A Network-Centric Stocking Stuffer

Santa comes to the mall once a year (although he does get there earlier than he used to).  This year, when you bring your children to see him, imagine that after the photos are taken, you don’t need to get the hard copy right away or even wait for them to be emailed.  They’re on a photo sharing site where all your loved ones can enjoy them.

Now Santa is not on his usual North Pole LAN, but that doesn’t matter.  The photographer has an SD card that is special – it’s the Anniversary Edition SD Card by Eye-Fi.  This card is compatible with cameras designated for SDHC and uploads files directly to flickr, Facebook, Kodak Gallery, photobucket, shutterfly, TypePad, and many other photo sharing sites.  It even uploads to Wal*Mart’s Digital Photo Center and Costco.com.

Now, this perfect world scenario does depend on WiFi access for the photographer in the mall, which can be problematic.  However, Wi-Fi is still a growing phenomenon and the Marketing Consigliere sees this as quite feasible by next holiday season.  Clearly, this mobility is great for B2C type of happenings, and can facilitate lead generation and social networking adoption.  Additionally, there is a B2B angle for this.

PropertyPreviews.com allows Eye-Fi card users to upload real estate photos and videos to specific sites.  This can be used for commercial as well as residential real estate.  While the network-centric capability for photographers already exists with either the manual effort of using a cable to hook a camera up to a PC or just inserting the camera’s memory card, a wireless capability such as this will most likely proliferate along with more WiFi networks, growing memory, and increasing battery life.