Palo Alto, CA—Fireside, Inc., announced Fireside, a smart system for the home that’s designed to make enjoying all a users’ photos and videos as easy as taking them.
“With the popularity of cameras, mobile phones and tablets, taking pictures has never been easier, but we really only get to enjoy a small fraction of them,” said Andy Jagoe, CEO and founder of Fireside. “Fireside’s mission is to unlock all of these hidden memories, and for the first time enable you to effortlessly enjoy them every day.”
The system consists of an intelligent curation and delivery service, and the SmartFrame, a “reimagining of the digital picture frame.” In addition, the Fireside app brings all of a family’s photos and videos together to a private, secure place in the cloud, and makes them searchable. Then, Fireside’s cloud service uses contextual computing and machine learning to automatically curate and organize libraries of thousands of photos, showing families the content they want to see, whether it be photos of a particular birthday or ski holiday, for example.
Fireside SmartFrame is a reinvention of the digital picture frame. It connects to users’ iOS/Android devices and the cloud to integrate their curated content into everyday life. Like art or music, Fireside strives to create a personal visual ambience that sets an emotional tone in any room.
Taking inspiration from furniture and lighting, the SmartFrame is crafted with materials such as glass, melamine, chrome and copper—and features a rotating stand mechanism to support standing on a mantle or hanging on the wall.
After two years of development and extensive beta testing, Fireside found that 80% of users said they had switched from photo to video as their default capture mode. SmartFrame runs Android and features a Qualcomm Snapdragon S4 Pro Quad-core 1.7GHz, 802.11 b/g/n Wi-Fi, Bluetooth 4.0 with BLE, and a 15-inch LED-backlit 1080p display with IPS technology. Playlists update over Wi-Fi in the background, and to prevent buffering and playback issues, all photos and videos play locally from 64GB of local eMMC storage.
Starting at $399 and available in black or white, Fireside launched on Kickstarter and will be available through December 2. backfireside.com
