SideShow Photo Frames and English History

One of the things I love about my job is playing with cool technology and yesterday was a real treat for me as I made my way down to meet the guys at a Living Picture on the south coast of England, in the historic town of Battle. It's funny to think that surrounded by so much heritage these chaps are busy creating such innovative products.

A Living Picture make one of the must have gadgets for this Christmas; the Momento Digitial Photo Frame.  The device is chocked full of features, from wireless connectivity to USB, SD Card etc ports, not to mention a crystal clear 10" TFT display.

So why the interest in this device?  Well, it is the first of its kind to work on the new Windows Vista SideShow platform and take advantage of all the software innovation available in Vista to share information (in this case photos) on devices external to your computer.  This area of technology is going to be a really interesting one to watch in the coming months as more and more companies start to develop new products that take advantage of the SideShow platform - at the moment we've got laptops and photo frames working with SideShow, but in the future I see all kinds of devices!

As you would expect there are detailed support documents available explaining how to develop on the SideShow platform.

Here's a photo of the device in action.  Notice information from Media Player is overlayed on the photo - but I guess in the future they could extend this to include information from Outlook like emails or upcoming calendar appointments, or indeed any type of information like RSS feeds etc.

One of the other cool things they showed me was the Momento Live Service which allows friends and family to share photos with any Momento Photo Frame anywhere in the world.  You simply upload a picture on the website and it appears instantly on the photo frame - very cool.

Technorati tags: A Living Picture, SideShow