There’s a new project on Kickstarter that’s looking for $100,000 to start producing networked digital picture frames you can’t help start thinking about as digital signage displays.
These will be 15-inch units running Android 4.4, built in BLE and WiFi and a pretty fast quad-core CPU – nothing like the hunk of plastic gathering dust in my storage cupboard.
What intrigues me is the smarts the developers are building in to the application, to use metadata and learn about the user. Think online music services like Spotify and how it learns your musical tastes, and apply that kind of data-mining to images.
This is built, of course, for the massive consumer market and is not YET ANOTHER stab at a digital signage CMS, but it’s a very nice panel design and the thinking is the sort of thing that could be applied commercial uses.
If you have been involved in digital signage for a few years you may recall a company called SignChannel that was doing digital picture frames as signage, and how it had commercial ties to Scala. There’s another service called Ceiva that’s been around for ages.
The Fireside project has raised roughly $16K so far, with about a month to go.