For some reason, this evening I am reminded of the advice, attributed, I think, to Hemingway, to ‘write drunk, but edit sober’. On that basis, I guess I’d better check this piece again in the morning!
I’m just back from the Mobile Focus event in Barcelona, which runs alongside the Mobile World Congress. For those that don’t know, two companies, Showstoppers and Pepcom, run events at major trade shows that give journalists free food and drink while providing desktops for companies that want to meet those journalists. Yesterday, I attended Showstopper (which looks perilously close to not having enough exhibitors to sustain the event at MWC) and tonight I went to Pepcom (which does seem to have plenty of support). Technology journalism is not a well paid profession, these days, so free food and drink ensures a good number of the members of the press. (and it helps us to write, apparently, but doesn’t help us build memories!)
Anyway, at this evening’s event, I met a number of companies that had interesting display-related stories. I saw HP and Lenovo, Huawei, Vuzix and others, but the one that caught my eye was Aura.
Aura makes a digital photo frame, a category of display that looked at one time as though it might have been an important market category, as we all take more and more pictures, although we rarely look at them beyond a share on social media. Psychologists have done a lot of work on the idea that quite a lot of what we do is to ‘create memories’ (check out this Ted talk for more on this topic). Looking again at photos refreshes the memory and helps to reinforce and build memories.
Some people spend a lot of money on cameras and lenses, to get good pictures, so you might think that there should be a good market for displays to display those images. Of course, tablets and smartphones usually have excellent displays, so you might think that there could be a market. Unfortunately, the market was effectively killed for good products by low cost, poor quality implementations that had little commend them. All the big brands got out of the category, which seems to have ‘died the death’ as a significant market segment.
The Aura Photo Frame has nice image quality. Image:Meko
Aura Takes a Different Approach
Rather than simply chasing price down, Aura has taken a different approach and worked from the basis that we all take lots and lots of digital images, but we simply don’t look at those images after we have posted them on a social media website. So, the company is offering a high quality 9.7″ display with 1536 x 2048 resolution and using (based on our observations in Barcelona) an IPS panel, that is connected via Wi-fi to the firm’s cloud service which can automatically or manually copy images from smartphones and from social media services directly to one of the company’s frames. So, for example, a user could set up the app on their phone to always copy images of a particular individual to a specific frame as the app supports face-recognition software in the cloud. Users can give permission for others to upload to their frames.
Slightly surprisingly, the frame doesn’t allow USB or local uploading of images, you have to use the cloud-based app. Also, while the software supports a number of online apps and social media platforms, it doesn’t support Flickr, which is one of the most important for high quality photography (and one that I use). The frame has a gesture detection system, so if you are close to the frame, you can simply swipe in the air to change images.
The Aura frame costs $299. That compares with a price for a 9.7″ iPad, with the same kind of display, of $302.99 today on Amazon, so it’s hard to see why you wouldn’t just buy a tablet, which has so many more uses? That, I fear, is the problem for this kind of product and a reason that the DPF market has gone the way that it has. (BR)
