Frame Media Reinvents Itself as Thinking Screen, Goes After Larger “Connected Screen” Market

Xconomy.com’s Wade Roush has posted a wonderful article about FrameMedia’s new name and additional new goals!  As Thinking Screen Media, the former FrameMedia is still the leader in content delivery to connected screens worldwide.

Wireless digital photo frames, considered one of the hot new categories in consumer electronics back in 2006 and 2007, haven’t taken off as quickly as expected. People love digital frames, but they’ve tended to buy them as gifts pre-loaded with photos they uploaded to the Web, meaning many frames still don’t come with their own connection to the Internet. That’s a problem for Wellesley, MA-based Frame Media, whose whole business, when I last profiled the startup in 2007, revolved around providing fresh digital content for the frames, such as news and sports headlines, weather, and photos shared by friends.

But while Wi-Fi-equipped frames are still playing catchup, another channel for the company’s programming is emerging: so-called “connected screens,” meaning a whole variety of Internet-ready displays that are turning up in homes and offices. As a result, Frame Media is rechristening itself Thinking Screen Media, and going after what CEO Alan Phillips calls “a whole category [of displays] defined primarily by the fact that, unlike PCs, they are limited in their ability to easily search and configure content.” That includes not just digital frames but high-definition TVs, cable set-top boxes, game consoles, Internet radios, and even printers.

Through its FrameChannel platform, Thinking Screen works with publishers such as Time magazine, the New York Times, People magazine, and Weatherbug to offer more than 1,000 channels of content customized for such screens. (Users choose and configure the information feeds at Thinking Screen’s website.) The company is also partnering with virtually every consumer-electronics company on the block—names like Kodak, Motorola, Nintendo, Philips, Samsung, Sony, and Toshiba—to make it easy

“Most of the connected screens haven’t hit the market yet, but they will over the next six months,” says Phillips. In particular, Phillips says, “We’ll see an aggressive push by TV manufacturers to enable TVs to go beyond video.” A taste of what he’s talking about already familiar to millions of video game fans is the home screen of the Nintendo Wii, which, in addition to games, offers links to news, weather, shopping, and photos.

The 15-employee startup collected $5 million in Series A funding from Longworth Venture Partners and CommonAngels in May 2008, and there are plans to raise a Series B round this fall, Phillips says. When it comes to supplying content for tomorrow’s connected screens, Thinking Screen has both technical and strategic advantages over existing and potential competitors, he says.

San Diego-based Chumby, whose interactive media player displays information through “widgets” analogous to Thinking Screen’s channels, is the company’s closest competitor, in Phillips’ judgment. But he thinks Chumby will have a hard time delivering content to devices other than its trademark soft-sided appliance, since the widgets depend on Adobe’s Flash video format, which most other connected screens can’t handle. Thinking Screen’s data, by contrast, is delivered using the Media RSS format, created by Yahoo in 2004 and used by thousands of content publishers.

Thinking Screen also has a network of content and manufacturing partners that would be hard for any other company to match, Phillips says. “The barrier to entry is about partnerships on the content side and more importantly on the screen manufacturer side,” he says. “As we create a critical mass of users, the revenue from advertising is shared with both content providers and screen manufacturers, so there is a stream now that encourages the screen partners to make sure that FrameChannel is enabled on their devices.”

Two new products set to emerge from Thinking Screens in the coming months are designed to widen the service’s appeal to consumers. One is a line of inexpensive digital frames dedicated to a single type of content—examples might include a frame that just shows celebrity news from People magazine or news and scores for the Boston Red Sox.

The other is a selection of 35,000 channels aggregating local information. For example, Phillips says, “You could have a Hopkinton, Massachusetts channel, where we’ve licensed content from local news sources, traffic, weather, relevant sports scores, stock quotes for companies, lottery numbers, a Twitter feed from your state representative—everything to do with Hopkinton. So you can imagine watching the Today show at seven in the morning and as a picture-in-picture experience you’re also getting your local town’s feed.”

Wade Roush is Xconomy’s chief correspondent. You can e-mail him at wroush@xconomy.com, call him at (617) 252-7323, or follow him on Twitter at http://twitter.com/wroush.

All Digital Media, Inc. Deploys FrameMedia’s SignChannel!

All Digital Media, Inc. has chosen FrameMedia’s SignChannel “to provide a cost-effective alternative to conventional large scale digital signage advertising for small and mid-sized businesses in the Minneapolis region, while generating monthly revenue with minimal upfront investment.”

Alan Phillips, founder and CEO of FrameMedia, tells us that “Digital wireless picture frames offer a great alternative to high cost, large scale digital signage because a wireless Wi-Fi frame provides targeted content based on the flexibility of its placement, such as restaurant booths and waiting areas, without the need for professional installation.  By utilizing SignChannel, All Digital Media has created a win-win situation for both itself and small and mid-sized companies looking to stretch their advertising dollars.”

All Digital Media, Inc. has, in fact, purchased over a hundred wireless digital picture frames and placed them in local businesses with smaller budgets, such as restaurants, gyms, spas, and fitness centers – businesses with a high concentration of clientele/customers – and, by using SignChannel, are able to generate quite a sum, per frame, per month!

“SignChannel has offered us the opportunity to take a practical, grass-roots approach to reaching advertisers in teh local community, right here in the Brainerd Lakes area.  Through the innovative use of a Wi-Fi digital frame, we’re generating revenue with a highly customized advertising vehicle and getting in front of an audience at strategic locations where they’ll be most captive, such as waiting rooms in doctors’ offices or on the treadmill at the gym.  We are excited to be the first in Central Minnesota to provide this unique service,” says Wes Hughes, owner and principal of All Digital Media, Inc.

The full article about All Digital Media, Inc. and Frame Media’s SignChannel, and their VERY cost-effective digital signage advertising venture, can be found and read at The Nearshore Journal.

GiiNii PixPlus and FrameChannel: An Unbeatable Combination!

Don’t these two look great together?

In fact, GiiNii and FrameChannel do much more than just LOOK good together; they perform well together, too.

As you read in the New Year’s Eve post about GiiNii’s newest electronics,  GiiNii’s PixPlus digital picture frames will feature FrameChannel, the best content provider of all, and if you go to CES, you can see for yourself in South 1 Hall, Booth No. 21244.  Not only that, but GiiNii is taking orders for the new PixPlus wireless frame at CES, too!

The partnership between GiiNii and FrameChannel will give GiiNii PixPlus customers a 10.1-inch touch-panel wireless digital photo frame with a full gig of internal storage and a resolution of 800 x 400.  The new GiiNii PixPlus wireless frame, once connected to FrameChannel, will be able to pull in pictures from multiple locations, such as Flickr, Picasa, Facebook, Webshots, etc, and will also enable PixPlus owners to subscribe to all kinds of channels, such as Discovery, NASA, sports, weather, traffic, art, music, comic strips, inspirational channels, and pretty much any and every topic under the sun, with more every day.  Photographs and channels are automatically updated, too; you add a picture, and FrameChannel immediately adds it to your wireless frame’s slideshow.

GiiNii President Scott Reeves has this to say about the GiiNii/FrameChannel partnership:  “FrameChannel.com lets consumers easily and automatically incorporate images from photo sharing Web sites, plus it’s a wonderful resource for information on a variety of topics.  The new GiiNii PixPlus Featuring FrameChannel digital picture frame gives users an amazingly easy way to keep tabs on their photo-sharing sites and stay informed and entertained.”

FrameMedia’s Co-Founder and CEO Alan Phillips says that “We are pleased to be partnering with GiiNii on this exciting new device.  Enjoying FrameChannel’s marriage of photos from your favorite online service with personalized content from our more than 500 available channels is an especially pleasant experience on the GiiNii PixPlus Featuring FrameChannel.”

The new GiiNii PixPlus Featuring FrameChannel wireless digital picture frame has TONS of features!  Some of them are touch-panel controls, a memory card reader, USB port, power-save modes, three preinstalled images, several varieties of slideshow choices, auto-rotate, Mp3 and WMA music playback, video playback, calendar, clock, zoom and thumbnail viewing, and a wireless remote control.

The new PixPlus frame also comes with a lithium-ion battery, which means several things: no cord hanging down from the frame, no need to place the frame near an outlet, and the ability to pick up the frame to look closely at a picture, or bring it to someone across the room.

Remember, you can see the new GiiNii PixPlus Featuring FrameChannel wireless digital photo frame at International CES 2009, South Hall 1, Booth 21244.