send instructions back, meaning you can do things like sharing your favorite photos with friends or relatives and ordering prints right from the frame’s screen.
In fact, Vizit is close to being a full-fledged tablet computer—albeit one that’s dedicated to handling photos. It’s got a 532-megahertz ARM 11 processor inside, running the Linux operating system and Adobe’s Flash Lite runtime environment, the same media-management system running on many newer mobile Internet devices, such as the Chumby Internet radio.
But all this power shouldn’t scare off the non-computer-literate. The controls are simple enough that owners, grandmothers included, will be able to manage all the device’s functions with ease—and without ever going to the accompanying website. (Though the website does account for much of the device’s power—more on that below.)
I got the whole story behind Vizit from Isabella founder and CEO Growney, who is also the founder of Concord, MA-based private equity firm Rudyard Partners and was formerly the managing director of Motorola Ventures, the venture capital arm of the electronics giant.
The general inspiration behind Isabella Products, Growney says, came from one market observation and one personal experience. The market observation was that the ubiquity of digital cameras and camera phones means that consumers have stored up between 70 billion and 100 billion digital photos, fewer than 1 in 10 of which are ever shared (although Facebook users upload some 14 million photos every day, making the online social network the world’s largest photo-sharing site). The personal experience? “My mother didn’t feel like a grandmother because she couldn’t ever see her grandchildren, living in Chicago,” says Growney, with tongue in cheek. “Her solution was to come and live with us for months at a time. I said, ‘We can solve this problem with technology.'”
Growney says digital communication today is as much about frequency as it is about substance. Which meant that the company wanted to make it extremely easy to get new photos into any digital frame. To make that possible—and to sidestep the main problem with memory-card-based frames, which is that most people never get around to putting new photos on the cards—-Isabella built a cellular card into the Vizit. The company isn’t saying yet which cellular operator the device connects to, but Growney says it’s a GSM/GPRS-based network that reaches all major U.S. metropolitan areas. Reading between the lines, that probably means AT&T.
[Update, 11/5/09: Isabella Products confirmed in a press release today that it’s working with AT&T to deliver photos to the Vizit frame wirelessly.]
The device connects wirelessly to Isabella’s online content management system many times a day to see whether new pictures are available. That system, at VizitMe.com, is another part of the gadget’s beauty. While the frame itself holds only 150 photos, the website can hold thousands. Adding new photos into the rotation is as easy as
