Motorola 10″ Wireless Digital Picture Frame

Motorola’s beautiful 10-inch wireless digital picture frame will make any room in your house a focal point!

Friends and family, as well as you, can e-amil photos directly to your Motorola frame; it has its own email address! You can also subscribe to various RSS feeds that will appear on your wireless frame, such as local and national news, weather, and sports.

You can even listen to the radio over your Motorola wireless picture frame!

With a screen resolution of 800 x 600, you know your pictures will appear bright and colorful.

An internal memory of 512 mb means you’ll be able to store up to 2300 digital pictures; that’s a lot of pictures, folks.

Your Motorola wireless digital photo frame also accepts SD, SDHC, MMC memory cards and USB flash drives. It’s compatible with Windows 2000 and higher.

Did I mention that it is also an Mp3 player, a calendar, and an alarm clock? Wow!

The holidays are fast approaching; don’t you think the people on your list ought to have a wireless digital picture frame?

Get ready for femtocells: Ubiquisys raises $11 M

I’ve posted here before about Motorola’s innovative use of femtocells, but over on VentureBeat.com, Jared Newman has written a great post about how femtocells can defeat all that “dead space” even the best wireless coverage will sometimes have:

If you’ve used an iPhone, you’ll know how frustratingly spotty its wireless coverage can be.

Fact is, wireless carriers such as AT&T (which serves the iPhone) are desperately searching for ways to unload the huge amount of traffic that are hitting their networks from iPhone and other smartphone owners. These users are slurping up large amounts of bandwidth to do things like browse the Internet and watch videos.

Ubiquisys is getting ready to attack cell phone dead zones and overcrowded 3G networks around the world with its femtocell technology. Today it announced it has raised $11 million more from existing investors, which it will use to support the service as it moves from testing to soft launch.

Femtocells are small devices that let cell phones tap the Internet in places where wireless cellular service is weak or unavailable. Calls are routed by low-power antenna through an existing DSL or cable router, or through an all-in-one device (such as Netgear’s Femtocell Voice Gateway) that includes both the router and the femtocell.

Femtocells haven’t taken off in a big way yet, but wireless carriers are definitely interested in femtocells’ ability to take a load off cellular networks. Last September, Ubiquisys and Japanese mobile carrier Softbank launched the first commercial 3G femtocells, using “ZoneGate” technology that allows devices to communicate and determine the best radio frequency for routing to the Internet.

Swindon, U.K.-based Ubiquisys is looking for partnerships around the world with more carriers, who often charge a monthly fee for the service. In exchange, customers may get perks, such as unlimited calling when using the femtocell. The idea is that the consumer can save money by nixing a local phone line, because the cell phone is reliable enough to replace it, while the carrier gets to ease the stress on its network.

The company’s chief executive, Chris Gilbert, said there’s been a spike in femtocell interest over the last few months, either signaling a possible economic recovery or a need from carriers to start addressing their network issues. Even in the United States, where femtocell interest was once driven coverage dead zones, the explosion in smartphone use has put a strain on wireless carriers. The renewed interest around the world has helped Ubiquisys raise its most recent round of funding, which now totals $53 million since August 2006.

Ubiquisy has backing from Accel Partners, Advent Venture Partners, Atlas Venture, T-Mobile Venture Fund and, most notably, Google, which invested $25 million in the company two years ago.

Gilbert said Ubiquisys faces competition from Huawei and Alcatel-Lucent, among other smaller ventures, but those two companies don’t focus specifically on femtocell. As such, Gilbert said Ubiquisys is growing horizontally to a variety of companies and products, rather than vertically.

In addition to getting its technology into router-like devices, Gilbert wants Ubiquisys to work with TV and set-top box makers, allowing femtocell to cover more convenient areas of the home.

PC World Creativity: Virtual Wireless Digital Picture Frame Perfection!

Danny Allen at PC World.com has created the Perfect Wireless Digital Picture Frame!

(This image was created by Bryan Christie Design, and what a good job!)

Mr. Allen took the best parts of several wireless/digital picture frames available today, and put them together to create his idea of the perfect wireless photo frame, and after reading his article I can only quote the Beach Boys and say, “Wouldn’t it be nice. . . .!”

He’s quilted together some Kodak OLED, some SmartParts SP8PRT,  some Polaroid Pogo, a few Motorola femtocells, a little VoIP, a little bit of this, a little bit of that. . . .and the result was simply, WOW!

You can read Danny Allen’s creative article on the February 5, 2009 page of PC World.com.

CES Innovations Design and Engineering Award: Motorola CDMA Femtocells

The concept of the femtocell has fascinated me ever since the September 25 post about the Motorola digital picture frame that used femtocells.

(The femtocell is explained on this website.)

Apparently, I’m not the only person to be impressed by Motorola’s wireless touch-screen digital picture frame with a built-in femtocell: KeepMeConnected© Femtocells-CDMA 9100 Series has been selected as an honoree of the CES Innovations 2009 Design and Engineering Awards, in the Furniture product category.

The CDMA Femtocell 9100 Series includes a SIP VoIP soft phone and provides enhanced mobile phone coverage inside the home.  It also allows users to deploy a femtocell connected through a broadband connection for optimal wireless performance and coverage.  The device also serves as a touch-screen digital picture frame.

With this, consumers can have both a multi-use phone for both landline and cell, with one bill and a single service provider.  The integrated digital picture frame allows consumers to display images that reflect their personal style.

You will find the KeepMeConnected© Femtocells – CDMA 9100 in Motorola’s booth 8545 and the Innovations Design and Engineering Showcase at the Sands Expo and Convention Center at the Venetian, booth 72062.

Now, pay attention to this video, and you’ll see what these things actually can do.