I’m going to push for the company to purchase some wireless photo-frames. These would make really cool information radiators for the office.
Place them in social areas e.g. the kitchen and beam useful and interesting stuff to them! I like the “API” i.e. just images. Can imagine all sorts of fun data and feeds – Burndown’s, build stats, mash-ups of company stock performance and random interesting data and pictures.
For our radiator screens we use plain old flat monitors, usually embedding a bunch together with a host PC into the office partition walls (we call the result a “bridge”.) Alas screens are not cheap. (I don’t assign any cost to the PCs, which tend to be old/recycled.) A 15″ digital photo frame is not too cheap either given how specific to purpose it would be, but using smaller sizes and positioning them more carefully sounds interesting.
What we really want is a cost-effective solution for a far bigger display. (I still think fondly of the huge plasma Voxar were given when bought by a display technology company.) Our little team at ADCS has a great bridge of our very own of late, but most web pages are not easily read on a standard size monitor from any appreciable distance, so half the team don’t get enjoy information heat at our desks. A second-hand projector may be the way to go.
Looks like putting wireless devices in the office is going to be hard – Due to a reasonable IT policy. Suggested walling off the PC talking to the photo frame(s) to the point its off the network and accessed via http outside of the main domain. Sigh. Will report back at some point.
Ordering the frames now. Having to go non-wireless. Note that wireless SD cards are available, so if it’s successful we can drop the wires!
Need a good image aggregation system…