Article Review: Eye-Fi

“Eye-Fi: How One Little Chip Will Change the Way You Share Pictures”
WIRED magazine, 11/9/07
http://www.wired.com/gadgets/wireless/news/2007/11/eyefi


Eye-Fi is a new company that makes Wi-Fi memory cards for cameras. This enables users to automatically route photos to their hard drive or to photo vendors like Facebook or Flikr.
This product is extremely innovative and useful. Photos the world over are trapped inside of people’s cameras because of the chore of uploading them. Then many never make it online because it is a multi-step process: plug in the camera, upload the pictures to the hard drive, filter through the pictures, and manually upload them to the web. The card’s software even handles scaling and compression. As for filtering through the pictures, privacy settings on the sites can even help with this.
So why haven’t we seen anything like this sooner? Eye-Fi was the first to create a Wi-Fi-equipped memory card because many of the large companies like Kodak and San Disk focus solely on hardware and not software. Eye-Fi was able to assemble the necessary people involved because the company was focused solely around the idea of producing a Wi-Fi chip. Camera producers like Nikon and Canon have played around with the idea, but their solutions locked users to one photo platform for uploads. Users wanted more freedom.
Eye-Fi has been working on creating this chip for two and a half years. They’ve produced a 2-GB SD wireless memory card. The user just needs to sync the card to a hard drive or Wi-Fi network, and all the work is done for him. Eye-Fi also pioneers on listening to customers. Anyone can log onto eye.fi.com to suggest additional photo platforms.
Because of the integration of technology, IDC analyst Jonathon Gaw anticipates that more devices will soon network via Bluetooth or Wi-Fi. As for Eye-Fi, CEO Yuval Koren cryptically tells readers, “’There’s a lot more that we have in mind. Keep following what we’re doing.’”
I think that this is a remarkable idea. I can never find my cord to upload my pictures and even when I do upload them, I hardly ever post them online just because it is such a hassle. This could enable me to upload and share more pictures and would save a lot of time. I might even take my camera more places and take more pictures with this much work eliminated. However, I would still want to be able to edit a lot of my pictures so loading them directly online would not be for me. I also think that it would take up a lot of memory on your computer and website if all the pictures you took were uploaded. Many pictures that the average person takes end up being deleted. How is this worked out?
Another problem is the range of the Wi-Fi. If you are in a remote area or overseas, what happens to your uploads? Can you still upload manually if need be? Different countries also have different band frequencies, which could cause a problem.
Overall, I think it’s a very interesting and useful technology, but not something I would purchase until it becomes more widespread. Cost and logistics uploading would be issues for me, and I don’t think these have been brought into light yet since the concept is so new.