Thinking Screen Media, the Wellesley Hllls, MA, startup that pushes news, photos, and other content to Internet-connected screens, is tweaking its business model once again. Formerly called Frame Media, the company started out in 2006 with a focus on delivering information to wireless photo frames. But last year it started thinking bigger—wireless photo frames weren’t really catching on, and the company decided to target the broader category of connected screens, meaning not just digital frames but TVs, cable set-top boxes, game consoles, and Internet radios.

Now the Apple iPad seems poised to kill off the digital frame category completely, in the view of CEO Alan Philips. So the company has raised $2 million, through a Series B financing and the sale of one of its divisions, to work on its applications for the iPad and cable set-top boxes, Philips tells Xconomy.

“We now believe in multipurpose devices,” says Philips. “The wireless photo frame category just has not taken off, and because of the introduction of devices like the iPad and the ability for set-top boxes to have Internet connectivity, it’s unlikely that the frame market will take off. So we are focused on consumer devices that will have a push element, and we think that the iPad is the best example of such a device. If you fast forward two years, you could see 30 percent penetration [of the iPad], at least in the U.S. market, in terms of the number of kitchens and living rooms that have an iPad for remote control or photo-frame or on-demand media access.”

Thinking Screen raised $2 million in Series A funding from CommonAngels and Longworth Venture Partners back in November 2007 and extended that round by another $3 million in May 2008. The new Series B funds come from Scala, which runs a digital advertising and signage business out of Exton, PA. Scala paid $2 million total for an equity stake in Thinking Screen and to purchase Thinking Screen’s SignChannel division, which focuses on digital signage. Three of the 12 staffers in Thinking Screen’s Wellesley Hills office are now Scala employees, Philips says.

The spinoff and fundraising frees up Thinking Screen to concentrate on home information devices. The company launched free and $1.99 versions of its iPad app, called FrameChannel, in early April. The app allows users to choose from approximately 1,000 channels or “widgets” such as news feeds, weather and sports information, National Geographic photos, or photos from Flickr, Picasa, Facebook, or other photo sharing sites. (The free version mixes advertisements in with the other content.) “It’s really about how are you going to use the iPad for the 22 hours a day that you’re not holding it,” says Philips. “During that 22 hours, it’s pushing content based on your preferences to the screen, in the kitchen or living room or bedroom.”

Philips says the company is working on improvements to the app, such as additional widgets as well as channels that are more interactive or that present multiple types of data on a single screen. Similar FrameChannel widgets are available to owners of other devices such as the Roku Player, Tivo DVRs, and digital frames from Samsung, Sony, Philips, Motorola, Kodak, Toshiba, and Viewsonic.

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The digital photo frame is one of those consumer-electronics categories that seems perpetually poised to take off, but never quite gets airborne. I bought a Ceiva frame for my grandmother back in 2001—it plugged into a phone line and downloaded new pictures from the Ceiva website every night at 3 a.m. Today, things are pretty much the same. The displays of the latest models are brighter and crisper, and most come with memory-card slots instead of phone cords. But there has been surprisingly little innovation around the basic idea of the digital frame. They’re still just passive devices that sit on your desk or bookcase, cycling through the same pictures over and over until someone updates the memory card.

Isabella Products in Concord, MA, is trying to change that. On October 30, it will launch Vizit, which masquerades as a digital photo frame but is actually a sophisticated, two-way photo management device connected to a nationwide cellular data network. The product will have a price tag commensurate with its capabilities—in the $250 to $280 range, plus a monthly subscription fee. I know a lot of early adopters who won’t balk at that price, considering that the Vizit—the brainchild of local venture capitalist and Motorola veteran Matthew Growney—raises the bar for the whole category of digital frames, just as the iPhone did in the mobile world.

The Vizit is attractive, but much more importantly, it’s smart and it’s connected. “The beauty is not so much in the physical design, although our guys have come from places where design matters, like Motorola and Bose and Nike and Facebook,” says Growney. “To us, it’s about the connectedness of the device…it’s about managing the sharing experience.”

On the hardware side, Vizit has an impressively large screen, measuring 10.4 inches diagonally, which is 2.4 inches more than Ceiva’s largest frame. It has HD-quality resolution of 800 pixels by 600 pixels, compared to Ceiva’s 640 by 480.

But it’s the interactivity packed into the screen that really sets the device apart. Trust me, I’ve seen lots of these devices, and the Vizit—which I got to play with last week during a visit to Isabella’s office inside Concord’s historic old Damon Mill building—is unique.

For one thing, it’s a touchscreen device, which means there aren’t any cryptic buttons on the side or the back of the frame: all the controls are right on the display. For another, it’s got an elegant user interface that makes it easy to do things like rotating photos, choosing different slide show transition effects, or selecting which photo album you want to view.

It’s also got the built-in cellular modem, which means it can download photos from the Internet without having to be plugged into a phone line or an Ethernet cable or integrated into a home Wi-Fi network. And the modem doesn’t just grab photos from the network: it can also … Next Page »

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Wireless digital photo frames, considered one of the hot new categories in consumer electronics back in 2006 and 2007, haven’t taken off as quickly as expected. People love digital frames, but they’ve tended to buy them as gifts pre-loaded with photos they uploaded to the Web, meaning many frames still don’t come with their own connection to the Internet. That’s a problem for Wellesley, MA-based Frame Media, whose whole business, when I last profiled the startup in 2007, revolved around providing fresh digital content for the frames, such as news and sports headlines, weather, and photos shared by friends.

But while Wi-Fi-equipped frames are still playing catchup, another channel for the company’s programming is emerging: so-called “connected screens,” meaning a whole variety of Internet-ready displays that are turning up in homes and offices. As a result, Frame Media is rechristening itself Thinking Screen Media, and going after what CEO Alan Phillips calls “a whole category [of displays] defined primarily by the fact that, unlike PCs, they are limited in their ability to easily search and configure content.” That includes not just digital frames but high-definition TVs, cable set-top boxes, game consoles, Internet radios, and even printers.

Through its FrameChannel platform, Thinking Screen works with publishers such as Time magazine, the New York Times, People magazine, and Weatherbug to offer more than 1,000 channels of content customized for such screens. (Users choose and configure the information feeds at Thinking Screen’s website.) The company is also partnering with virtually every consumer-electronics company on the block—names like Kodak, Motorola, Nintendo, Philips, Samsung, Sony, and Toshiba—to make it easy for device owners to activate the feeds on specific devices.

“Most of the connected screens haven’t hit the market yet, but they will over the next six months,” says Phillips. In particular, Phillips says, “We’ll see an aggressive push by TV manufacturers to enable TVs to go beyond video.” A taste of what he’s talking about already familiar to millions of video game fans is the home screen of the Nintendo Wii, which, in addition to games, offers links to news, weather, shopping, and photos.

The 15-employee startup collected $5 million in Series A funding from Longworth Venture Partners and CommonAngels in May 2008, and there are plans to raise a Series B round this fall, Phillips says. When it comes to supplying content for tomorrow’s connected screens, Thinking Screen has both technical and strategic advantages over existing and potential competitors, he says.

San Diego-based Chumby, whose interactive media player displays information through “widgets” analogous to Thinking Screen’s channels, is the company’s closest competitor, in Phillips’ judgment. But he thinks Chumby will have a hard time delivering … Next Page »

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Frame Media, the Wellesley, MA-based provider of content for digital picture frames that we profiled last September, has raised an additional $3 million in what it’s calling a Series A-1 investment round. The round, led by Longworth Venture Partners and CommonAngels, brings the company’s total funding to $5.2 million. Digital frame owners can use Frame Media’s Web-based interface to select advertising-supported content channels such as news, sports, weather, and stock photos.

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Frame Media, a Wellesley, MA-based startup that uses the RSS standard to distribute photos, news, and other content to wireless digital picture frames, announced today that it has closed a $2 million Series A funding round co-led by CommonAngels and Longworth Venture Partners. “With the addition of Wi-Fi capabilities in digital picture frames, Frame Media has found a way to accelerate the transformation of these devices into the home’s next information appliance,” said Third Screen Media founder Thomas Burgess, who has joined the company’s board of directors along with Longworth’s Jim Savage. We profiled Frame Media back in September.

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