Having just come away from Barcamp Cambridge - a distinctly different flavour to existing Barcamps (heavily science/hardware influenced - and more interesting for it) - I’ve been left with one simple but immensely appealing idea.

Simon Ford had presented a microcontroller that can be easily customised and hooked to the Web; which opened up a discussion on the possibilities that it could achieve.

We hit upon a digital photo frame - the ones that show a slideshow of digital images in your living room - hooked into the Web, specifically to an RSS feed of images.
The most delightful use-case was to be able to see the pictures your friends are taking, as they are taken, beamed into your living room; via a service like Flickr. This would be great for anyone, but I can really imagine a more senior family member appreciating it - someone who may not want to use a computer but does want to be kept in the loop of family activities.

Taking the idea to its extreme, you could even have a simple two buttoned device to go with it - a red and green button - for a HotOrNot style service. Only rather than rating beauty, you’d just rate your appreciation.
So, red would ensure you don’t see the image again; and green would increase the chance of your social group seeing the image; a kind of collaborative filter (like a Digg for photos, just without the cumbersome Web interface).

How would you sell it?
A good strategy to strike a deal with Flickr/Zoomr/Facebook type services to promote the product on their sites; as that would be targetting customers that can immediately use it (as opposed to buying the product, then having to signup and learn a new Web service). A mail order service is also far more in the reach of a startup than existing retail channels.
Once these ‘early adopters’ have it (even though the Flickr community runs into a healthy tens of millions size userbase), they can give it the credibility to spread into the mainstream. In particular, for family members who may not yet be very Web20, it would make sense as a gift item (”here grandma, use this and see my photos” - perhaps with some tag filtering…).

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* Update 29/08/2007

Although this would complicate such a beautifully simple product; there is a lot of very cool stuff that can be done, right now, in this space.

For instance, it could be an all in one ‘Family-O-Scope’ or ‘Friend-O-Scope’, that beams the latest (public) happenings of loved ones into your living room.
So, you’d see new pictures, film reviews, events that are connected with your friends as beautifully rendered ’slides’ of information, with an overlay of that person’s face. If you want, you can zoom in on that person - e.g. to render their Meecard - to get a general overview of what they’re doing.

Even more emotive would be a world map view; where people’s locations are mapped out; and the latest occurences, geographically, ‘pop’ into view as they happen. E.g. a friend travelling in Nepal takes a photo, and it ‘pops’ up over Nepal in my living room map.

Market-wise, it would be the appeal of something like the Facebook news stream, but on a mega-mainstream scale. Crucially, it does not require the product-owner to be active in creating content; just the people they know (and it seems all of the younger generation do this naturally). The challenges are making it attractive, making it easy, and stripping out the noise. I mention noise because right now, I feel the Facebook stream alone is a little overwhelming, and I don’t want that same attention-stress carried over into the more peaceful areas of my house. Such a product must be ’serene’.

This would represent a much bigger user-experience challenge than the original photo frame, but it’s broadly the same concept. Anything that is friend/family orientated deserves not to be cocooned in your computer.

This entry was posted on Saturday, August 25th, 2007 at 11:26 am and is filed under Vision.