Eye-Fi Review: Almost Great

I have now been using the Eye-Fi card, from Eye-Fi, Inc. for a few weeks and though it does some things very well there are several major issues that keep it from being a "gotta have" product.

The Good: I must complement the company on their packaging and user experience. Installation was very smooth and easy and their Eye-Fi Manager control panel and web interface is clean and easy to use with excellent online help. Their email support was prompt and knowledgeable. At $99 for a 2 Mb SD card, it is approachable for photo enthusiasts.

When the Eye-Fi is paired to a wireless (Wi-Fi) network and inserted into the SD slot of your digital camera. It automatically uploads pictures from your card through the network to the Eye-Fi servers which in turn send the files to one of many photo sites supported by the service (like Facebook. Flickr, Picasa Web, etc.) and/or to a folder you specify on your desktop. You configure these destination options using the web-based Eye-Fi Manger. In my tests using several Nikon Coolpix models, this worked flawlessly. If you have taken pictures while out of range of a wireless network you are paired to, the card is smart enough to queue those files to upload when you are connected.

The Eye-Fi card is an ambitious project and a clever implementation. Trying to get a card to communicate with a wireless network and run a program to manage uploads over that network in a device that doesn't know that all this is happening is no small feat unto itself. On that score the Eye-Fi card does a great job - though this lack of communication with the camera creates some major limitations on how the card can be used.

The Bad: The first limitation has to do with how the card is paired with a wireless network. To do this you remove the card from your camera and put it into the supplied USB reader which needs to be plugged-in to a PC or laptop. The card then sniffs out the available networks and allows you to add a network profile for that network. Network pairing can only be configured from the PC/laptop. Network-based security keys are supported but services requiring a login (like a T-Mobile hotspot where you need a username and password) are not. This means you need to take your laptop with the card to every location that you will want to pair the card to a network. For me this was great for my home network or the one at the office but it eliminates one of the visions where you could hop on any Wi-Fi network or go to Starbucks to upload your photos.

The second limitation is the inability to select if a specific photo is to be sent to the network or not and as importantly, the ability to select where it should be sent. In a single photo-taking outing there may be pictures I want to send to a public service like Flickr and others that I just want moved to my PC.

Conclusion: It is too bad that the Eye-Fi card has to operate "blindly" when inserted in your camera. I totally understand why they had to do this. Digital cameras are not "open" devices where Eye-Fi could make use of the UI and screen of the camera. Hopefully they will be able to continue to be clever and come up with a work-around for pairing to a network like T-Mobile's hotspots without actually connecting to that specific network. That will still be hard since once the card is in your camera, you have no UI or way to get feedback on how the Wi-Fi part of the card is working. If you want to always send all of your photos to the same destination sites, you don't like messing with cables or docking stations and you are often in places that have a Wi-Fi network that you can use your laptop to pair with then the Eye-Fi is for you. For what it does, it is a well executed product. Just make sure you think through if you can live with the limitations.

One might see digital camera vendors adapting their in-camera software and UI to be Eye-fi aware so that if the card is detected in the slot, the is access to some basic UI. That will take time to get that type of integration and the camera vendors may go directly to adding Wi-Fi to their bill-of-materials (along with GPS chips we hope!). This is where camera phones like the Nokia N95 what have built-in WiFi have a distinct advantage for mobile photo takers - the Wi-Fi is integrated with the phone's UI so you can select and configure Wi-Fi network access on the device and if Wi-Fi is not available, you always have the cellular network. If you really want to need to upload photos in real-time from almost anywhere, an N-series Nokia (N73, N81, N93, N95) or SONY Ericsson Cybershot camera phone today is a better option.

MJK

Eye-Fi Raises $5.5 M for Wi-Fi SD cards

Eye-fi, a Silicon Valley startup announced that they have closed a $5.5 million dollar A round of venture financing. I first read about these guys last year and signed up for their beta in October (though wasn't selected). They are estimating that a 1GB Eye-fi SD card will be $100 - I just saw 1GB SD cards in a Sunday circular for $14.95. The idea of being able to instantly get my pictures from the camera to the web is appealing to me (hence the name of this blog!). I've tried a number of previous attempts including a SONY Clie with a Wi-Fi card, I still own my Nikon P3 (who's Wi-Fi I gave up on trying to get to work). It just seems to me that there is a lot more complexity to this Wi-Fi/SD marriage than meets the eye.

Here are a few of the issues that come to mind:
(1) Though I really like the idea of getting some of my pictures posted quickly to Flickr, it is maybe one in 5 - not all. It is still very important for me to get my original files on my desktop (and then onto my backup drive) so this is really not an obvious substitute for my cable.
(2) What happens if I am on a trip and am shooting more than 1 GB worth of images/video clips using multiple SD cards or I'm somewhere that might not have a Wifi connection that works. Unless I use the Eye-fi card exclusively, how do I manage transmitting my pictures on different cards?
(3) If I do use the Eye-fi card exclusively, how do I get the pictures to my PC? Do I upload and then sync back to my PC?
(4) Do the pictures go directly to Flickr or are they going through some intermediate site controlled by Eye-fi (that I would no doubt need to pay a subscription fee to use) and are then being relayed to the sites that I select.
(5) How does one manage the options for the Eye-fi through the cameras UI? Lets say I want all my pictures to be sent to my personal storage area in the cloud but I want to tag only certain ones to go to Flickr - some I want to be public, others private, etc.

Maybe Eye-fi's strategy is to prove out the software and platform with the SD card but ultimately their business is to license that SW and platform to camera or mobile phone vendors who integrate Wifi into their cameras/camera phones as a native feature or make Wifi available as a dongle (this is actually my preferred option - hope someone from Nikon reads this blog!).

I do question the long-term need for connected cameras that are not integrated with a phone (that may also have Wi-Fi capability). Though my recent experience with the Samsung A990 3.2 Mpixel phone from Verizon was pretty bad, phones from Sony Ericsson and Nokia are starting to deliver all the image quality and performance you need for most snapshots or photoblog posts. Plus they have an integrated keyboard for labeling and tagging, a more open environment for 3rd party applications (Shozu being one such example) and more of them have built-in GPS for automatic geo-tagging.


I wish the Eye-fi guys luck as I'm very pro sharing and getting the pictures off the camera and in some cases published to the web. I'm just not sure this specific product as a Wi-Fi/SD card for $100 is going to be a big winner with more capable camera phones coming on strong and such a cost competitive market for SD memory.


MJK

More Great Marketing from Nikon

If this is your first visit to this blog, I'll let you know up front that I am partial to Nikon cameras. That said, Nikon has once again hit the mark with a great marketing campaign for their Digital SLR products.

Nikon has been reporting great financial results based on largely on the success of their dSLR products. Profits were up over 50% last year. Some of this success can be attributed to the growing demand for better digital cameras as people are actually trying to use DC's and finally starting to understand the limitations of point-and-shoot models. The rest of it is just plain great marketing. You don't see it that often any more so it motivates me to write about it when you do.

Their latest campaign was to give 200 people in Georgetown, SC a Nikon D40 and let them take pictures. They then took the pictures along with profiles of some of the people who took them and created a really beautiful web site. One of the things that has always fueled my interest in photography is the emotive power of imagery. Cameraphone pictures are great to instantly send a visual message to someone and that has its own power but for pictures that really communicate beauty and emotion, nothing compares to a dSLR.

Are we seeing a renaissance of the "photo hobbyist"? All I know is many more of my friends are sporting Rebels and Nikon D's these days and that is a good sign for photography as a means for preserving memories and communicating with a view through a lens. If you have not yet taken the plunge, there's nothing to wait for. A D40 can be had for just north of $500 and the D40x for around $700 - now you will then need at least $300 worth of accessories (flash, CF/SD cards, bag, etc.) and before long you will be online looking for the best price for that telephoto zoom lens (the good news is those have come down in price too - Nikon has a 55-200 zoom with VR for less than $250).

Digital Railroad Launches Marketplace

Digital Railroad (DR) launched the Beta of their Marketplace today. DR has already built a great platform for photographer's and agencies to manage their own assets/archives, workflows and storefronts - now with the launch of the Marketplace, all of those archives can be searched through a single sign-on for photo buyers.

The real impact of Digital Railroad has been to return the control of their work to the professional photographer. Previously, DR subscribers were able to use the platform to promote their own archives, now, by participating in the Marketplace, they will be able to gain exposure to traffic from more photo buyers.

Photo buyers and flocking to the Digital Railroad Marketplace because of the 1000 members and 50 agencies who are putting up the freshest and most desirable content on attractive terms (set by the seller). There are others who are trying to aggregate photographs and photographers but they do not have the caliber of professional work available on Digital Railroad. The big 800 lb gorillas in this business have built bloated and inefficient mechanisms for marketing content to buyers. They have acted as "gatekeepers" and "toll collectors" to the free flow of commerce between the buyers who are looking to purchase content and the professionals who are taking the pictures. The Digital Railroad platform eliminates that friction and provides a much cleaner solution that will result in more and better content for buyers at better prices while returning more profit to the photographer or agency.

Keep and eye on Digital Railroad’s Marketplace – it has potential to carve out a major role in the future of how photos and other digital content are discovered, bought and sold.

Great Kodak Video On You Tube

You have got to watch this.......



I hope it's not too little too late........

Canon is King on Flickr

Michael Arrington over at TechCrunch had a post a few days ago on the data that was being collected by Flickr about the different cameras used by their users. I hadn't see this before and have had some fun poking at the numbers.

Flickr currently claims to host about 230 million photos. Though some users can withhold their EXIF data from view and some photos have has it stripped out by a desktop app, I'll wager that these numbers are still a pretty good representation of the overall community. In adding up the numbers from the major brands I found a few surprises. Even though Kodak and SONY are top selling consumer digital camera brands, they are very under represented in the universe of Flickr photos. SONY has only two models with over 1 million photos, Kodak does not have any, their top model has 695K photos. Compare that to Nikon, with 8 models (not just dSLRs) with more that 695K photos and Canon has 33 models with more than 695K photos!

When it comes to Total Number of Photos, Canon is King (from Flickr data):

Canon 75 Million
Nikon 26 Million
SONY 22 Million
Olympus 13.9 Million
Kodak 10.6 Million

Canon is still the leader by a wide margin in overall digital camera sales (see all the numbers) with a projected 20,650,000 sales in FY2006/07 (ending in March '07). That's a 22% increase over last year. This is more than double Nikon's total DC sales of 8,500,000.

Nikon is coming on strong in the more profitable dSLR market with close to a 50% increase over last year up to 2 million units closing in on Canon's 2.45 million. Nikon has had a big hit with both the D50 and D80 this past year and a new D40 with a $599 MSRP is on the way.

Getting back to Flickr, I can't help but wonder what impact if any the RAW/NEF controversy last year had on pro's use of Canon vs. Nikon? I just picked up a D70 from a friend who had upgraded to a D80 and am looking forward to dipping my toes into dSLR-land. I can tell you already there are now a lot of accessories to tempt me....... Dear Santa, I could really use a 28-200 VR lens..........

Photo Backup Services

There are a number of new companies offering to provide online backup services for your photos (and in some cases other data). These include:

- Box.net
- Carbonite
- PhotoSafe from PhotoSite
- ProtectMyPhotos
- Streamload
- Swiss Picture Bank


I really like the idea of automated backup. I've been using an external hard disk with Retrospect and Picasa 2.0's Backup to DVD-R for my photos but when I was running the Carbonite Beta there was something very nice about knowing that all of my photos were sync'ed with the backup service.

My big issue with these services is that regardless of what they call themselves or where their data center is (Swiss Photo Bank.....), these companies are mostly all startups (PhotoSite has been around the longest and is part of United Online (UNTD) the same company that brings us Classmates.com and NetZero). It is true that storage costs have come down dramatically and new storage architectures make providing services like these much more practical, as some point these companies will need to make enough money to cover their costs once the VC money is spent. Though I have worked at both startups and big companies like Fidelity and Kodak, I want a brand like Kodak (or HP or Google or Yahoo) to be the keeper of my photo archive. I probably won't get invested in a service until it is available from a "trusted brand" at an affordable price.

This looks like an area that should be ripe for some acquisitions since several of these startups have built very nice technical solutions and all they need is a trusted brand to help them get people like me over the hump........

Manhattan Story Mashup - a Nokia Experiment

Thanks to Steve Garfield for this tip on an interesting experiment being run this Saturday in Times Square using camera phones called the Manhattan Story Mashup. The group behind this is Sensor Planet, a project of Nokia Research.

Though I can't say that I completely understand all of the rules of this particular game, it is part of an intersting trend for using mobile and web technologies to enable activities in the physical world. I think this is a really positive trend, whether it is geocaching, Dogster letting you find compatible hounds to go for a weekend walk with or connecting with a group for a weekly bike ride using an email list, this is exciting and healthy for our overly screen-glued society.

There's a startup here in Boston that I'm watching that has a service that is catching on with the under 30 crowd called Hey Let's Go (heyletsgo.com). It makes use of bits like the web and mobile technologies but the focus is on doing fun things in the world of atoms.

Better late........ Flickr adds Geotagging

So I'm late on this one but the rumored geotagging features on Flickr went live today. Right now you have to go to the Organizr to access the map and tag your photos - I'm sure they will add more links to add geotags (like from a photo's detail page) in the future. If you have already added geotags, they are picked up automatically.

Once a photo has a geotag you can access it via a "map" link on the description page and a small window pops up showing you the location. One thing that looks like it will need some work (or bigger servers on the back end) is the map-based search which is a little slow to refresh at different zoom levels.

Overall, a very solid addition to the web's leading photo sharing community. Someday soon all of this geotagging will happen transparently but for now Flickr's geotagging is a fun and easy way to put yourself on the map!

YouShoot on ABC News!

Ryan and Brian from YouShoot, a Boston-based startup, had a great interview on ABC News today.  Their business is renting digital cameras for events and then providing an online platform for sharing and printing. Their primary events have been weddings though the service is also great for corporate events or other functions where you want to capture some candid photos.  

They have bootstrapped the business to-date but are looking to scale up in the near future. 

Will new SONY GPS device start the trend?

PhotographyBLOG has a report of the announcement from SONY today of the GPS-CS1 GPS Device that will be available in September for $150. Thought this is not technologically revolutionary (you can buy a portable Garmin GPS for about $100 and use software like Picasa to link your photos to Google Earth or Google Maps) what is significant is that finally a major camera brand is going to promote the combination of GPS and digital photography. It looks like it might be tied to working only with SONY digital cameras which would be really unfortunate (for me since I have three Nikon Coolpix cameras). There is software that I've referenced before like GPS PhotoLink that does the matching for you but it is $995.

Is this a tipping point for GPS photography? Almost every new photo sharing site I look at has some form of manual geotagging thanks to Google's open API. I like the accessory path for early adopters but ideally you would like this built into the camera.

MS Live Labs to show Photosynth @ Siggraph

Microsoft's Live Labs will be demonstrating Photosynth, a prototype implementation of research from the Interactive Visual Media Group combined with some technology they picked up with the acquisition of Seadragon.

For those of you visiting Boston for Siggraph, Richard Szelinski from Microsoft Research will be presenting their paper, titled Photo Tourism: Exploring Photo Collections in 3D on Wednesday 8/2, Hall B2, 8:30-10:15AM.

You should definitely watch the video on the Photosynth site. The ability to take arbitrary photos and automatically register then for orientation to be combined into a 3D view is groundbreaking. There have been similar approaches such as the technology from MOK3 which now powers the Supertour.com site though their approach still requires some operator intervention to register multiple pictures.

I was thinking about an interesting mashup. There was an article in the NYT this Sunday about the SkyScout that uses positioning technology from Yamcon that not only grabs GPS location but uses sensors to know the direction and elevation of where the device is pointed (SkyScout tells you what stars you are looking at).

Imagine if you had the SkyScout's positioning/orientation system built into a digital camera that could save that info with the image to be used for feeding photos into something like PhotoSynth!

More Visual Search - Xcavator

From my friends at Future Image is a tip on a new service called Xcavator from San Fransico-based Cognisign.

I highly recommend the Cool Video Intro link and demo with Flickr. What I really like about Xcavator is that rather than trying to rely 100% on computer vision to do fully automatic similarity matching - it takes simple input from the searcher to improve the results. By clicking on regions in the source image you help narrow your results. The Golden Gate Bridge sample/demo is really impressive.

Riya who is now switching to visual search will have to keep a close eye on Cognisign. Riya CEO Munjal Shah goes into quite a bit of detail in the Riya 2.0 Roadmap post about their plans.

Trying out Zooomr 2.0

I've finally made it beyond the huge obstacle of signing up/logging on to Zooomr (they use some bizarre link to OpenID) to give it a try since I'd like to check out the geotagging. They are offering bloggers a free upgrade to a pro account. That requires you to post a Zooomr photo to your blog. So here's mine, a panorama of Fenway Park from a few weeks ago when we had some great seats on the right field roof deck.

FenwayPano061106
Hosted on Zooomr

More on my thoughts about Zooomr once I have had some more time to give it a good test drive.......

Picasa 2.5 Beta supports geotagging with Google Earth

I installed the new Picasa 2.5 Beta a few days ago to check out the new PicasaWeb online photo sharing capabilities called Picasa Web Albums that Google released as a beta last week (announcement from GoogleBlog). Picasa Web is a very clean and fast (if a bit basic) photo sharing site that when using Picasa 2.5 is effortless to upload to.

Here's my first album from a recent Red Sox game. As quite a few people have already pointed out, the biggest weakness is lack of control over access. Anyone who finds the album can help themselves to the high resolution versions of the photos single click (this is just like public photos uploaded to Flickr but there you have access control and permissions options). It also seems that even albums you choose to make "unlisted" are still being indexed (ZD Net Article). Until they come out with a new version with better access control, I would not post any photos that you consider too personal (or valuable) for anyone with a browser to view and download.

The thing that has me rather excited is hidden under the Tools Menu of the Picasa 2.5 client application and is called GeoTag with Google Earth. Google Earth is one of the most amazing pieces of software I've ever used. With Picasa 2.5 running, you select a folder of images you want to geotag (locate on a map), you select GeoTag with Google Earth. The Google Earth application is launched and you have a Picasa "tray" overlaying the map window. You use Google Earth's search and navigation to find the place you are looking for, put the geotagging cross-hairs on the spot you want and select geotag. This then communicates the x,y coordinates back to Picasa. From here, you can also add the pictures to your MyPlaces in Google Earth.

I've already been playing with Google Earth Plus which allows you to upload waypoints and track data from your GPS. When we go on an outing or hike I turn on my Garmin ForeTrex 201 and hook it to the backpack. At the end of the hike or outing you save the track data. The track can then be loaded into Google Earth (using a PC and a cable). In Google Earth I was able to geotag photos from a Pink Jeep Tour we went on in Sedona, AZ and link them right to the GPS track (there's also a very cool software application called GPS PhotoLink that actually does the linking automatically based on time stamp).

Joe Hughes on his incrementalist blog has done a great job of reviewing the new geotagging features of Picasa and Google Earth as well.

It would be nice to do this right from Picasa Web since it would allow a hot link back to the original photo stored online. Even though Picasa has stored the geocoding information in the files EXIF info, when you upload to Flickr - the geotags are not recognized since Flickr deals with x,y as just another tag (seems like this is not the best way to deal with explicit geotags). But, all in all, if this is a small glimpse of the synergies that we might see in the future from Google's various acquisitions and services then it is very encouraging!

Geotagging and "place coding" of images may be something that today is fun for a few thousand photogeeks but in the future this becomes one of the pillars of how digital photos are made more findable and usable. Photo search by location (plus time) of either your personal collection of photos or public photo collections opens up some very interesting possibilities.

Bravo Google for pushing this forward!

Riya Changes Focus

Munjal Shah, the CEO and founder of Riya/Ojos has been providing a riveting chronicle on his Blog of the launch of Riya.com this spring and their recent change of strategy and focus. Riya 2.0 as others like Mike Arringon at TechCrunch are calling this new strategy - is focused on visual search of pictures anywhere on the internet.

I've got to say that I'm a bit disappointed. The automation of capturing metadata with images is a horizontal capability that is a key element to enabling the next generation of digital photography applications and services (and effective photo search in my opinion). Riya had set out a bold vision of creating such an automated system for consumer's photos. Help me initially find and identify the people in MY photos then add even more intelligent tagging based on proximity, text recognition, etc. I still think this is a very worthwhile problem to solve.

The Riya 1.0 launch plan was built around face recognition and that people would share the "profiles" of the people that were identified in their photo collections with others. This may be one of the places where things when wrong. People can be very protective of their personal photos and the annotations/tags that go along with them. Those who participate in communities like Flickr or Facebook obviously have less anxiety about the public nature of their photos or they only post some of their photos to the community. Now, you let the masses do the identification of any content on anywhere on the web. There is a lot of tagging that is already happening on the sites hosting the images (like Flickr and Facebook) that can also be used as part of the search methods.

Visual Search of all of the content on the internet is a BHAG for sure. Google is already in the game. Ask.com just re-launched an image search that I've found to be quite effective. As Tara Hunt, Riya's recently departed marketing wiz, says in her comments on Riya's change in strategy - in the search game it is relevance that matters. Riya will need to do a better job of delivering more relevant results than their many competitors.

Microsoft Pro Photo Summit

Are you a pro photographer or "industry influential" (in MS's words)? You might want to look into attending the Microsoft Pro Photo Summit. Microsoft has slowly and methodically become a force in digital photography, not just because they control the OS on 90% of the world's PCs but because they've worked at it. Their first digital imaging application other than Paint was PictureIt! which shipped in 1995 and had some very innovative features.

I'm sure one of the hot topics of conversation will be the new alternative to JPEG MS has proposed called Windows Media Photo (CNET News Article). With their recent breakdown in talks with Adobe about support for PDF in Office 2007 (Bloomberg News Story) it will be interesting to see how this plays out. Photoshop is the standard for pro photographers and most advanced amateurs - Adobe has been leading the effort on a Digital Negative Specification trying to unite various flavors of RAW files.

Webshots takes on Photobucket

Webshots today announced a free image hosting service called AllYouCanUpload.com, here's the full story from Yahoo! (since CNET News had not yet covered their own announcement!)

As far as I can figure, this is a way for Webshots to boost their comScore Media Metrix numbers. In a recent WSJ article Photobucket showed one year growth of 81% while Webshots was down -16%. Even though I have yet to figure out the business model around Photobucket's giving away free disk storage and bandwidth as a remote hoster though with 10 million unique users a month you should be able to figure out some way to make a buck. That is certainly what Trinity Ventures was thinking when they recently recently invested $10.5 million in Photobucket.

Traffic numbers and ranking are vitally important to CNET as they have built a major online advertising property around Webshots.

-MJK