Keywords: Wi-Fi digicam card photo sharing
A family get together in New York sparked a career change that turned a trio of telecom ASIC engineers in Silicon Valley into consumer electronics entrepreneurs. The first results of that change hit the Web last week with the release of Eye-Fi, an 802.11g card for digital cameras.
Former chip designer Yuval Koren said family members promised to send copies of their digital pictures after a gathering in New York at the end of 2004 but they never did. That set the engineer and two of his colleagues who helped develop the Cisco CRS-1 chip for high-end routers to launch a startup aimed at automating the process of sharing digital images.
"We are from the opposite end of the spectrum from consumer electronics—big iron," said Koren.
Auto photo sending
The resulting Eye-Fi Card fits into an SD slot and automatically sends pictures to a local PC or Mac or to an online site based on preset user preferences. The $100 card went on sale Oct. 30 on a variety of online sites including Amazon and Wal-Mart.
This time around the trio who helped design one of the first interfaces for an OC-768 telecom line used only off-the-shelf chips. The Eye-Fi Card includes and Atheros integrated .11g chip and a 2Gbyte flash memory device.
Users must first slot the card into a provided USB reader on a PC or Mac to set user policies. Whenever the card detects new photos and the presence of a Wi-Fi connection, it can send the pictures to the local computer or to one of 17 online photo Websites including Facebook, Flickr, Photobucket or Shutterfly.
Once user preferences are set, the card can be plugged into any camera. It acts like a 2Gbyte flash storage card, but also sends photos automatically, drawing no more than the maximum 200mW allowed by the 3.3V SD slot.
One down side of the product is that users cannot change settings on the camera because the card will not work directly with the interface on the digital camera. So far, only a handful of cameras with integrated Wi-Fi are currently on the market, the company claims.
"The upside is we can work with any camera with an SD slot," said Koren. "So, we let you keep the camera you have or choose the camera you want. The choices are fairly restrictive if you want a camera with embedded Wi-Fi today," he added.
For video, too
The initial Eye-Fi Card only handles pictures, but future versions will also handle video. Also on the road map are premium services.
The company has worked with the separate applications programming interfaces of the various photo Websites to automate the process of uploading pictures as part of a free service that comes with the Eye-Fi Card. Users will have to pay for future services the company is planning, but not ready to announce.
"We have a deep pipeline of products and services we are considering," said Koren.
The startup may also consider rolling out cards that use other interfaces or communications protocols such as Bluetooth or UWB. Today some 60 percent of existing digital cameras have SD slots, and as many as 75 percent of new cameras have the slots. Sony's Memory Stick runs a distant second and the aging CompactFlash card is slowly being phased out by most camera makers.
"The high-end cameras are still clinging to CompactFlash, It used to be everyone's bread and butter," said Koren.
"We know that a large percent of digital images captured each day are never printed or shared. That adds up to significant lost revenues for photo sharing and printing sites," said Ron Glaze an analyst at International Data Corp., speaking in a prepared statement. "We anticipate wireless cameras will fundamentally change the way people manage their digital photographs in the future and believe that Eye-Fi Card will help drive these changes," he added.
The startup has raised $6.5 million in venture capital to date.
- Rick Merritt
EE Times
votes:
|
||||||||||||||
|
||||||||||||||
 |
|
|
|
|||||||||||||||
| ||||||||||
| ||||||||||
| ||||||||||
