小小的芯片改变你分享图片的方式 - Eye-Fi

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from www.wired.com

       

• Eye-Fi, 一个新的公司名字，制造Wi-Fi相机存储卡，此公司、此产品的灵感源于三年前的一次婚礼。       
  
• 得益于Atheros低功耗、高集成度的Wi-Fi芯片，这家公司已经把2G的Flash存储器和WiFi功能集成在一个SD卡中。配上相应的软件，你可以将数码相机拍下的照片即时地传送到笔记本电脑，甚至17个不同厂商的网站上去，比如flikr等。       
  
• 主意不错，目标用户是我们这些熟悉高科技的年轻一代。
  

Eye-Fi: How One Little Chip Will Change the Way You Share Pictures

Eye-Fi, a new company that makes Wi-Fi camera-memory cards, was formed because of a broken promise.
Three years ago, Yuval Koren, Eye-Fi's CEO, traveled to New Yorkfrom San Francisco for a wedding. You know, the kind you see in everysingle romantic comedy ever made? Long-lost friends were reunited,copious snapshots were taken, and everyone pledged to send them alongsoon after. "There were lots of good intentions," says Koren. "But itnever happened."
We all know why: Booting-up your computer, plugging in your camera,uploading pics to the hard drive and finally choosing what to send tothe web is universally annoying.
Koren came home and cornered his geeky friends -- some worked atCisco, others at Wi-Fi vendor Atheros, and a few even labored away atApple. He posed a question to them: Why do digital pictures so oftenend up trapped inside cameras?
And then they figured out a way to easily set them free.
Two-and-a-half years of intense work later, they produced a 2-GB SDmemory card mated with a Wi-Fi chip. Just sync the card to a hard driveor Wi-Fi network, and plug it into a digital camera and start snappingaway. Pics are then routed to the hard drive or to one of 17 photovendors (like Facebook or Flickr.) The card's software deftly handlesscaling and compression while privacy settings at the individual sitesallow you to filter what gets published.
The Wi-Fi chip, though, was the technical breakthrough. Developed byAtheros, it uses 70 percent less power than competing products,allowing it to be comfortably nestled in a standard SD card. Atherosdidn't realize how much its wunderchip could help Koren's fledglingproject.
"They didn’t know about us at first," explains Koren. "The software andhardware were still in beta, but we begged for access." Atheroseventually agreed and granted Koren access in order to help prove theirown technology.
A marriage of innovation and vision may have hatched the Eye-Fi, butsomething larger is also at work here. Next-gen Wi-Fi networking isfinally allowing lowly hardware to be integrated with web apps andsoftware.
"Businesses realize that device margins disappear quickly," saysJonathan Gaw, an IDC analyst who covers home networking. "One way tocombat that is to integrate upwards with services via Wi-Fi orBluetooth. We’re going to see networking in all kinds of devices."
Eye-Fi was able to beat lumbering industry dinosaurs like Kodak and SanDisk to the punch on a Wi-Fi-equipped memory card for a couple ofreasons. First, it's rare for hardware companies to havecross-disciplinary chops in software, which the Eye-Fi developmentrequired. Second, camera makers like Nikon that have toyed with Wi-Fiseem intent on locking in consumers to one particular application orphoto platform. Who cares if you can beam photos around wirelessly ifyou're shackled to the same device all the time?
Eye-Fi is instead laser-focused on a more technically savvy crowd."We’re not talking about grandmas," says Koren. "Our customer knows howto get photos out of camera but would rather spend their timecaptioning and sharing."
Eye-Fi also goes the extra distance to listen to its customers. Evennow, anyone can log on at eye.fi com to suggest what other photoplatforms should be supported.
Korenis coy about what's next for the company, but says, "There’s a lot morethat we have in mind. Keep following what we're doing."