TOSHIBA BRINGS HIGH STYLE AND INNOVATION HOME WITH NEW DIGITAL MEDIA FRAMES FEATURING Wi-Fi® CONNECTIVITY

Home Theater Forum has posted a great article about Toshiba and Thinking Screen Media’s FrameChannel:

Through its partnership with FrameChannel®, Toshiba’s Digital Media Frames deliver digital personalized content including weather, news, sports and photos

Atlanta — September 9, 2009 — Toshiba America Consumer Products L.L.C. (“Toshiba”), a market leader in home entertainment products announced cutting-edge advancements for today’s connected home. Taking photo sharing to new heights, Toshiba’s Digital Media Frames deliver real-time information through its partnership with FrameChannel®, such as personalized weather, traffic, and sports scores as well as music and video to any room in the connected home.

Toshiba is creating a new trend-setting product category with its new Digital Media Frame models. Picture the possibilities of a fun, interactive product that not only displays photos but also makes it possible for users to automatically share priceless memories with friends and family anywhere in the world thanks to FrameChannel®. Simply set up a FrameChannel® account and upload images or link favorite photos, music and videos from popular sites like Flickr®, Photobucket®, and Facebook®. Friends and family can stay updated with new photos when their frames are connected to the account.

“Toshiba is dedicated to creating innovative and entertaining products to enhance the needs of today’s connected home,” said Jodi Sally, Vice President of Marketing, Digital A/V Group. “Through Toshiba’s partnership with FrameChannel®, our new Digital Media Frames allow the user to not only display and share photos, but also customize their frame with personalized digital content, all in one sleek package.”

Not Just a Photo Frame

The feature-packed channels available through Toshiba’s FrameChannel® partnership can be customized to an individual’s passions. Currently there are over 1000 free channels to choose from in 19 categories with selections like People.com, Men’s Tennis, 3-Day Forecast, Stock Quotes and Facebook®, to name a few. Users can subscribe to their favorite channels and their Toshiba Digital Media Frame will automatically update with real-time information.

“FrameChannel® was created to provide a wide range of personalized content to the next generation of digital devices,” said Alan Phillips, co-founder and CEO of Frame Media. (FrameMedia is now called Thinking Screen Media) “With over one thousand current channels, FrameChannel® subscribers can find virtually anything they’re looking for and Toshiba’s new Digital Media Frames take this market to the next level with their intuitive interface and great looking design.”

In a true function meets fashion manner, Toshiba’s tradition of high-gloss design and brilliant screens adorn the frames; Toshiba’s Digital Media Frames offer rich, vibrant, high-resolution screens that make photos pop with crisp color. A tilt senor automatically adjusts to view photos in portrait or landscape formats when the frame is turned on. Easy-to-navigate home screens boast touch sensitive controls that light up when pressed. Home screens are customizable with a calendar, clock and streamed online feature channels to match personal interests and hobbies.

The new Digital Media Frames were announced at House Beautiful Magazine’s Kitchen of the Year in New York City, an event celebrating the intersection of dining, entertaining and design. Kitchen of the Year is an ideal venue to showcase how Toshiba’s Digital Media Frames can seamlessly bring engaging content to every room of the digital home.

Toshiba’s Digital Media Frames come in two sizes – 8-inch frames available in black (DMF82XKU) or white (DMF82XWU) with an acrylic front finish and eye-catching reflective trim and black 10-inch frames (DMF102XKU) offering a striking faceplate design and a slim profile.

Pricing and Availability:

Digital Media Frames

White 8-inch Frame, DMF82XWU (currently available, MSRP $179.99)

Black 8-inch Frame, DMF82XKU (currently available, MSRP $179.99)

Black 10-inch Frame, DMF102XKU (currently available, MSRP $229.99)

About Toshiba America Consumer Products, L.L.C.

Toshiba America Consumer Products, L.L.C. is owned by Toshiba America, Inc., a subsidiary of Toshiba Corporation, a world leader in high technology products with subsidiaries worldwide. Toshiba is a leading manufacturer of a full line of home entertainment products, including flat panel TVs, Hi-Definition Blu-ray Disc players, TV/DVD Combination products and portable devices. Toshiba America Consumer Products, L.L.C. is headquartered in Wayne, New Jersey. For additional information, please visit www.tacp.toshiba.com or www.toshibatv.com.

Important Notes:Wi-Fi® can be used to connect to FrameChannel® and Picasa™ services.

Use of FrameChannel® or Picasa™ services for uploading requires a personal computer and a

working Internet connection. To receive FrameChannel® or Picasa™ services on your Digital

Media Frame, you need a working Wi-Fi® connection. These services are provided by

third-parties and are subject to change or discontinuation without notice. Toshiba makes no

warranties, representations, or assurances about the content, availability or functionality of third

party services.

DRM-protected files cannot be played back. For supported storage media and file format types,

please refer to owner’s manual at www.tacp.toshiba.com

1GB (gigabyte) = 230 = 1,073,741,824 bytes. Available storage capacity will be less.

Facebook is a registered trademark of Facebook Inc.

Flickr is a registered trademark of Yahoo!, Inc.

FrameChannel is a registered trademark of Frame Media, Inc.

Wi-Fi is a registered mark of the Wi-Fi Alliance.

All others are trademarks or registered trademarks of their respective companies.

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.

Wireless/Digital Photo Frame Popularity is Growing FAST, Esp. With FRAMECHANNEL!

The author of DigitalSmartFrames.com has written a compelling post on Life to the Fullest about the fast-growing popularity of wireless/digital picture frames, in particular the Kodak Easyshare wireless frames, which use FrameChannel:

Owners of digital frames know that one of the key features is ease in transferring pictures from your camera or laptop to your digital picture frame. Most digital photo frames require the use of a memory card such as a Secure Digital card to do this, however Kodak digital picture frames such as the Kodak EASYSHARE W820 and W1020 greatly simplify this step using wireless technology.

Digital frame popularity is growing fast as consumers realize their benefits over traditional picture frames and as manufacturers add features and lower prices. Digital picture frames enable consumers to get the significant amount of digital pictures they have stored computers hard drives and out on display in our homes and offices. Just as improved LCD technology has made digital televisions clearer and more popular, consumers now can display slide shows of pictures in their digital LCD frames with the same quality as prints, and get the benefits of dynamically changing pictures. Many even support other medial such as music and video.

Of course with the benefits of digital frames are new aspects to deal with, such as power supply, memory, and the transfer of photos from their source to the digital photo frame. Most models of digital frames allow you to transfer your photos either straight from your camera or from your computer by providing memory card slots. These usually support a variety of types of memory devices: Secure Digital (SD), Multimedia Card (MMC), Memory Stick (MS), or Compact Flash (CF) – pretty much the same type of memory cards that go in your camera.

This means you can take pictures in your digital camera, pop out the memory card, and then stick it straight into your digital frame to start viewing pictures. Many digital frames lack their own internal memory, which means you have to permanently use a memory device whenever displaying pictures in your digital frame. Digital photo frames with internal memory allows you transfer the picture files from the memory card to the frame’s internal memory (and store the pictures permanently on the frame). Another common practice is first transferring pictures from you camera to your computer, and using a picture management application to enhance them, group them, and prepare them for transfer to your digital frame. Many digital frames have a USB port for this reason since transferring picture files from a computer is often done via a USB flash drive.

A more recently offered feature in digital frames involves the use of wireless technology. This allows for pictures and other information to be transferred to the frame wirelessly, tremendously simplifying the picture transfer process. A wireless digital picture frame means that consumer can change the pictures displayed on their frame much more frequently, which really is what digital frames are all about – dynamic display of digital content that never gets old. By eliminating the need to put pictures on a memory device and going through the processes of transferring them from camera to computer to frame, wireless digital picture frames promise to be the preferred type of digital picture frames in the future.

Two leading wireless digital photo frames are the Kodak EASYSHARE W820, and the larger Kodak EASYSHARE W1020 digital frame. The 8-inch W820 and 10-inch W1020 come with tons of great features, but their wireless capabilities differentiate them from other Kodak digital frames. Best application of these frames is with a Flickr account, a popular online photo sharing website, which enables you to configure the frame to automatically move photos from your Flickr account to your W820 or W1020 wirelessly using a capability called ‘Photostream’. This means as you add pictures to various albums in your Flickr account, you easily pick and chose those you want to show up on your Kodak wireless digital frame, and let Photostream go from there. Since Flickr is a great application for downloading and storing new pictures as you add them to your collection, this makes it easy to keep fresh pictures on your Kodak digital photo frame.

Wireless digital frames bring promise for even more applications for these devices because the ability to transfer information to them wireless creates even more possibilities. The Kodak W820 and W1020 models for example also offer a wireless enabled service called FRAMECHANNEL, which can stream information such as news and weather to the frame using something similar to RSS feeds. This means your digital photo album is not long just for photos, but instead an information portal, also great for businesses and service industries who want to put digital display in places such as lobbies or use as advertising portals.

Kodak is not the only maker of wireless digital picture frames, Samsung, Ceiva, and others have all made similar models with similar features. But the Kodak EASYSHARE W820 and W1020 deserve strong consideration.

Regardless of what frame you choose, if you are getting ready to buy a digital frame, you’d be wise to consider a wireless digital picture frame.

D-Link and Cellcom and FrameChannel: Oh MY!

How many pictures are stored in your cell phone?  A lot, I betcha.  Who gets to see them?  Um, you?  And maybe whoever you’re having lunch with?  Many of those cell phone pictures are great photographs, and isn’t it a shame they’re stuck in your phone where so few people can experience them?

I’ve written many times about the award-winning D-Link, and what an absolutely superior wireless picture frame they have, and everybody knows I’m FrameChannel’s biggest fan.  Now, thanks to D-Link, FrameChannel, and a phone carrier called Cellcom,  people can send their cell phone pictures straight to their D-Link wireless digital picture frame.  Take a picture with your phone, and it instantly appears on your living room wall.  Magic?  Wireless picture frames are the closest thing to magic we’ve got, so far!

Remember that the D-Link DSM-210 is pre-loaded with FrameChannel software, right out of the box.  You don’t have to load it yourself.  FrameChannel can be used with most of the best wireless picture frames, and it works with most photo-sharing websites, such as Picasa, Facebook, Flickr, Photobucket, and even your very own personal photo storage file.

All that, plus dozens of awesome RSS feeds, and the ability to send your cell phone pictures straight back to your D-Link wireless frame, via FrameChannel, thanks to Cellcom!

According to John Meaney, director of field sales for D-Link Systems, Inc, “The D-Link wireless digital photo frame is designed to enhance the home entertainment experience by allowing users to view their favorite photos easily and conveniently virtually anywhere in the home.  By offering our frames with FrameChannel photo sharing technology, Cellcom is taking that experience to the next level, adding another dimension of fun and value to its customers.”

Rob Riordan, executive vice president and director of corporate development at Cellcom, says that “The ability to take photos with your cell phone makes it quick and easy to capture unexpected special moments.  And now, the collaboration between Cellcom, D-Link and FrameChannel has made it simple for Grandma in Florida to see photos of the family taken in Green Bay within minutes.”

Dorothy Gale would have said it thusly:  D-Link and Cellcom and FrameChannel:  Oh MY!