augiemania

For a few years, I’ve been making pretty abstract webpages that serve no purpose other than to be pretty to look at (you can find these linked in my sidebar). 

As my wife and I are beginning to more seriously furnish our home, she proposed that we find a way to frame this particular page to hang in our living room. Finding a way to display these pages outside of the context of a computer is something I always had a hard time trying to figure out, but my wife’s suggestion re-lit this curiosity in me.

I could only think of 3 way to do this. 

The first, and worst, way is to set up wireless monitors to my unused iMac and run open browser windows to the pages. This is expensive for home decor, and not really practical if I decide to exhibit/sell these rigs (and idea I’m toying with). 

The second, and most cost effective way is to buy a bunch of low-end tablets. My 2 concerns here are that the screens are small (7 inches) and since they are low-end, they won’t have the processing power to run some of my pages well. (They typically work perfectly in any half-way decent computer/tablet/phone, but these tablets are 45 bucks for a reason.)

The third, and best method is through a company I found earlier in the week. They custom build web enabled display screens, provide and SDK for me to load up what I need, and can mass re-produce them need be. They also provide larger screens more appropriate for exhibition/sale. The downside, is that they are expensive.

The 15 inch display would run roughly $300 a pop, plus any support I need from them to ensure I can do what I want with them. Then add shipping. Ordering a “sample” order of 20 units runs $5,900 plus shipping + support.

I would 100% want to order the 20 as I have ~10 i’d like to see able to be hung on a wall, and the ability to make more of these as I need to.

I don’t have 6 grand sitting around to do this. Enter Kickstarter. With their tiered rewards structure, I could easily offer contributors their own piece to hang, or any number of perks. It’s also not a HUGE amount. However, Kickstarter (and the internet at large) is notoriously tilted towards those with “klout” and I’m not exactly in that boat, and I abhor hard-selling/spamming to my friends (which is all I have to sell to at this point).

Ugh, what do I do? I’ll try to figure this out. Maybe I’ll just get 1 for a proof of concept and go from there.