Professor Steven Combs, AKA “Inspector Gadget” Talks About The Weather, Open Source, and RSS Feeds For The Wireless Photo Frame

We continue our conversation with Professor Steven Combs, Instructional Technologist at Ivy Tech Community College, Evansville, Indiana campus, and local television’s Inspector Gadget, guru of electronics.

FrameMedia: Professor Combs, there are so many possibilities for a wireless digital photo frame. Other than personal photos, what other kinds of content do you think frame owners might like to subscribe to?

Professor Combs: Weather! What a joy to wake up and in the morning, next to your alarm clock, find one of the slides that displays the local weather complete with weather map and maybe an outdoor webcam or two. As a blogger myself, I would also like to be able to subscribe to my favorite RSS feeds and have the headlines from my favorite sites displayed along with the weather.

FrameMedia: The possibilities for a wireless photo frame are diverse; do you think people would pay for content? (for example, the Picasso channel, etc.)

Professor Combs: Personally, I wouldn’t pay for content and would not recommend frames that require purchased content. The web contains all the free content I could ever need or want. RSS feeds and photocasts are in abundance. One of the things that attracted me to the Pacific Digital product was the fact that there were no monthly subscriptions required as with some other products. I’m a big advocate of open source and for me this means content as well. Give folks a great product that gives them access to the content they regularly peruse during a normal day, and I think they’ll buy it. Lock them down to yet even more monthly fees and they’ll begin to search elsewhere for a product that provides free content.

FrameMedia: What is your opinion about ads appearing on the frames, for example, The Baseball Channel brought to you by Nike?

Professor Combs: Don’t like ‘em. . . unless. . . yep, I can be bought. If you offer a frame for free and tell me up front that there will be advertising and how that advertising will be selected and distributed, I might give it a shot, as long as I don’t have to pay. If advertisers want my living room and office space to sell their wares, they need to pay me. Not the other way around.

More from Professor Combs tomorrow. Stay tuned, and don’t miss it!

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