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May 2004

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Room with a PhotoVu
BOULDER -- Odds are George Jetson had this in his house. (Remember him, the futuristic nine-to-fiver cartoon character?) A flat screen that hangs on the wall and scrolls through photos. What do you call it?

A. A digital picture frame?
B. A 21-century shoebox?
C. A hanging photo album?
D. The PV1900?

Mark Van Buskirk started Boulder-based PhotoVu with Robert Jordan. They believe the hot market for digital cameras will create demand for their product, the PV1900 - a wireless digital picture frame

Well, if you work at PhotoVu, the Boulder-based company that created the screen, you'd choose D. The company announced the product in February.

The two men who started PhotoVu, Mark Van Buskirk and Robert Jordan, have worked together in the digital field for a while. But their take was that while digital photography was hot and growing, there weren't many good options to view digital pictures; few companies have made viewing digital photography easy or fun.

Van Buskirk says the PV1900 fills the "missing link" in digital image display.

"Digital photography is really popular, and people need ways to use their photo collection without putting it on an unsightly computer in a living area," Van Buskirk says. "We believe the infamous photo 'shoebox' lives on, simply reincarnated on a computer hard drive. And we're putting those pictures on the wall."

Today, consumers who use digital cameras often store, organize, edit and share their pictures via computers. That's where Van Buskirk says the PV1900 comes in.

Say you got a digital camera last year like millions of other consumers. Now your computer hard drive is loaded with your favorite digital images: little Johnny's first steps, Uncle Joe doing a belly flop in the pool, of course, dogs playing poker.

Plug in your PV1900 (it runs on electricity) and turn on your computer (it has to stay on for the PV1900 to work). If you have a wireless network, all the better. If not, the PV1900 still works with wires. The PV1900 retrieves the photos from your hard drive and displays them on the screen. The photos start scrolling, and you can see as many photos as a computer will hold in a folder. Kind of a perpetual slide show of digital images.

You can set how the photos enter the frame -- from slow fades, to entry from top to bottom or left to write, five seconds between images or more or less. "We've built in a lot of functionality," Van Buskirk says.

It works with Windows, Macintosh, Linux or UNIX operating systems.

It's all part of what analysts call the display technology industry. And PhotoVu, which makes the PV1900 in Boulder and Nederland, says it's the industry's first custom-made 19-inch LCD wireless digital picture frame.

It's about two inches thick.

And buyers can get the screen in many kinds of frame including wood.

Van Buskirk says the market is wide open, and that he's looking to sell it to consumers and businesses. Some might say it's pricey for either group -- the PV1900 costs $1,549.

On the commercial side, Van Buskirk says as more businesses start to use digital media, his frame can help sales and marketing efforts, "whether in a lobby, waiting room or retail store."
But some analysts don't buy it and believe consumers won't, either.

"The market really hasn't shown much demand for this kind of technology," says Kristy Holch, an analyst that covers imaging technology with InfoTrends Research Group in Weymouth, Mass. "On the commercial side, there are cheaper options for presentations."

Holch says printing digital photos is still "very big" and will remain so for at least a few more years.

She adds that she believes the future of display technology will revolve around something already very familiar to consumers: the television. "Families will begin to gather around the TV to view photos as content from personal computers become networked to TV sets," she says.

Regardless, Van Buskirk says he's in it for the long haul and that right now he has more orders for the PV1900 than he can fill. He wouldn't share any names of those customers but did say a friend in Seattle beta-tested the product and bought one.

"I use it in my business," says Mark Stair, a real estate investor in Seattle who knows Van Buskirk when the pair worked together at Motorola. "I have it in my house, and I look at homes I've taken photos of that I might invest in. It's become the centerpiece in my home. We put family photos on it, too."

Stair says he recently used it for a friend's 50th birthday party. "We loaded pictures of him when he was a baby all the way through his life. When he saw the photos, he said it was just like watching his entire life unfold there on the screen."

Van Buskirk says he and Jordan used their own money to start PhotoVu but wouldn't say how much they've put into the venture, which has three full-time employees and some contractors who work on software.

PhotoVu sells the product through its Web site, but is open to possible brick and mortar retail in the future if demand dictates. Van Buskirk says he expects to sell between 1,000 and 2,000 units this year.