Picwing (YC Summer 08) Debuts Their Social Digital Picture Frame

http://www.techcrunch.com/2008/08/15/picwing-debuts-their-social-digital-picture-frame/

by fallentimes • 18 years ago

61 54 18 years ago

Once they get their hardware prices down I think these guys will be rocking. My Mom would love me for a million years if I got her one of these.

tdavis• 18 years ago

I could get one for my mom too, then take pictures and have them show up there so she will bug me about my life less often ;)

brlewis3• 18 years ago

If that's all you want to do, you can just use any MRSS-capable frame with OurDoings.

http://ourdoings.com/2008-03-01

It sounds like PicWing has a lot more ambitious things in mind.

jmorin007• 18 years ago

Congrats guys! Great idea. Looking forward to getting one for the fam for the holidays!

gojomo• 18 years ago

These should really have a webcam and mic, too -- albeit with a physical shutter/switch for total confidence in its on/off status.

Then it'd be the ultimate for keeping-in-touch-with-distant-relatives.

edawerd8• 18 years ago

Thats exactly the long-term direction that we want Picwing to go. Pictures are really just the beginning for us: We would love to enable applications like email, video conferencing, and more that your Grandma would be able to use in a really non-intimidating way.

brlewis3• 18 years ago

Interesting. It looks like you're going after "2. Simplified Browsing" (but not just browsing) as well as "27. Hardware/software hybrids" plus at least one of the 30 different subtypes of "9. Photo/video sharing services"

http://ycombinator.com/ideas.html

wallflower2• 18 years ago

Six words: Automatically updated photos of their grandkids

Picwing's potential target market: Grandparents. Go after it!

My brother-in-law and myself did this (for my parents) with the then best-of-class Digital Spectrum MemoryFrame. Once we saw that a Wi-fi picture frame supported RSS feeds we were hooked - despite the high cost and painful configuration (RSS + picture frame). I am hopeful that Picwing will make the picture frame grandparent friendly and not try to extort annual subscription fees.

edawerd8• 18 years ago

Wallflower,

Grandparents or even parents are exactly who we had in mind when we built this!

brfox2• 18 years ago

If there is any way you could do this with a dialup connection, then you have yourself a real golden opportunity... especially if there was no monthly fee for 5 pics/month or something. I would buy one right now if it did this.

My recently widowed grandmother doesn't have a computer, let alone a wi-fi connection...

wallflower2• 18 years ago

Edward, apologies for assuming you weren't going after the baby boomers. My parents have wi-fi but one of the painful things was configuring the frame. Aside from configuring how the frame connects to the Internet, I would love to have a frame that was completely configurable via the website, from the power-saving options (sleep times) to the daily widgets (my mom loves the word of the day type things).

edawerd8• 18 years ago

Thanks guys! I'm Edward, one of the founders of Picwing, and we're really excited about finally telling the world about the product!

Judging from the number of orders we've been getting, it seems like people have been waiting for something like this for a while. While there are other wireless digital photo frame products out there, we really feel that we've been the first company to tackle it from the software perspective.

Thanks again!

utnick• 18 years ago

Looks cool!

Are you assembling and soldering these frames from scratch? Would love to hear more tech details on this..

mattmaroon5• 18 years ago

That's pretty awesome. Is there a priority waitlist for YC alummns :)

immad• 18 years ago

This is absolutely awesome guys. Congrats. Great idea.

edawerd8• 18 years ago

Thanks! We are actually hand-building these things right now, which is why it's taking so long to ship these out to people. They're very far from perfect, and most of our hardware will probably change in the future, but we wanted to get them out to people as soon as possible to get some feedback on them.

rantfoil• 18 years ago

Congrats to the PicWing team. They're building the true next generation of the digital connected home. It's rare to get a team together that is so talented both on software user experience and hardware design.

babul• 18 years ago

Congrats on the launch guys! Awesome product.

One simple suggestion that seems to be missing and can add a lot of value for very little cost...

Allow the frames to be personalised with custom messages engraved on the wood/glass. Finding a good engraving service is easy enough, but if you had a web-form for personalised messages (with preview), these would make excellent presents for weddings/birthdays/anniversaries/etc.

Everyone loves personalisation, and the sentimental value add-in is immense.

Just ordered mine. Look forward to getting it soon(ish).

edawerd8• 18 years ago

Wow thats a great suggestion! We wanted to (someday) let people customize the actual frame, but the engraving takes its to a whole new level!

The way Apple allows you to do it with iPods is really nice. We'll definitely look into this feature.

froo• 18 years ago

My question is kind of mundane.

Is the power supply removable with a standard DC connector or is it built into the device?

The reason why I'm asking is that I'd like to purchase one for my mother, but since she lives in Australia the plug will be a problem unless I use a converter - which has the potential to cause problems for her (as she's not too tech savvy) and it would be easier if I go find a suitable power supply.

davidw• 18 years ago

Cool! I worked on these a while ago, but then we moved back to Italy...

http://www.mobilemag.com/content/100/336/C2154/

It was pretty cool - the guy running it scored a deal on a bunch of old HP laptops that he took apart and reassembled into frames.

luccastera• 18 years ago

Wow! I really like that idea. Now what would be great is if I could hook it up to my Facebook account so that as my friends are adding pictures on Facebook, they show up on my Picwing frame sitting at home automatically.

edawerd8• 18 years ago

This is a really cool idea too, and it's def on our feature list. We would also keep in mind that all your pictures on facebook are not necessarily the pictures you want on your grandmas photo frame =)

auston• 18 years ago

Dude holy crap! I was totally thinking of this! I'm definitely going to get a few!

ericwan• 18 years ago

this one is awesome. I'd get one for my mom when it gets cheaper. =)

Have you guys thought of sync-ing them with flickr and facebook pictures? Or you guys are already working on it?

zkinion• 18 years ago

Please put something more into it to make it different than d-link's or any other wireless picture frame that can also pull stuff from facebook/etc. Is there an ease of use advantage?

Just saying its "social" is played out and only works in the valley. Everybody is doing that these days. Hardware is normally a different game than software and is played by different rules. The marketing is totally different as well. That's awesome that you guys have been able to put a solid piece of hardware together. Don't let all that work, and all that future work, go to waste by falling into a web 2.0 trap. :)

hooande• 18 years ago

When is Mother's Day again? One less holiday present I have to worry about.

Baltropreneur2• 18 years ago

Cool stuff!

I wonder how many times Paul Graham saw this idea mentioned in applications before picking the right team to implement it?

Overall exciting to see these devices slowly becoming popular (Chumby). There is a ton of innovation to occur here.

marketer• 18 years ago

That's probably a compliment to the picwing guys :) An idea that seems obvious in retrospect is probably a good idea. But I'm betting it wasn't obvious to a lot of people before the TC article. If you said, four months ago, that you wanted to "view your photostream across any medium", you'd get plenty of blank stares :)

Baltropreneur2• 18 years ago

Yeah it was a 2ndary idea we mentioned in sept 2007 application. Like do you have any other ideas we may find of interest.

Though we were not looking at it from a hardware standpoint, but social photo software.

Either way its great to see these devices start catching on and congrats to these guys!

maxklein5• 18 years ago

Too expensive. For $50 you'll have me, till then, no deal.

axod3• 18 years ago

For $249 you could just buy a mini laptop :/

axod3• 18 years ago

It's sort of funny seeing this, after CO2Stats.

Surely electronic picture frames are sort of bad in terms of using energy needlessly? Is there technology yet that only uses power when the display changes, and not all the time?

vlad• 18 years ago

"Electronic paper" is designed this way.

axod3• 18 years ago

In production and cheap yet?

brlewis3• 18 years ago

My wireless digital frame (reviewed at the link below) draws only 9 watts:

http://ourdoings.com/2008-03-01

terpua• 18 years ago

http://www.picwing.com/about

Just like jobsyndicate and startuply, nice copy. Perhaps PG looks for hackers, who are also writers :)

whalesalad• 18 years ago

Pricey but I bought one. Mom's birthday is right around the corner and I love supporting a small and new startup.

khill• 18 years ago

When I see something like this, my first thought is, "I wonder how easily this could be hacked so I could display whatever picture I wanted on random people's photo frames?"

Tichy• 18 years ago

Why do digital picture frames always have such broad borders? I'd really like one that is more elegant, that is, with less wasted "screen estate".

But never mind, I won't buy one anyway - I am waiting for digital ink to catch up...

Picwing (YC Summer 08) Debuts Their Social Digital Picture Frame

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