Archive for February, 2007

Kodak Introduces Two Wireless, Two Digital Frames

The Vancouver Press’s Jim Jamieson writes that "With digital cameras becoming nearly as commonplace as microwave ovens, the sheer number of photos taken every year is mindboggling.  Take into account the fact that the vast majority of snapshots – many of them great pictures – never make it to the printer and end up living on a computer’s hard drive and you begin to get the idea of the market Kodak and others are trying to tap."

Kodak’s new line of wireless digital picture frames is incredibly cool, as they can display photos from anything connected to a wireless home neetwork, even your online photo albums.  The wireless models come with a screen resolution of 800 x 480.

Think about it.  You’ve got hundreds, maybe thousands, of awesome pictures stored on your computer’s hard drive, and you haven’t seen most of them since the day you took the picture and stored it on your computer.  Your children are growing up, and it’s all documented in those pictures, but you never seem to have the time or opportunity to just look at them.

A wireless digital picture frame is ever-changing.  All of the pictures you own, every photo in your hard drive, can be put in that picture frame.  All of them.  The baby pictures, the toddler pictures, the kindergarten pictures, the fourth-grade field trip, the eighth grade graduation, the prom, the Homecoming Dance, the high school graduation, the day you took her to college and left her there, her wedding, the grandchildren, birthdays, holidays, reunions. . . . You’ve got all of that on your hard drive, or you will, eventually, and it’s a shame to just KNOW it’s there and never see it.

Now, you can see it any time you want.

Kodak’s got, besides the EX1011 (shown) a 20-centimeter version that is also WiFi capable.  Next month, there will be two digital photo frames, 20 and 18 centimeters, as well.

All the models come with a wireless remote and interchangeable faceplates are also available.

These frames will be available next month!  March!

That’s tomorrow, folks. 

Digital Frame Market Index down 43% in January

Last month we introduced the Digital Frame Market Index (DFMI). Wikipedia defines index (as it relates to economics or finance) as a single number calculated from an array of prices or of quantities. We are most familiar with the Consumer Prices Index (CPI) or the Gross Domestic Product (GDP). Values of an index in successive periods summarize level of the activity over time or across economic units. As a refresher, the objective of the DFMI will be to summarize the level of activity associated with the emergence of the digital frame market by looking at buyers and sellers.

The digital frame market continues to be seasonally driven with the vast majority of purchases occurring in December (and a slight blip around mother’s day). Thus it is no surprise that the index dropped dramatically (43%) from December’s report. We anticipate small monthly increases through the second quarter of this year with moderate gains in the third quarter as the consumer press starts to write about the new wireless frame entries.

Searches on the terms “Digital Photo Frame” and “Digital Picture Frame” dropped by over 83% to just under 250,000 searches. There was a significant increase (71%) in the unique combination of online retailers and digital frame SKUs being promoted on CNET. This may be the result of new products launched at CES in January.

	Dec-06	Jan-07
Searches	1,500,000	248,000
SKUs available from Best Buy	6	6
Retailer/SKU Combinations on CNET.com	46	79
Number of expected daily clicks on AdWords	97.5	58.5

Details are available on the index components in last month’s Index Report.

The index is constructed by combining these individual component indices with a proprietary weighting scheme.

Sources

http://inventory.overture.com/d/searchinventory/suggestion/

http://www.cnet.com/

http://www.bestbuy.com/

www.google.com/trends

Pacific Digital Wireless Picture Frame: Inspector Gadget Tells Us How Cool It Is!

Well, not THAT Inspector Gadget. But Fox News sure knows a fantastic wireless picture frame when it sees one! Steven Combs, from Ivy Tech, tells it like it is, when it comes to wireless digital picture frames. (Ivy Tech ROCKS, by the way!)
Check THIS out. It’s the 8×10 frame, and it holds 80 pictures. Music, too, or your OWN voice!
He talks about the practical, business use, as well as the fun usage in the home.

Watch closely as he SHOWS you how the wireless adapter works.

I was in love with these wireless frames before, but now I think I’ve been swept off my feet.

Tune In Tomorrow For Inspector Gadget

Today in class, I took my students to the computer lab.  Two gentlemen from the college’s computer division had come down to the regional campus to show the students how to use the campus computer and email systems.

After the demonstrations, I was talking to these men and the subject of communication among the dozens of regional campuses of our college came up.

“Most institutions of any kind have computer slideshows in the lobby or waiting room areas, but there are no two alike.  Wouldn’t it be cool if all of our campuses had some kind of monitor in the lobby, with slideshows of various campuses, classrooms, etc. so that a student in the northern part of the state could see what the campus was like in the middle or southern part of the state?  A wireless monitor that would show the same thing in each lobby?”

“You can,” I said.

And I took them to Inspector Gadget’s Fox segment about wireless digital picture frames.  The two men were impressed.

“Someone at the main campus could set up, change, and display the content of the wireless picture frame in multiple campus lobbies?  One person pushes a button, and multiple picture frames are programmed and showcasing the same things?”

“Yes.”

“Colleges everywhere could really use something like that!” they said.

Tune in tomorrow, and you can see the Inspector Gadget segment that so impressed a large college’s two biggest computer geeks.