PRODUCT ENDORSEMENT

25 May 2003

I'm not getting paid by Ceiva, but I want to talk about a GREAT new product that people might not be aware of. It's what I gave my mother for Mother's Day. For anybody with a computerphobic relative you'd like to share photos electronically with, this is absolutely perfect.

It's an electronic photo frame.

It looks just like a regular frame and all it needs is a telephone outlet and electricity. The kit comes with a splitter, so you can plug in your frame and your telephone to the same outlet. It all sets up in a matter of literally seconds.

When you have the frame you set up an account on Ceiva and invite people to send photos to that account. Anybody anywhere in the world can upload photos to your frame.

At some time during the night (when nobody is using the telephone), it logs in to the Ceiva site (you don't need a computer) and it downloads 20 photos from your account. Throughout the day, it gives a constantly changing slide show. You can program it for whatever interval you want--change every few seconds, change every minute, change every hour--whatever you want. And then the next day there will be 20 new photos (depending on what has been uploaded). (The owner of the account--who does need to have a computer, and who may live on the other side of the country from the recipient--does the programming; the owner of the frame just needs to sit and look at the pretty pictures.)

You can choose to let the photos cycle, so no matter how many you've uploaded, they always come back eventually, with new uploaded photos the first in line to be the next day's offerings.

In order to upload photos other people (a) have to be invited by whoever owns the account, and (b) have to join Ceiva. But that's all.

The frame costs $130 and the service to keep it going is $8 a month, so minimal.

When I got the frame for my mother, I invited everybody in the family (including the extended family) with a computer to join. Then when she was out of the house, I got hold of her Web-TV address book and copied people on that list as well. You do, of course, have to have either a digital camera or a scanner, so not everyone is going to be able to participate, but Tom's been good about uploading photos. Jeri didn't have either a scanner or camera, so I gave her my old digital camera. I know she'll have a lot of fun sending her grandma photos.

The best was when my mother's husband's cousin's son (got that?), who lived with them for a year, uploaded photos of himself, his wife, and his two kids. They live in Holland!

You can add text to the photos, if you want, giving them either a caption

or making them look like a post card

I am particularly excited about the prospect of uploading photos while I'm in Australia. They are 5x7 photos, so will look better than the tiny pictures she gets on her little teeny Web-TV screen.

Walt plans to buy a frame for his mother as well. She suffers from macular degeneration and seeing things is sometimes difficult for her. I'm hoping that this will make it easier for her to see photos (especially since you can adjust the brightness).