CEIVA view point FRAMED

Posts Tagged ‘iPhone’

With each passing day there seems to be yet another digital picture frame being introduced to the marketplace. Typically what’s offered as “new” to the market is really another company doing what others have done before. However two new products have been released that takes digital frames to a new place… literally. One is the Hama Digital Photo Album the other is Sondata’s Shake –A-Pix portable mini album.

Hama Digital Photo Album

This digital “frame” is actually an electronic album used to store your favorite pictures to have ready to show when needed.

The Hama Digital Photo Album, with a 7” screen, it can fit in a pocket or purse. Its screen displays picture formats like JPEGS in 800×480 pixel resolutions. Operating on rechargeable batteries, its view time will last about 2 ½ hours on a full charge.

Like most digital frames, pictures can be transferred via the usual USB interface; and can store about 4GB of image files and supports the most common memory solutions like SD, SDHC and MM cards.

While pricing and release date have not yet been announced, the idea of a portable digital photo album looks like a promising idea.

Sondata Shake-A-Pix mini Digital Album

Borrowing the idea from the iPhone that uses shaking motion to engage functionality in some apps,  Sondata believes its tiny 2.4in photo frame, called Shake A Pix,  it is the world’s first portable digital photo album utilizing motion sensors. Quite simply…  shake it  to browse through your favorite photos.

This mini frame (and I do mean mini) has an internal memory of 32MB which, depending on file size ¸is just about enough memory to hold up to 170 jpeg or bitmap images. Photos are transferred into the 50g photo frame via USB connections.

The 5mm-thick photo frame measures 90×50mm has its own built in retractable stand. Its all powered by a tiny lithium-ion battery which can keep photos displayed for up to three hour on a single charge. Retail pricing for this mini album is expected to be $38.

Two evenings ago, the New York Times posted an article in their “Gadgetwise” column entitled: Filling a Photo Frame via a Celluar Network. Rik Fairlie, the author, describes how bothersome it can be for adult children to keep the digital frames, given to parents as gifts, stocked with fresh photos. He writes, “you’re probably tired of driving over to your parents’ house to deliver a new SD card that refreshes the photos.” Fairlie then goes on to say that  “Soon, you won’t have to. A new company called Isabella Products will start a service called Vizit in mid-October that lets you send photos… to digital photo frame remotely.”

HUH? WHA? SOON YOU WON’T HAVE TO???

We here at CEIVA started offering photo sharing services to remote frames over 9 years ago. In fact, the New York Times wrote a story about CEIVA providing this type of service back in 2000.  Then in 2002, they wrote a story about grandparents and how the CEIVA photo share technology can keep them connected to family.

Now, I do not have a problem with telling the Vizit story and writing of the service they want to provide. But to taut this type of service as NEW… that just isn’t right. I mean let’s give credit for innovation where credit is due. In today’s information age, a little bit of research would have set the record straight.

So for the sake of journalistic accuracy and clarification, I thought I would post a comment on the “Gadgetwise” article citing how the New York Times had already announced this innovation years ago. Written below is a copy of what I wrote as a comment… which, at the time of writing this blog, oddly has not been posted.

All I can think of is “Imitation is the most serious form of flattery.”

While the ability to share and send digital photos to remote frames may seem new to some, actually it is a service we here at CEIVA have been providing our frame owners for nearly a decade now.

In fact, The New York Times has covered the CEIVA story from our start back in 2000. Here are some excerpts from past New York Times articles:

1.) NYT ARTICLE: STATE OF THE ART; A Frame To Hold Your Pixels, By Peter H. Lewis Published: Thursday, March 2, 2000 “Using Ceiva’s technology, one can send up-to-the-minute pictures of the kids to Grandma’s bedside table anywhere in the country…”

2.) NYT ARTICLE: Digital-Generation Gifts for Radio-Generation Parents, By Jeffrey Selingo Published: Thursday, November 21, 2002 “…interested in sending your parents new pictures of the grandchildren every day, you might consider the Ceiva picture frame…”

3.) NYT ARTICLE: When a Picture Is So Good It Deserves a Frame, By Wilson Rothman Published: June 5, 2007 “Ceiva, which pioneered the connected frame concept more than seven years ago… downloads pictures that you have uploaded or family members have shared.”

We here at CEIVA continue to improve our products, and in the time since these articles were written our digital frames have evolved and improved a great deal.

While our users have been able to send pictures from their cell phones to a CEIVA Frame for quite a few years now, last November we created a FREE iPhone app called CEIVA Snap… which our users love.

Facebook users also enjoy the FREE CEIVA Sender app we have developed. This simple app allows users to send pictures directly out of their Facebook Albums and into family and friend’s CEIVA Frames.

CEIVA is proud to have been the innovative leader in the world of photo sharing to digital photo frames… and we look forward to developing new ways to make the photo sharing experience even more rewarding as time and technology moves on.

So for now, even though the New York Times has forgotten it… that’s what CeivaJoe knows.

COMMENT

Digital cameras have made taking pictures a simple task. If your camera has a battery charge and enough space on its memory chip, then all you need to do is point and shoot.  CLICK CLICK CLICK… shoot now and deal with the picture file later.

But even though you can click a ton of pictures, your camera memory card can only hold so many picture files. At some point you need to move the pictures off your camera and on to your computer for safer storage. Once your pictures are over on a computer you often discover that not every picture was as good as you would like it. No worry, thanks to photo editing software like Google’s popular Picasa 3.0.

For those of you who don’t know, Picasa is an amazing and free (yes 100% FREE!) photo editing & organizing software that puts a powerful and easy tool into the amateur photographer’s hands. With Picasa you can do editing “basics” like the pros, including: crop, remove red eye, control brightness, add text and more! Plus there are a bunch of fun special effects too. Did I mention how EASY it is?

So how could such a cool editing tool be improved?  Simple, create a bridge from it right into a digital picture frame… and CEIVA has done just that. CEIVA has made it easy to have your photos, organized and edited in Picasa, to be moved right out of it and directly into your CEIVA frames and albums with its new CEIVA Sender for Picasa.

CEIVA is committed to make the “from camera to digital frame” digital picture process effortless. The CEIVA Sender for Picasa is the latest application developed exclusively for CEIVA digital frame owners. Other applications created for these unique state of the art digital photo frames include: CEIVA Sender for Face Book and CEIVA SNAP app for the iPhone.

To get your own free CEIVA Sender for Picasa download Picasa 3 first from here and then add CEIVA Sender plug-in from here to it. It’s that easy. Finally you can to CLICK CLICK CLICK, EDIT EDIT EDIT, and SEND SEND SEND using Picasa 3 fortified with CEIVA Sender.

So until the next post… that’s what CeivaJoe knows!

COMMENT

iPhones are all the rage. With what seems to be hundreds of new Apps being released each day its no wonder these phones are so popular.

We here at CEIVA love the iPhone. Its design and simplicity, like so many Apple products, is an inspiration to us.

So when we can build bridges between our products and Apple’s, we do so without hesitations.

Take a look at CEIVA Snap, our iPhone “bridge” application that lets you snap pictures and then instantly and directly send them to your own frame or CEIVA frames owned by your friends and family.

The CEIVA Snap app, which is FREE, allows you to take a picture from right within the app and then send to any CEIVA digital photo frame you have access to or to any album you have set up on your CEIVA account.  A copy of the picture, taken through CEIVA Snap, will still reside in your iPhone too… just in case you want to show on the go.

Taking and sharing pictures using cell phones just got easier. In fact, CEIVA’s iPhone app is so easy you might say that it’s a… “CEIVA Snap.”

So until the next post… that’s what CeivaJoe knows!

COMMENT