Introducing the Picwing Smart Frame (YC S08)

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.

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...

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

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.

Picwing (or <i>someone</i>) should make the reverse of Eye-Fi (<a href="http://www.eye.fi/" rel="nofollow">http://www.eye.fi/</a> ; it's a WiFi enabled SD card that transfers photos <i>from</i> your digital camera to your computer).<p>The reverse would just be a similar card (probably identical hardware, just different software) that can be plugged into <i>any</i> frame, and automagically download images from Picwing's website, or an RSS feed, or whatever.<p>I'd buy it.

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.

How much does this thing cost?

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

Wish I'd ordered one of these - I just got my parents a Kodak wireless frame (<a href="http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/B0016NOTOI" rel="nofollow">http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/B0016NOTOI</a>) 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.<p>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.

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?<p>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.<p>So this isn't in production yet?

This is cool stuff. I think picwing will do great as a kind of clock for any kind of data, driven of the internet.<p>For ex.<p>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.

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

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 :(

Will it show photos from a Media RSS feed?

It has it's own e-mail address?<p>Great - what happens when a prankster starts mailing Goatse to my living room?

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

Technical specs -- please!!!

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

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

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

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