With Nannagram, Fresk Interactive aims to keep grandma’s photos fresh

Stefan and Thomas Hansen can check grandma’s gift off their holiday shopping list. The brothers, who together make up Des Moines-based Fresk Interactive, took care of that with the launch of Nannagram, a digital “picture frame” application. With Nannagram, users can push photos via email and Facebook (and soon SMS) to a viewing device like…

Nannagram, created by Stefan and Thomas Hansen with grandparents in mind, allows users to share photo feeds with anyone who has a web-enabled device. Screenshot from nannagram.com

Stefan and Thomas Hansen can check grandma’s gift off their holiday shopping list.

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The brothers, who together make up Des Moines-based Fresk Interactive, took care of that with the launch of Nannagram, a digital “picture frame” application. With Nannagram, users can push photos via email and Facebook (and soon SMS) to a viewing device like a TV, tablet or smartphone. Nannagram integrates with Facebook accounts and shares the photos users select on a web-enabled slideshow, so recipients of the photos don’t need their own accounts. Recipients neeed simply to open a Nannagram feed on their device and bookmark it, and shared messages and photos will appear automatically.

So even if grandma’s in, say, Denmark — in the Hansen’s case, she is — she can still see current photos of loved ones without having to browse the internet herself.

“It was something that sounded like fun,” Stefan said of Nannagram in an email interview, “and it makes for a great gift to our grandmother this year.”

Inspiration for Nannagram struck when Stefan was paying a visit to his wife’s grandmother last winter and decided a few photos could do a lot to brighten the place up. That, coupled Stefan and Thomas’ trouble keeping their own gradmother’s digital picture frame populated with up-to-date pictures — again, the whole Denmark thing poses a challenge — gave them the idea for the project. 

“It hit me at that point: we are sharing all these photos and messages with people we don’t even really know (on Facebook), but for some odd reason, we’re often leaving our grandparents out of the loop,” Stefan said. “And I’m guilty of that myself. It seems to be easier (or more likely) for me to share a photo with a buddy online than printing and sending my grandma a photo.”

Not anymore, the Hansens hope. Nannagram is free, and Stefan (far left) and Thomas (near left) intend to keep it that way. Through the Amazon Associates program, they’ll make a cut of the profits when goods are purchased from links on the Nannagram site, but the brothers don’t envision the application as a big money-maker.

Instead, they see Nannagram as a gift that will keep on giving to grandparents — and, perhaps, something that will provide a foundation for future Fresk projects. 

“The idea of building a non-interface for a demographic age of 70-90 has a lot of appeal to us,” Stefan said. “If we can create something of value for that generation, it should be easy to carry a lot of those concepts over to our other projects.”

“There’s definitely a lot of other applications for the general framework that we’ve built,” he added. “Think digital signage, advertising or a shared/digital message board. So it’s really just another tool in our arsenal.”

For more on Nannagram, see the demo video below, from fresk on Vimeo.

This story is part of the AIM Archive

This story is part of the AIM Institute Archive on Silicon Prairie News. AIM gifted SPN to the Nebraska Journalism Trust in January 2023. Learn more about SPN’s origin »

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