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

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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 Nixplay Demo

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.

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This Is How One Military Family Stays In Touch

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On August 10, 2018

In Customer Testimonials

When you’re in a military family, it’s not easy to stay in touch all the time. The loneliness caused by distance isn’t always easy to overcome, especially when your loved ones are deployed in a faraway, war-torn location.

When Sherra Humphreys‘ daughter Rachel enlisted in the military, the proud mom immediately started thinking of ways to keep each other updated about everything happening in their lives.

“When you have a soldier [in your family], we kind of have a job at home to support them and make sure that they’re not really homesick and they can do their job well,” says Sherra.

“The immediate thing I [thought of] was, ‘oh, I’ll send you a Nixplay Frame and we can put a playlist on it, and we can update it, and it could play whenever you walk in.'”

Watch the video to learn about the Humphreys’ story:

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.

Nixplay blog-Rita-video

The Easy way To Stay In Touch With Your Loved Ones

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On August 7, 2018

In Customer Testimonials

Your engagement. Your wedding. Your son’s first steps. Your daughter’s graduation.

Your whole family may not be physically present for all these occasions, but there are many ways to include them as you celebrate your milestones.

Take for example Rita, who lives in Massachusetts with her husband and children. She wanted to keep her parents Jim and Elaine, who live across the country in Washington, involved in her children’s lives. She gave her parents a Nixplay frame as a way for them to bond despite the distance.

“It was a way for us to share [with my parents remotely] what was going on in the children’s lives, because they’ve never lived in the same town,” says Rita. “The Nixplay frame will allow them to see immediate pictures of the kids at their sporting events, or at any family events we might have that they weren’t able to join us on.”

Watch the video to learn Rita’s story.

Your bond with your family is always worth celebrating. For Nixplay Family Week, we’re giving you the chance to show your loved ones how much they mean to you by giving them their own Nixplay Wi-Fi Frame.

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For a limited time, you can get your own Nixplay Iris at up to 35 percent off. The more frames you buy, the greater the discount you get–all the more reason to get Nixplay Frames for you and your family. After all, what better way to celebrate family ties than by sharing your best memories with each other?

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

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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.

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

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.

Amazon Echo with Nixplay Frame

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

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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

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.

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