

Introducing the Picwing Smart Frame (YC S08) - edawerd
http://www.picwing.com/blog/?p=22

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Alex3917
My grandfather is 90 and has parkinsons and I've been looking for something
like this for him. He is still sharp, but he was never good with computers and
lately he's pretty much lost whatever ability he had. The key thing I need is
the ability to send him podcasts and videos of booktalks that queue up
sequentially as if they were blog posts in an RSS feed. What I also need is
the ability to check online to see if he's already viewed something, and if so
the ability to get rid of it and add more stuff to his queue.

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brfox
Try <http://www.ceiva.com> My grandma loves the frame! it only needs dialup
and just cycles through the pictures all day. Youu can control which pictures
are on tthe frame and it updates every night. she absolutely loves it.

EDIT: woops, I now see you want videos... the ceiva frame doesn't do videos or
audio, just pics.

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markbao
This is awesome. Picwing, any chance of an article on your journey to
manufacturing? Engineering the frame, developing the software, finding
manufacturers that will work with startups...

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gommm
I second that, I really would like to see the experience of a startup getting
into manufacturing (especially finding the manufacturers and how you work with
them)

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Prrometheus
I third that. I admire that these guys went after a difficult idea
(hardware/software combined product) and didn't just settle for yet another
web app. Karma will reward them, because their revenue model is simple and it
will be much harder for copy-cats to steal their market.

Also, it looks bad-ass (if a little unresponsive).

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noonespecial
Be careful with "smart frame". There are 9 active trademarks with those words,
several of which pertain to picture frames.

We've recently learned a lesson about trademarks here. Even simply using the
words to in your product description (and not necessarily a product name or
slogan) will run you afoul of trademark holders. Also, trademark attorneys
will often fish for billable hours with overzealous trademark enforcement.

I don't know how far you've looked into it so far. The product is awesome.
Make sure you've got your bases covered, there's going to be some jealousy.

~~~
robg
Besides, language shapes debate. Why call it what others call their more
inferior products? Seems like a good opportunity for a new name/product
category.

Feed frame? Stream frame? App frame?

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aswanson
Go to your nearby Walmart or Best Buy and ask a customer there if feed frame,
stream frame, or app frame means anything to them. You need something more
basic that the average person would quickly grok. [EDIT: But it's not like I
have any better ideas.]

~~~
robg
A few years ago, would they have responded to "smart frame"? Why be limited in
a name (if they can use it) by the poor technologies of others?

Life frame? Live frame? Living frame?

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aswanson
I like Life Frame. What about Web Frame? Nah, Life Frame beats that one.

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mojombo
I'm not that interested in the photo sharing side of the Picwing, but it looks
like this could become a pretty badass little device for all sorts of
networked display/control applications. Will the OS or API be open for hackers
to develop and deploy their own applications? If so, I could totally get on
board with this.

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echamussy
Yes, we are planning to release an API to develop new applications for the
frame. We have done some work already in that regard but we want to have
something very solid before releasing it.

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mojombo
Awesome. The other thing, and I expect you have this in mind already, is that
if I were to buy one, I'd want a thinner more modern bezel instead of a
picture-framey one. Are you planning to make different styles/colors available
in the future?

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edawerd
Def. We'd like to have something that looks a lot slicker in the future.

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tlrobinson
Picwing (or _someone_ ) should make the reverse of Eye-Fi
(<http://www.eye.fi/> ; it's a WiFi enabled SD card that transfers photos
_from_ your digital camera to your computer).

The reverse would just be a similar card (probably identical hardware, just
different software) that can be plugged into _any_ frame, and automagically
download images from Picwing's website, or an RSS feed, or whatever.

I'd buy it.

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paul9290
Eye-Fi & PicWing need to team up!

Take a photo(s) from dig camera and instantly it's published on my and my
friend's PicWing compatible devices. From photo frames, to TVs to screensavers
to Tivos ..Boxee .. Windows Media Center...flickr accounts, facebook profile,
etc...

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staunch
If you ever need a fallback idea you could try turning Picwing into a
monitoring tool for NOCs (network/server health) or financial systems. I think
you'd have an easy time selling lots of units to both groups of customers, and
there's probably a lot of other people who would need a cheap display device
for monitoring purposes.

~~~
echamussy
That's a great idea. Thanks for the suggestion !! We have also thought about
using them as kiosks for events like conferences or for taking orders in
different businesses.

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greendestiny
Keep your prices down and your APIs open and people will do this stuff for
you, and feel like great hackers for doing it. Kiosks seem like the kind of
thing entrepreneurs love to dream up business ideas for and none of them seem
to make much impact - that's a purely unscientific intuition.

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gruseom
_Keep your prices down and your APIs open and people will do this stuff for
you_

A mere upvote can't express how good I think this advice is.

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edawerd
This advice will be well noted. Thanks.

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tptacek
How much does this thing cost?

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axod
Out of date review:

"One major flaw would be the price issue - it costs a whopping $249 for a 7″
Picwing digital photo frame"

Maybe it's come down by now, but at that price, may as well buy a netbook.

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mechanical_fish
Well, given that this thing appears to _be_ a netbook from a hardware
standpoint, it's hard to complain if it costs about as much as a netbook!

Before you conclude that the only thing preventing people from owning netbooks
instead of appliances is the price, be sure to spend several hours pondering
the lessons of Slashdot's infamous initial review of the iPod: " _No wireless.
Less space than a nomad. Lame._ "

[http://apple.slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=01/10/23/1816257...](http://apple.slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=01/10/23/1816257&tid=107)

I think this frame is pretty exciting, even if the Chumby is more cuddly.

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aswanson
This one is even better:

 _Raise your hand if you have iTunes ...

Raise your hand if you have a FireWire port ...

Raise your hand if you have both ...

Raise your hand if you have $400 to spend on a cute Apple device ...

There is Apple's market. Pretty slim, eh? I don't see many sales in the future
of iPod. _

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jpd
Those were legitimate criticisms at the time. I certainly would have never got
one if they hadn't started using USB.

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tptacek
The Picwing is also not as much of a breakthrough as the iPod was, to make an
obvious point.

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jpd
Yeah, a music player that plays music. Novel idea. What's the breakthrough
about it?

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kqr2
Besides the larger display, does anyone know how this compares to the chumby?

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echamussy
This is Enrique from picwing. In addition to the larger display, the picwing
frame runs on a faster hardware platform, supports Actionscript 3 for
application development and doesn't require the user to go to a different
computer to customize and install widgets. Eventually we would like to release
an application store (running on the frame itself) for people to install new
apps for their frame. We are ourselves big fans of the chumby and we have
tried to learn from its advantages and shortcomings.

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jim-greer
Wish I'd ordered one of these - I just got my parents a Kodak wireless frame
(<http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/B0016NOTOI>) and setting it up to pull
grandbaby pictures from Flickr was painful. Aside from the predictably
terrible software design, it's not a touch screen - it has this weird touch
strip on the bottom and right of the screen.

For my parents baby pics/videos plus easy access to NPR podcasts in the
kitchen would be very attractive. One button videoconferencing would be very
cool too. Good luck with the manufacturing.

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old-gregg
This is really cool. Can I ssh into it and load up my own programs to run on
it or show an arbitrary web page?

As a true geek and photography hobbyist I wouldn't even think of using it for
pictures (LCD, I bet, is terrible - even laptops don't come with decent LCDs
anymore) but man... there is so much stuff I could use this for! From weather
to error notifications from my production servers, delivered right to on top
of my fireplace. Sweeeet.

So this isn't in production yet?

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edawerd
Well, it _is_ running on Linux, so you could pretty much do whatever you want
with it. But, we officially only allow running of flash programs that are
built using our (loose) framework, so that it integrates nicely with our
operating environment.

We did a limited production run, but are currently not producing them anymore
so that we can concentrate on software development more.

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sonink
This is cool stuff. I think picwing will do great as a kind of clock for any
kind of data, driven of the internet.

For ex.

1\. A web startup could use it to showcase their website metrics
(visits,pageviews etc.) in real time. 2\. Could be used to show updates about
a game - cricket scores for example will be a big hit. Especially inside an
office where television is not accessible.

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Andys
Even just having a photo frame that also displays tomorrow's weather and an
NTP-synced clock is a great but simple step forward for photo frames

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axod
Emailing to the frame sounds kinda cool, but if this takes off, expect to see
a _lot_ of spam photos inviting you to purchase viagra, or go to their porn
site etc.

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edawerd
You can specify which emails are allowed to send pictures to your frame. We
have some software that will filter out forged headers on emails as well. So
far, it hasn't been a problem for us.

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axod
Ah that's cool. I'm just thinking of possible issues in the future. Giving one
of these to a grandparent, and then them being emailed goatse etc would not be
a good thing.

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vizard
Will orders be limited to US or will it be international? I am from Canada,
the land where most cool tech gadgets dont end up or are a year late :(

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brlewis
Will it show photos from a Media RSS feed?

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Angostura
It has it's own e-mail address?

Great - what happens when a prankster starts mailing Goatse to my living room?

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danw
Photosharing sites like flickr have autogenerated email addresses for mobile
upload and this doesn't seem to be an issue.

Also it looks like emails to this device goes to the 'messages' app for review
first [is this correct?]

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danw
Looks really great. What are the physical dimensions of it? As compared to an
iPhone or a netbook for example?

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bprater
Technical specs -- please!!!

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gommm
I would definitely use it as a way to see analytics data on a website

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edawerd
Noted. A quick search seems to reveal there isn't a google analytics API.
Anyone know if there are APIs for any other major analytics suite?

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brandnewlow
You can have Google analytics e-mail reports to you.

Could you just have them sent to the picwing every hour or so and you guys
display the data somehow?

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mattmaroon
Might want to edit the loading time for the YouTube video out.

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tptacek
So that bloggers can call you on it the same way they did when Apple did the
same thing. Nothing like a little drama to spice up a product launch.

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mattmaroon
I kind of expect loading times on stuff, especially a video, but I don't want
to sit through 5 seconds of it when watching a demo. It's boring. People won't
hold Picwing to the same standards as Apple.

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dilanj
That is sweet, also Boxee would be a great app for it.

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edawerd
Boxee would really be a cool app for it. Also, we thought about a TV-guide
application on the frame as well, so it could be a companion to your TV.

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nailer
How about an alarm clock? There's more people who use alarm clocks than have
twitter accounts. Add your existing weather app, so I can see what to wear in
the morning.

Also a simple Facebook feed? Using the Python API you can do this in a few
minutes, give me a buzz if you want me to paste example code.

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ph0rque
> How about an alarm clock?

Yup, with sleep.fm integration.

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eli_s
Wow! great device looking forward to seeing it at my local store one day :)

