Earlier today, I had an interesting conversation with my mom. She had been approached by my aunt with the idea of providing a simple, Internet connected means of providing pictures to my grandma without needing to understand why or how it actually works. Now before the 50+ crowd jumps me for that comment, bear in mind that my grandma is in her mid-ninties. Yes, that is 9-0. So it should be safe to point out that at this stage in her life, she is dealing with other issues that prevent the possibility of introducing computing to her, whereas if she was in a different place in her life, it would be a great idea. Moving on.

After discussing all of the possibilities with my mom, I kept coming back to one reality - why is it so difficult to make something like this happen easily? Seriously, the best I could come up with was either a wifi-enabled digital picture frame or even better, using a Chumby with Flickr to simply display photos and other family news.

In many ways, the Chumby-Flickr combination made the most sense, seeing how family members could upload their photos, have then automatically resized off of the camera, then stream them easily to the Chumby.

Unfortunately, it is not that easy for a number of reasons. Here is a partial list.

• As easy as Flickr is, there is a need to show my less tech savvy family members how to upload photos. Not a problem for my mom, but other members of the family might need a quick how-to, which is problematic being so far away.
• My family by in large are living in the dial-up world. Some by choice, others because of location. This puts a real strain on uploading pictures with much success, at least when it comes to any that present any real numbers.
• To use Chumby, you really need wifi - rural Kansas is not really booming in that dept.

Now there are other reasons that I will not get into why this will not work, but it presents a greater opportunity. Why in the world do we not see see someone taking something like the Chumby, providing some sort of EVDO-like service for it and have Flickr on standby already out of the box? While WiMax or mobile broadband still costs money, if you bundle the whole thing (hardware and all) into a Zonbu like subscription plan, you will see a lot of holidays filled with these as gifts as they accommodate a very specific need - getting photos to grandparents who for whatever reason, are not part of the computing community. Think no one would by it? Wrong, I can name about ten people without even breaking a sweat.