Presto - photo sharing for Boomers

My friend Sharon Chiarella, who was the first product manager for Kodak's online printing services, just sent me a note about the coming out of her new startup called Presto (I keep on wanting to put a Yahoo-like exclamation point after Presto!). They announced today $10 million in venture funding from Kleiner Perkins Caufield & Byers and Clearstone Venture Partners. Their stealth name was Sonata Systems.

From what I can glean it is a printer built by HP that you give to your parents who are not proficient PC-users. You then upload your photos to Presto.com and they will deliver the image data to the printer using a phone line (they should also look at using a wide area wireless network). This is a smart move for HP to insert themselves (and their ink and paper) into a virtual sharing solution. For many Boomers, prints on the fridge beat pix on the PC.

I think this will be a hot item for this holiday season if it is priced right. My parents would love this. There's a magical moment when you receive a new picture and can hold it in your hands. I've tried the remote picture frames (like the short-lived Kodak Storybox and the Ceiva Digital Photo Receiver) and they were a lot of work and with only 20-30 picture capacity my parents always seemed to want to keep the exact pictures I deleted! It also seemed like the monthy fees were out of line. With Ceiva, the owner of the receiver pays $99/yr. If you gave one as a gift, your investment is $129 + $99/yr. Hopefully Presto can participate in the consumables revenue to keep the network fees low and encourage lots of sharing.

Presto will be showing it at the Wall Street Journal's D4: All Things Digital conference next week hosted by Walt Mossberg and Kara Swisher.

Good luck Sharon and the Presto team!