DigitalSmartFrames.com

As we've written many times on this blog, the future of digital picture frames is in wirelss technology. What makes digital frames so innovative is that you can constantly display fresh pictures, something impossible on a traditional frame, and wireless technology makes this even more possible. Wireless digital frames are also evolving into more than just picture frames, many now stream other types of media like news, weather, and anything else that can be sent via an RSS feed.

Ceiva was an early experimenter in providing a network sharing service with their digital frames, allowing a remote family member to send pictures to a digital frame. Recently, a company called Frame Media has developed a similar free service called "framechannel" that digital picture frames like Kodak can use to feed content to a frame using wireless technology. Last year Ceiva sued Frame Media for patent infringement claiming Frame Media had infringed on Ceiva's patent for distributing picture mail.

This week, Frame Media seemed to get some good neews in its favor.

In a press release, Frame Media claims that the US Patent and Trade Office (PTO) and the US District Court have given them recent favorable decisions. The PTO had initially rejected most of the claims of the suit and the US District Court had refused an injunction of Frame Media's service. Now the PTO has agreed to an inter partes examinations, which usually leads to claims being rejected. So this litigation has a ways to go, but so far doesn't look as though Ceiva is going to be able to interupt the Framechannel service.

We find it hard to believe that a single company like Ceiva could ever keep sole rights to technology like streaming media to digital frames. In fact, we'd expect several competing digital frame streaming media services, either from digital frame manufactures, specialists like Frame Media, Google or Yahoo, or even cell phone companies looking to move to other devices. Digital frames we think will become another heavily used device in homes and businesses, and competing media services are likely to follows.

If you are looking for a great wireless digital frame recommendation to take advantage of Framechannel, we'd suggest the Kodak EASYSHARE W820.