Down to the wire without a gift idea on your radar? Check This Out...

Here’s a great last-minute holiday gift for traveling shutterbugs.

Hold on Gadget Girls, this is a fun one! eStarling (www.eStarling.com ) has just released their newest WiFi digital picture frame, the eStarling ImpactV, and, get this, the new model supports video clips. Now you can send photos and videos of your experiences, from anywhere in the world, to a photo frame sitting in a home or office anywhere else in the world. I love it!

Every ImpactV has a unique email address and can be connected to a home of office WiFi network to receive photos and video clips wirelessly.

Here’s how it works. Let’s say you are traveling to someplace exotic and fun for the holidays, but away from your family at home. You can take a photo or video with your mobile phone or digital camera and then send that video to your ImpactV frame back at the house. (With an iPhone camera the sending is automatic. With other camera-enabled phones that have emails, you can take the picture or then email it using the phones email camera. If you are using a digitial video camera or camera, you might make a quick stop at an Internet cafe to email the photos directly to your eStarling ImpactV frame at the house.) Cool, eh? I told you.

Your family might be sitting in the living room on the other side of the country or on the other side of the world. With no action on their part, and no wires or cables involved, the photos and/or video clips magically appears on the ImpactV frame. They get to see what you are seeing, almost instantly.

Whether you keep one at your home or office or give one to your mom, dad, siblings, friends or boyfriend, this is a great way to share photos and video clips from far away. Are you planning to take the kids and celebrate the holidays with Mickey & the gang at Disney? Take a video clip and send it to grandma’s ImpactV.

Photos take a minute or so to arrive at the frame. Videos take a bit longer, sometimes as much as twenty minutes for larger video clips. The maximum length for a video clip is 4 minutes, so you can’t send a 2-hr movie or anything crazy like that. Mind you, though, the frame does play DVD-quality video with high quality sound.

The frame does some neat tricks.

• You can schedule photos and/or videos to appear on your frame on whatever day/time you specifiy.
• You can subscribe to RSS photo feeds and video feeds to automatically get new content on your frame — there’s probably RSS feeds of your favorite travel destination available, so maybe prior to going on a trip, you set up your frame to get a photo and video preview of your planned destination. Better yet, add my Photo of the Month feed and together we’ll visit a new destination each month.
• If you’ve collected digital photos or videos in a variety of online places (Smugmug, Flickr, Photobucket, etc.) eStarling provides a single website that you can login to and manage all those photo assets. (The originals can be securely stored at Photobucket via a partnership between eStarling and Photobucket).

There are other tricks you can do too. You can connect your ImpactV to a Facebook account. Put your Facebook credentials into your eStarling web account and photos from your Facebook friends will automatically start appearing on your eStarling photo frame.

If you have an iPhone, things get even easier. There is an iPhone software application available, produced by eStarling, that adds a one-click, send-to-frame feature to your iPhone camera. You don’t even have to email a photo to the frame. Just take the picture and if you like it, click the Send to eStarling button to get it on your frame…within seconds of taking the photo. You can edit the photos directly on eStarling’s digital asset management site…add a “Happy Holidays from Us!” caption to your family photo before you send it over to your sibling’s ImpactV.

This is the cutting edge of digital frames and would make an awesome holiday gift. $199.99; http://eStarling.com.

Happy holidays,

Ellen