Spending quality time even when not at home

In the office.
And on the beach

The web magazine for top managers - who's promoted, who came, who left? And what to do when you're not in the office.

If you are a manager, that means you travel a lot. And if you are frequent traveler that means you don't spend much time with your family. But, thanks to the products of digital age, you can be home every day, at least digitaly. You need three things: A digital camera (which you probably already have), a Wi-Fi network in your home (widely present, and if it is not, it's very easy and inexpensive to set it up), and a device called digital photo frame.

The idea of digital photo frame is not new, however eStarling brings it to a new level. The pure technological name eStarling 2.0 Wi-Fi Photo Frame means "a beautifuly designed device that displays the photos from several sources". It connects to thw Wi-Fi Network in your home and rotates the pictures in .jpg file format.

eStarling needs to be connected to your PC via USB cable (which is included in package), and then you have to configure it. Not a hard task, so it'll be up and rotating in no time. After initial configuration, you can disconnect it and it will operate as a stand-alone device.

The first way to send your photos to Photo Frame is via Flicker. Go to Flickr and find your favorite, then at the bottom you'll see "Feed". That's how you can subscribe to that feed and Photo Frame will display its pictures as they come to Flickr. You can choose more than one feed. That way, you can send your pictures from a PC somewhere in Berlin (boring conference, I know...), or from a mobile phone from a send beach in Bahamas. No need to say, but I will: Your mobile phone has a camera and an email? If not, buy another one.

The second method is maybe even better. When you configure your eStarling 2.0 Wi-Fi Photo Frame, you'll get an email address and you can send photos to it. The small device will check the address for pictures every few minutes and display a new photo as it came. "Wait", say you, "when there's an e-mail, there's spam too." Yes, says me, but you can allow only e-mails from a certain e-mail address to be received.

Just a few more data that are technical: eStarling 2.0 Wi-Fi Photo Frame has an 7-inch color screen (wide, as this is cool this days, however it will keep the aspect ratio of pictures received), an it has "MMC/SD/MS/CF 4in1 card slot". That means it received memory cards from almost any device. The eStarling 2.0 Wi-Fi Photo Frame is a digital photo frame that does very good job, and the price of around $249 is appropriate.

However, I must mention its look. It is beautiful. eStarling has, how they calls it, "Black piano finish", and it will fit in any space, be it a modern office or your home in the prairie.

"One last question", ask you, "what if I send a picture by mistake? You know, the congress was boring, but that after party with my colleague of opposite sex... Can I stop the picture to be displayed?" I will not answer that question. The real gentlemen don’t do that. Nor the ladies.

May 18, 2007

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