Wi-Fi Enabled Televisions Among Highest Growth of New Product Introduction

SOAWorld Magazine has posted a fascinating article about the “1H09 Wi-Fi Products Tracker Database” directory:

Research and Markets has announced the addition of the “1H09 Wi-Fi Products Tracker Database” directory to their offering.

The Wi-Fi Products Tracker Database provides summary data of branded WLAN end-products by product name, vendor, 802.11 technology, category, and subcategory in pivot-tables for quick analysis of trends. Detailed data is provided for in-depth analysis of product releases from 2007 to 1H09

Wi-Fi Connectivity Becoming Pervasive on Devices. Over 1000 New Wi-Fi Products Are Launched in 2008

Wi-Fi enabled products continue to proliferate across nearly all categories, including computing, networking, consumer electronics and mobile devices. Over 1,000 new products were launched with Wi-Fi in 2008; 2009 promises to surpass that mark, reports this latest report.

Among the key growth areas is stationary consumer electronics (CE) devices with Wi-Fi. Stationary CE devices include products that require access to a power source, such as televisions and digital photo frames. In 2008, manufacturers introduced nearly 100 new Wi-Fi enabled stationary CE products, up from 22 in 2007. Introductions are increasing in 2009, with over 55 in the first half of 2009.

Digital photo frames and digital audio players with Wi-Fi were among the key device types to see a surge in product introductions in 2008 compared to 2007. In 2009, Wi-Fi enabled digital televisions are among the highest growth of new product introductions for stationary CE devices. Philips consumer electronics was among the most aggressive competitors, pushing an array of new Wi-Fi-equipped digital audio players and digital TVs. In the digital photo frame category, adoption of Wi-Fi in 2008 new product introductions was broad-based across 17 different competitors

Recent research found the following:

Hewlett Packard had the most Wi-Fi enabled new product introductions of any manufacturer in 2008, and nearly tripled their new product introductions in 2008 compared to 2007.
Cisco leads the market in first half of 2009 with 802.11n-enabled product introductions overall. Samsung electronics leads market in 802.11n consumer electronics.
802.11 b/g solutions are still the dominant Wi-Fi technology in new product introductions in 2008. However, 802.11 Draft n 2.0 solutions are gaining rapidly, and are expected to become the most popular Wi-Fi technology across most product categories by the end of 2009.
Philips, looking to grab a market leadership position in Internet-enabled television sets, released more Wi-Fi enabled television sets than the rest of the market combined.

Recent research, 1H09 Wi-Fi Products Database is part of the new “Wi-Fi Product Database”. The database provides detailed tracking of the progression of Wi-Fi adoption in computing, consumer electronics, mobile phones and other electronic devices that are announced.

The database includes a detailed log of branded WLAN end-products by product name, vendor, 802.11 technology, product category, and subcategory. The data is provided in formatted pivot-tables for analysis of technology and product trends, as well as competitors.

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.

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.