine. That way I can call up my calendar, gadget of choice, excedera without touching it. I’d like to have a few of these in my home but I won’t get them until they are wifi, and hopefully upnp comes out with a spec for them.
These frames are great stuff, great stuff..
> so I need to take up an extra socket, and have ugly wires running to a highly seen place
That’s only one problem. Digital frames are not great. Congress should pass a 100% excise tax to prevent their proliferation.
Let’s see where this is headed…. consumers replace outdated bulbs with fluorescents to save energy and reduce global warming… then start adding digital frames to their homes, which soak up all those previously conserved watts… taking us back to even more fossil fuel burning. Brilliant!
Jason, I hope you’re right that the electronic frames are a passing fad: http://lowtechtimes.com/2008/0.....re-frames/
China users will likely love these… to show Beijing Olympic latest photos etc!!
I bought a Philips model for my wife last year. It has a nice picture and the pictures look great, but changing them out is a pain. The rechargeable battery doesn’t last long and there are almost too many features. I’ve seen frames that play music and do other totally unnecessary stuff. It’s a picture frame, people!
They’re going for the early adopters. The technology will get better, battery life will improve, and eventually we’ll see wireless power transfer (it’s been invented already).
And, yes, I do remember Pointcast. I’m old enough
It was just a couple of weeks ago that the headlines declared digital picture frames to be electricity hogs, costing an average of $9/year to operate and if everyone had one, it’d take five medium-sized power plants just to keep them going.
Just wait until Apple decides to get in this market. I bet those sales figure will double.
thnks
thnks