Welcome to Wireless Frame Media
In the spring of 2004 I gave my parents a digital picture frame for their wedding anniversary. Despite being slightly technology handicapped, they love high tech gadgets as gifts and are still wowed by the “wirelessness” of the wireless mouse and keyboard from 2003. With a new digital camera in hand and the release of the The Vialta Vista digital picture frame (www.vialtastore.com/vistaframe100.htm), I figured this would be the perfect opportunity for them to show off their technology prowess and their kids and Grandkids all at once.
I loaded the frame with a bunch of family photos and set it up in their living room – it did not disappoint. They were instantly amazed by the frame and loved the idea of a steady flow of ever changing pictures on display in their condo. The problem is that despite a private lesson on how to upload pictures to the frame they have never updated it – not once. Two and a half years later, the frame, when on, still spins through the pictures we loaded that day. The perfect gift turned out to be not so perfect as the chore of taking the memory card out of the camera and using the clunky interface on the frame was too much to make the frame a useful appliance.
This year when they asked for a WIFI router for their condo, it dawned on me that we are on the cusp of the next wave of innovation. With my parents installing a wireless router that means it is official - WIFI is ubiquitous. And with the cost of a adding a WIFI chip to an electronic appliance being minimal, it became clear that a new wave of consumer electronics would start hitting the market. This wave will be a slew of non-PC devices that connect automatically to the Internet to collect, share and display digital information. For example, the digital camera that automatically sends pictures to your Flickr account, the scale that sends your body weight to your doctor’s office, the heart rate monitor that sends your workout information to www.ontri.com (a web-based fitness community I founded in Jan 2004) and of course the wireless digital picture frame that can display pictures and information delivered from the Internet right to my parent’s living room.
When I got together this fall with a friend and colleague, Alan Phillips, to discuss my next business venture, we both became excited about the wave of WIFI enabled devices and agreed there were many large market opportunities. We had both experienced the pain of the disconnected digital picture frame and knew that the day when millions of homes and businesses were displaying wireless digital picture frames was not far out. The question remained, “How could we, as Internet, software and media veterans, participate in this market opportunity?” As we researched the market, we found several hardware manufacturers working on the problem of combining flat panel displays with WIFI chips and making those in different sizes, shapes and designs. This, we decided, was great news. There will be dozens of these devices in all shapes, sizes and price ranges from a variety of manufacturers and by next Christmas they will be available at popular online and brick and mortar retail stores. And so the first piece of our mission was formed. We would launch a news and information portal to cover the wireless digital picture frame industry and we are working now to review every wireless frame that hits the market and meeting with manufacturers to cover the industry as a whole. Our site, www.wirelesspictureframe.com will become the information source for consumers looking to purchase a wireless digital picture frame.
As we continued our research and began to launch our portal we also discovered some other important information. The hardware manufacturers, as they should, were focused on hardware. But we believe there are some important missing elements on the software side to really make these devices sing and so the next phase of our mission was born. We are now developing web-based tools to support each and every wireless picture frame to hit the market. These tools will not only make it easy for a family to share photos to their frame but also will allow for news and information feeds to be displayed on the frames along with entertainment applications and image feeds. Imagine creating an online greeting card and delivering it right to grandma’s digital frame 3000 miles away. Imagine seeing the local weather flow through your photo stream along with reminders from your family, recipes and jokes of the day or feeds from popular news services such as the Red Sox channel or the People magazine channel. As we continued to grow the list of possible channels it became clear that a community would evolve where frame users could create, manage and share their own custom content channels with other members of the community.
Our mission was complete and our next company born: We would become the leader of content, tools and community to support the emerging category of wireless digital picture frames. We are working hard to fulfill this mission now. Stay tuned in Q1 of 2007 as our reviews come online along with a preview of our tools and community site. Happy New Year!
