Thai Restaurant Serves Outstanding Cuisine with a Side of FrameChannel!

The Indianapolis Examiner.com has a wonderful article about a Thai restaurant in California that really knows its social media!  Ting’s Thai Kitchen even has a wireless digital picture frame in the window, tuned in to its very own FrameChannel show!

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HIDDEN VALLEY LAKE, CA – Ting’s Thai Kitchen is not just another family-run restaurant in Lake County, CA. It is the winner of the 2008 Lake County Restaurant Challenge – a special competition put on by the county’s only TV station, Channel 8 Public Access Television.  Videographer Kit Dee organized and videotaped the competition between local restaurants. Here one restaurant challenged another with a food offering. The public was invited to visit the competing restaurants, taste the cuisine and then go online to vote for the winner. When all was said and done, one restaurant was left standing – Ting’s Thai Kitchen. Believe it or not, this little restaurant received the most favorable votes from the general public, countywide.

Whereas most restaurants focus solely on food, Ting’s Thai Kitchen focuses also on its surrounding community. It actually makes a special effort to attract more business by making its venue more beneficial to one-the-go business people. For example, shortly after the restaurant opened two years ago, it became a Wi-Fi hot spot. Now, the public could not only come into the restaurant to eat wonderful Thai cuisine, they could bring a laptop or other mobile device to check email, surf the Web and make VOIP phone calls. They could do this while waiting for their meal to be prepared. Having the restaurant be a Wi-Fi hot spot also benefited the restaurant by making daily contact with Thailand quick-and-easy.

The famous blue Twitter bird beckons the public to become Twitter followers of Ting’s Thai Kitchen for fresh seafood specials.

With Twitter.com making micro-blogging popular around the world, Ting’s owner, Charlie McFarling, decided his restaurant needed an online following for his restaurant specials – especially the seafood. Consequently, whenever McFarling gets ready to make a special trip to Santa Rosa to visit his seafood wholesaler, he first announces his intention on Twitter to his growing online following. Consequently, he can pre-sale his seafood before he even orders it.

If you visit Ting’s Thai Kitchen, you may notice a reliance on technological innovation before you even walk inside the restaurant. Occasionally, there is a digital photo frame in the window. That digital photo frame has been used to showcase pictures of various Thai food dishes as well as show off a promotional video of Thailand. What may surprise you is how this innovation works. Often the slide show you see comes from the Internet’s Frame Channel. What does that mean? It means Ting’s is actually developing its own remote network of slide show programs. How is that possible? It’s possible because the digital photo frame is Wi-Fi enabled. McFarling can actually upload slide shows remotely from any computer to his Frame Channel Site and have them showcased through that digital photo frame in his store’s window.

Indeed, reliance upon the Internet has empowered Ting’s Thai Kitchen to do some pretty clever things. Another clever idea is to offer “no-coupon” discounts on meals. The restaurant has decided to give special discounts on group gatherings for birthdays and anniversaries. Every person in the group gets a 15% discount on their meal. However, for the group to get the discount, arrangements have to be made a month in advance. To do that, customers must provide Ting’s with their name, birth or anniversary date via email. Just visit the Ting’s Thai Kitchen Squidoo lens to make that magic happen. Ting’s takes the email information and places it into it’s very own 30 Boxes Online Calendar. This amazing calendar actually notifies Ting’s via email a month in advance of the special occasion. That way, Ting’s can contact the customer and make special arrangements for a party.

Beginning in October, Ting’s will be uplifting its local community in an educational sense. The restaurant will be introducing a Social Media Sunday Brunch. Here a delicious meal will be followed by a special presentation on the benefits of the Internet’s social media space. Suzanne La Faver, a professor of Public Relations at Golden State University, will be on hand for the kick-off presentation. Ting’s is a small restaurant. The brunch itself will be limited to just 12 people for maximum educational benefit. The cost for the meal and the presentation is just $25.00. For more information and to make reservations, call CDMM – Synergistic Business Marketing at (707) 709-8605.

Kogan Wireless Digital Picture Frame Is Compatible with Twitter, Facebook, Photobucket, and Flickr

Kogan’s new 8-inch LCD high resolution (800 x 600) wireless digital picture frame allows you to send your pictures to almost any social media network!

According to Kogan founder Ruslan Kogan, “Social Networking has become extremely popular.  With the release of the Kogan Wi-Fi Wireless digital Photo Frame we have looked to combine photo sharing capabilities of social network websites and the digital photo frame.  The world of technology is about immediacy and through being able to rapidly upload photos to your digital photo frame, gives you the opportunity to view the latest photos of your family and friends straight away.”

Customers will also be able to upload digital pictures via email with the new Kogan frame, for each frame has its own email address.

Besides being able to get pictures from Facebook, Flickr, MySpace, and other social media sites, you can also manage your images with Kogan’s free web-hosted service for the central management of your pictures.

If you have an iPhone, you can download the FREE SeeFrame app from Kogan’s App Store, install, and send photos directly from your iPhone!

If several family members or friends have the Kogan wireless frame, these users can set up a single email aaddress that will be shared by all the frames, making photo sharing even easier and more convenient.

The Kogan wireless frame is also environmentally sound, for it can be programmed to turn off automatically at night, to save power and protect the screen.

This Kogan 8″ wireless digital photo frame will be available in July of 2009.

iGala Wi-Fi Linux Based Photo Frame

ThinkGeek put the word out about the new iGala Wi-Fi Linux-based photo frame!

Unlike other digital photo frames that just accept memory cards and show photos, the iGala has a brain inside its rectangular head. Use the touchscreen interface to configure the iGala to connect to your wi-fi network, then the iGala can do all kinds of smart things like login to a Gmail account and display any e-mailed photos on its hi-res 800×600 screen.

Of course the iGala can pull your photos automatically from Flickr and you can connect to Windows Live FrameIt or FrameChannel if you’re looking for a free web based interface to automatically push photos, news and traffic to your frame. No PC is required because the iGala is essentially a mini touchscreen computer running Linux.

FrameChannel or FrameIt?

The iGala frame comes in two models, one for FrameChannel service (http://www.framechannel.com) and one for Windows Live FrameIt service (http://frameit.live.com). They are both customizable web service platforms to manage the intelligent delivery of personalized content to wireless digital picture frames.

You are not required to use either of these two services. The iGala is perfectly capable of receiving photos sent via e-mail and handling Flickr RSS feeds of photos all by itself.

FrameChannel offers a library of hundreds of channels of content, all optimized for viewing on wireless picture frames. These include text based channels that are converted to images such as news headlines, live weather forecasts, sports scores, and horoscopes as well as image content from sources like National Geographic, AP Images and other galleries shot by the top photographers from around the world. This content is then married with each user’s personal photos that can be uploaded to FrameChannel or pulled from a variety of supported photo sharing sites including Flickr, Picasa, Webshots, Facebook and others. Each user selects the channels that interest them, sets the rules for each channel and FrameChannel applies its rules engine to create a unique content stream for each user that is updated continually. The iGala frame also features a simple One-Click setup for FrameChannel service.

Microsoft’s Windows Live FrameIt service lets users customize a content feed that is delivered via RSS which is similar to FrameChannel. Users can customize weather data, news sources and their own photos via Live Spaces or SmugMug. Once users customized the channel on FrameIt website, they can input its Collection Name on iGala to display its content.

The main difference between the two services is the scope of their image content collections. iGala users will be able to switch between FrameIt and FrameChannel services by performing an easy firmware refresh on the iGala frame.

Product Features

• Wi-Fi enabled photo frame can pull photos from Gmail and Flicker and has touch screen interface for network configuration
• 8″ 4:3 800X600 Digital LCD
• No PC Needed for Setup, No Subscription Fees for Online Use
• Full Screen Touchscreen Interface
• No PC Needed for Setup
• Linux based operating system
• Wifi 802.11b/g with WEP, WPA and WPA2
• 1GB Internal Memory Stores over 5,000 images
• Auto Synchronization with Flickr Photo Sets
• Access to Flickr Private Photos
• Email Photos to Frame
• Windows Live FrameIt or FrameChannel Support for Photos, News and Weather
• Insert SD media card to display photos from the card
• USB Mass Storage Connectivity
• MP3 Support to Play Music
• Auto Power Saving
• 110V/250V AC Adapter
• Clock and Alarm Function

Shogo Wireless Digital Frame Adds Facebook Access

Last January, I posted here about the new Shogo wireless picture frame, and agreed with the predictions that by 2011, half of all digital frames sold worldwide will be wireless.  I still agree with this prediction, and I will add my own two cents’ worth to it:  The best digital picture frames are the wireless digital picture frames.  Best, most practical, capable of displaying the most pictures, and just plain, well, BEST.  I personally own a wireless digital frame AND a regular digital frame, and I can tell you from my own experience that the wireless frame is so very much BETTER.  It’s a lot easier to sit at my computer and click, than to remove the memory card, insert it in my computer’s port, slide new pictures onto it, remove, re-insert it into the picture frame, and program it again.  Give me “click” any time.  More and more households are going wireless, and it just makes sense to have a wireless picture frame!

The Shogo frame now has an upgrade that adds Facebook to the list of social media sites accessable by the Shogo wireless frame.  The new software also allows Shogo owners to set their photo sharing sites to “private,” so only those select few will be able to view their pictures.

The software upgrade will be available online for free for all existing Shogo frame owners by the end of this month.

For more information about the Shogo/Facebook connection, read the article right here on MarketNews.