Category: From The Nixplay Team Page 5 of 8

News about our latest innovations and posts written by members of the Nixplay team.

What To Consider Before Buying A Digital Photo Frame

On October 17, 2018

If you’ve never bought a digital photo frame before, you’ve probably got a few questions which need answering. As our homes become more integrated with technology such as virtual home assistants (Amazon Alexa comes to mind) and light bulbs which can be controlled from your smartphone, digital photo frames find their place at the intersection of sophistication and simplicity–a subtle piece of digital décor that elevates your home to new heights with its versatility and class.

Below, we answer five frequently asked questions from readers who are thinking about getting (and eventually got!) a Nixplay Digital Frame for their home.

1. How can you update photos on a Nixplay Frame?

It’s incredibly easy! Using your smartphone or laptop, you simply need to install the Nixplay app–for free! You can use the app to easily upload new images onto your Nixplay Wi-Fi Cloud Frame. It’s similarly easy for NIX Digital Frames: Just plug in a USB flash drive or a memory card loaded with your pictures, and you’re all set!

2. Can a Nixplay Frame play videos?

All Nixplay digital photo frames are able to play 15-second videos as well as display digital pictures, giving you endless digital opportunities to display your dearest memories.

3. What are the available Nixplay Frame sizes?

Nixplay Frames come in several sizes to suit different areas of your home, such as mantelpieces and bedside tables. Nixplay Frames range from 8” to 17” in diameter, and come in several colors and finishes to match your interiors.

4. Can Nixplay Frames be wall-mounted?

Some frames can be wall-mounted for your convenience and aesthetic pleasure. NIX Lux digital photo frames can be sold with custom wall mounts for the 8, 10, and 13-inch sizes. What’s more, the wall mounts come with built-in spirit levels, ensuring that your frame is perfectly aligned on your wall.

5. Where’s the best area to place a Nixplay Frame?

Anywhere you want, as long as it’s indoors! Nixplay Frames are sized to various dimensions and finishes, providing you with numerous options for displaying your photos proudly. The smaller 8” Nixplay Frames are ideal for bedside cabinets and desks, whereas the 13” NIX Lux frames can be mounted onto walls, giving you endless decorating options around your house. The 17″ Frames, meanwhile, will make a lovely centerpiece for your mantelpiece.

Mars Salazar

Marianne is Nixplay’s Web Content Editor. Her hobbies include exploring new places, playing table tennis, and cuddling puppies. Send her a message at marianne.salazar@nixplay.com.

google photos for nixplay digital frame blog main image

5 Reasons Why You Should Start Using Google Photos Right Now (If You Haven’t Done So Yet)

By Mars Salazar

On August 12, 2018

In From The Nixplay Team, Photography

If you love taking pictures, you need Google Photos handy on all your gadgets. This app lets you back up, edit, and share your images and videos with ease, making it the perfect companion of your Nixplay Wi-Fi Cloud Frames. If you’re not yet sold on Google Photos, here’s why you should start using it ASAP:

1) It organizes your photos for you.

Google Photos automatically sorts your photos, such as the ones you took during a recent vacation, into albums by using machine intelligence. These albums are created when you back up new pictures to your account.

Now you can show off these albums, too: During the 2018 Google I/O Developers’ Summit, it was announced that Nixplay has joined the Google Photos partner program to help you securely access your priceless memories. And with the latest Nixplay app update, you can choose to stream your Google Photos albums to your Nixplay Wi-Fi Cloud Frame.

Google Photos is now integrated with the Nixplay mobile app.

When a new image is added to a Google Photos album, it will also appear on your Nixplay frame. It’s never been easier (and more fun!) to stay up to date on your loved ones’ lives. Update your Nixplay app now so you won’t miss out!

2) It lets you share your photos easily.

Want to have all the pictures your family took during your Europe trip in one place? With just a few clicks, you can create a shared album on Google Photos where you and your loved ones can easily upload your snapshots for everyone to see, whether they have the Google Photos app or not.

3) It helps you free up your phone’s memory.

Photos and videos can easily eat up a large chunk of your phone’s memory. Google Photos lets you back up your priceless memories and free up space on your phone in one go, hitting two birds with one stone.

Once your phone’s done backing up your pictures, just select the “Free Up Space” option under the menu. The photos and videos that have been backed up to Google Photos will be moved to your “Trash” folder, where you can permanently delete them from your phone’s memory. This simple action frees up precious space on your phone.

4) It lets you create photo books (in the U.S. and Canada).

Whether you’re tech-savvy or a technophobe, you have to admit that nothing still beats the experience of leafing through a printed photo album. Once you’ve set up your Google Photos account, you can have up to 100 pictures printed in a photo book for a reasonable fee. Easy, right?

5) It helps you digitize old photos.

PhotoScan is a nifty Google-made app that lets you scan printed photos using your phone’s camera glare-free. It also automatically crops and enhances your images, so your 20-year-old grade school pictures and your parents’ 40-year-old wedding photos stay vibrant during their online migration. You can choose to back up your scanned PhotoScan images to your Google Photos account so you can view them anytime on your Google Photos library.

What’s your favorite Google Photos feature? Let us know in a comment below!

Mars Salazar

Marianne is Nixplay’s Web Content Editor. Her hobbies include exploring new places, playing table tennis, and cuddling puppies. Send her a message at marianne.salazar@nixplay.com.

How To Live A More Sustainable Lifestyle

By Mars Salazar

On July 13, 2018

In From The Nixplay Team

Making the switch to a more eco-friendly lifestyle isn’t easy. It requires an intense passion for the environment, as it’s incredibly easy to forego sustainability for convenience.

It’s not just individual consumers who should be doing their part to save Mother Earth. Corporations should, more importantly, make sustainability a top priority. Nixplay recognizes the need to shift to more responsible practices, and is now taking the necessary measures to reach Zero Plastic Packaging status in the near future. The company is also exploring ways to incorporate post-consumer recycled resin into its product range, reducing the plastic waste that may end up in the ocean or in a landfill.

“Ultimately, our sustainability objective should be around how to make our products durable beyond the assumed product cycles as the plastics we make will most certainly outlive you and me,” says Lawrence Chu, Nixplay’s Principal Designer. “The best way to prevent plastic waste is not recyclability, but to ensure that we don’t produce products that aren’t useful and end up being discarded.”

In line with this goal, Nixplay invited on July 10 Fanny Moritz, the founder and CEO of eco-friendly lifestyle concept store NO!W No Waste, to share some easy things we can do in order to live a more sustainable life. Here are some things we learned from her:

1. Refuse things that can result in waste.

“You need to refuse the plastic bags that they give you in the grocery stores,” says Fanny. “Just bring in your own reusable bags, because I’m sure you already have some reusable bags at home.”

Same goes for plastic bottles. “Even if you really want to drink, just drink out of your own water bottle. Even if it’s a plastic bottle, it’s okay! Just refill it and don’t throw it away.”

You can also decrease clutter by unsubscribing from junk mail and by turning down freebies you really won’t use, like pens and fans.

Fanny Moritz discusses sustainability initiatives with the Nixplay family.

2. Reduce the things you buy.

Fanny swears by Marie Kondo’s bestselling book, The Life-Changing Magic Of Tidying Up. Kondo believes that everything you have at home needs to be loved by you, and this simple creed can drastically change your life.

“I’ve stopped buying new clothes. If I have to buy, I try to look for a secondhand option,” she shares.

Another way to reduce your carbon footprint is by assembling your own dining kit, consisting of metal cutlery, a cloth napkin, and reusable straws made of either metal or bamboo. This way, you don’t have to use disposable plastic utensils when you dine out.

3. Reuse the things you already have.

Fanny reuses glass jars and uses them as storage containers for her food, which she buys in bulk. “What is good about buying your food in bulk is that you don’t buy the packaging and the branding,” she shares.

Cotton balls and disposable feminine hygiene products might also be necessities for a lot of people, but they create a lot of waste and end up polluting the environment. In lieu of these, you can use reusable cleansing wipes and menstrual cups instead. Sure, you have to exert a little effort in order to sanitize them properly, but it’s a small price to pay in order to keep Mother Nature safe, right?

Some items you can use to live a more sustainable lifestyle: reusable straws, bamboo toothbrushes, and cleansing bars.

4. Recycle as much of your trash as you can.

Segregate your garbage and bring items like aluminum cans, glass bottles, and plastic containers to your neighborhood recycling center, where you can get some money out of them. You can also look for stores that invite customers to bring in their old items to use their sustainability initiatives.

“Nike does a very good job on this,” Fanny shares. “You can bring your own used shoes, and they’re going to use them to create a surface for a competition, for example.”

5. Rot (or compost) what you have in your kitchen.

A yard is usually a requirement for a compost pit—something a lot of people don’t have in the age of apartment living. If you don’t have the space needed for a compost pit, you can get an electronic composter, which can transform your food scraps into fertilizer. Living a zero-waste lifestyle has never been easier.

Want to start your own zero-waste journey? Visit NO!W No Waste to discover more plastic-free initiatives you can start on your way to living a truly sustainable life.

Mars Salazar

Marianne is Nixplay’s Web Content Editor. Her hobbies include exploring new places, playing table tennis, and cuddling puppies. Send her a message at marianne.salazar@nixplay.com.

The Future Is Bright And Voice-Controlled: The Story Of Nixplay and Amazon Alexa

By Mars Salazar

On June 26, 2018

In From The Nixplay Team

If you’ve watched The Jetsons, you’ve probably marveled at the family’s space-age lifestyle. You couldn’t wait for the day when you’ll be able to drive around in George Jetson’s flying saucer car, and you wished for a robot maid like Rosie to help you with the household chores.

Fast forward to 2018, three decades after the show’s last episode: Companies are developing prototypes of flying cars, and space colonization is a far-off dream no more. While sentient robot assistants like Rosie are still far from mainstream, voice-controlled virtual assistants, like Amazon Alexa, are helping more and more people manage their schedules, households, and even Nixplay frames.

“I strongly believe voice user assistants along with the experiences that surround them are here to stay, and the interactions are only going to become more and more natural,” says Nixplay’s Head of Software John Marsden, who oversaw Amazon Alexa’s integration into Nixplay’s software.
According to John, Nixplay chose Alexa as its entry point into voice integration mainly for two reasons:
Alexa has the largest user base among the voice assistants on the market, and Nixplay already has an existing relationship with Amazon.
On a more personal note, John, who had recently transformed his house into a smart home, shares: “I am a massive advocate for smart home integrations and I use Alexa to control much of my home. I wanted my Nixplay frames to become part of my smart home family.”

Alexa and Nixplay

Integrating Alexa into the Nixplay platform seemed easy on paper: John and his team only had to create a “skill,” which in the Alexa universe, is “a term used to describe all the ways a user can interact with their frame through speech.” But this simple task posed several challenges.

John Marsden

“By far the hardest challenge–and one we are regularly improving on–is dealing with uncategorized voice input from the user in terms of playlist and frame names,” John shares. Most voice AI assistants work by learning a category for each input a user might give the system. If the voice assistant is asking the user to give it a location for a travel skill, it expects the user to give it the name of a city, country or area of some type in order to perform properly. It wasn’t that simple for Nixplay.

“The challenge we had is that a playlist name can be totally random–one person may have a playlist called ‘My Family,’ another might be ‘Summer Holiday 2016.’ As such, it’s very hard to categorize the information,” says John.

“The complexity lay more in trying to model all the ways different users might try to perform the same action, and the fact that we have to deal with a lot of random data with regards to playlist names and frame names,” he elaborated. “To handle this, we had to implement a lot more intelligence outside of what is provided by Alexa.”

In the end, John and his team came up with some core initial features. Alexa can be asked to display any of your playlists on any of your frames, and it can also assign a specific playlist to any Nixplay frame, wherever that frame might be located.

“We wanted to start simple and solve some of the large initial challenges without having to make major platform changes,” says John. “The playlist display functionality focuses on displaying the user’s content, which is what we are all about.”

You can also ask Alexa to tell you the connectivity status of your frame—”a supporting feature to allow a lot of our users to check on the status of a frame they are helping to manage remotely.”

Stepping into the future

There might only be a few Nixplay skills at the moment, but John assures us that his team has a lot of surprises up their sleeves.

“I can’t go into too much detail here for fear being hunted down by our product managers, but we are putting a lot of support into voice and have some big plans,” he reveals. “Our current focus is on making the content experience more dynamic, thereby making it easier for a user to see the photos that they wish to see without having to manually manage their content. We are also looking at ways of improving the multi-frame experience.”

Wherever Nixplay and Alexa’s partnership will take them, one thing’s for sure: it will always be grounded on Nixplay’s vision of a world where people can share their fondest memories with each other easily.

“I am sure a lot of what we do will be heavily influenced by our users, and they will have a big

say in where we take some of our voice features,” says John. “We are moving fast with regards to voice experience, so watch this space for other voice assistant announcements in the coming months!”

We’re not yet firmly in the future, but we’re most certainly on the way there.

Mars Salazar

Marianne is Nixplay’s Web Content Editor. Her hobbies include exploring new places, playing table tennis, and cuddling puppies. Send her a message at marianne.salazar@nixplay.com.

This Is The Best Thing You Can Do For All Your Photos

By Mars Salazar

On May 9, 2018

In From The Nixplay Team, Photography

Taking photos is one of the best ways to preserve life’s most precious moments, whether it’s a Sunday dinner with the whole family or your grandchild’s first steps. But what do you do with all the pictures you’ve taken? Saving them on your computer is the first step, but it seems like a waste to just let them languish on a hard drive forever.

Luckily, digital frame company Nixplay has a solution for that. Because Nixplay’s joining the Google Photos Partner Program and using the Google Photos Library API, you’ll soon be able to securely access even more of your most treasured memories on your Nixplay Wi-Fi Cloud Frames anytime, anywhere.

A concept presentation of how Google Photos will be integrated with the Nixplay mobile app. This is not the final product demonstration.

During the 2018 Google I/O Developers’ Summit held on May 8 in Mountain View, California, it was announced that Nixplay will be one of the first companies to launch its integration with Google Photos to its customers in the coming months. With this development, Google Photos will soon send your albums directly to your Nixplay Wi-Fi Cloud Frames, eliminating the need for you to spend precious time selecting photos for your playlists.

The best part is that if you’ve sent albums from Google Photos to your Nixplay frame, every time a new image is added into one of those albums on Google Photos, it will also be automatically uploaded to and viewable on your frame. This feature is especially great for people who live away from their loved ones, as this presents a new way for them to stay connected to them. Now, not only will your treasured moments be within reach, but you’ll always be in touch with those who matter most in your life.

This innovation, scheduled for release in the summer of 2018, is the latest feather in the cap of Creedon Technologies, the parent company of Nixplay and its sister brands, NIX and Nixplay Signage. Creedon Technologies has sold close to 1.5 million units of Nixplay Wi-Fi Cloud Frames, Nix Digital Frames, and Nixplay Signage Solutions since its inception in 2007, making it the global leader in its field. By harnessing the power of cloud storage, service technology, and security, Creedon Technologies has empowered its customers to display their photos and share their memories in a sophisticated manner.

Are you as excited for this as we are? Let us know your thoughts by leaving a comment below!

Mars Salazar

Marianne is Nixplay’s Web Content Editor. Her hobbies include exploring new places, playing table tennis, and cuddling puppies. Send her a message at marianne.salazar@nixplay.com.