Investors Bullish on Internet-Enabled Picture Frames

Apparently not everyone agrees with me that those hi-tech picture frames you bought for your parents last Christmas are probably a passing fad.

Longworth Venture Partners and CommonAngels have just put an additional $3 million into FrameMedia, which provides a platform for delivering content to these frames wirelessly. The round brings the company’s total funding to $5.2 million after a $2 million round in November led by the same investors.

The FrameChannel platform allows users to choose from over 400 FrameChannel feeds for topics such as sports news, traffic conditions, and weather. FrameChannel also supports generic RSS feeds and social media sites such as Flickr and Facebook.

According to research firm IDC, 42.3 million digital frames are expected to be in sold by 2011 (a straggering figure given how few I’ve seen in the wild). It seems that the introduction of dynamically updated content is expected to spur rapid growth, and FrameMedia hopes to use the new capital to establish themselves as a leader in this fledgling space.