Digital Life Preview

My friend, Ken Berger, attended a press preview of the Digital Life event to be help in Manhattan this fall. He pointed out a few things that got a lot of attention among the media attendees and a few things he thought might be of particular interest to me. The theme today: live pictures and digital notes.

Live Pictures

I own an Eye-FI wifi SDRAM card already. You plug it into your camera, and it stores up to 2GB of pictures, but also wirelessly and continuously uploads them to your computer and online accounts such as flickr.com. The concept was nice, but the fact that I had to be on my home wireless network for this to happen defeated the whole benefit of the device. I wanted it to discover and use any open wifi it happened upon while I wandered around town, uploading pictures whenever it had found an opportunity. It does not do this.

Eye-FI has come a little closer to what I want with two new products: Eye-Fi Share and Eye-Fi Explore (theyrenamed the original product I had the Eye-Fi Home). Unfortunately, poor business choices have eliminated the benefit of otherwise brilliant technology.

The Eye-Fi Share just adds the capability to upload to a specific public wifi hotspot network run by Wayport. You get free access to this network for the first year. After that, they have you over a barrel for (currently) $19/year. Obviously, the business model for forcing users to a specific vendor is enticing. The Eye-Fi folks manged to resist scuttling their original product by forcing users to use their own propietory photo sharing site (that's why I was originally excited by it). But the MBAs finally won and managed to kill this next product of theirs. Having 10,000 Wayport hotspots in the US may sound great. But that may only cover tiny fraction of your upload opportunities, and will surely fail you at key moments and events. And it surely will not work when you take a picture at a friend's place, or at any of the growing number of places with open free wifi.  And of course, Eye-Fi is almost totally useless for me outside the US: I won't be able to upload pictures from any of the free wifi hotspots in Cafes here in Ho Chi Minh City, Vietnam. Eye-Fi Share is such a tragic product: it has all the technology to be brilliant and a must-have for me, but the business model imposed on it completely removes any of its benefits over the basic Eye-Fi Home.

The Eye-Fi Explore adds location (longitude and latitude) tags to the internal EXIF of your photos before uploading them. The location is that of the Wayport wifi router used to do the upload. I love geocoding my photos, and so was very excited to hear from Ken about this Eye-Fi product. But again, it is hobbled by being tethered to a specific access point vendor. Instead of using the location of ten thousand Wayport hotspots, it could have used a broader Wifi geolocation service such as Loki with potentially millions of defined locations, and certainly not excluding free ones.  Location using Wifi Hotspots is rather primative given current coverage, but further limiting this to just a single provider may add little value beyond tagging a photo "New York", or perhaps "Manhattan".

D-Link has a new D-Life line of home products. The whole D-Life line looks intriguing, but I was particularly interested by one product that will soon be available by the end of September: the D-Link "Internet enabled photo frame". I could see giving this to my mother and then having it show pictures I select and upload from Vietnam or put on Flickr with a specific tag.  It all depends, of course, on how it is implemented. But it has great promise. You could actually create a do-it-yourself version of one of these frames for very little money with a cheap computer, but the cost of electricity for running a dedicated machine could easily cost $100/year.

A little bit more research shows that D-Link was not first to market with this product, but they may help to make this category even more affordable. A $200 product is already available from eStarling.  It can work with Flickr and other sites through an RSS feed (for a specific tag for instance), and also supports encrypted Wifi connections and sending messages to the frame. The key is that there is no subscription fee or required service provider involved.

Digital Notes

Ken really liked the Livescribe pen. It takes a digital record of whatever you write, and it records what is being said as you write. This could be a perfect product for the classroom. I think I would love one of these in math class, or any situation where I am drawing a lot of diagrams or complex symbols while trying to follow a detailed technical discussion. But I think it has little hope of being well received in business meetings. No one likes being recorded in a meeting. It feels like an invasion of privacy. It makes people less inclined to be open in their discussions. And makes everyone fear they'll have their words literally played back to them and help against them at some point.