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Outfits like MySpace and Facebook are dominating the photo viewing and uploading space, according to a report released last week by InfoTrends, a Weymouth, Mass., market research and consulting firm for the digital imaging and document solutions industry.
In a survey conducted for the report, InfoTrends discovered that nearly 40% of the respondents who upload photos to the Internet do so most often to MySpace and Facebook. What's more, those sites were named as favorites by nearly half of the respondents who said they review other people's pics online.
When it comes to turning uploaded photos into prints, however, traditional Netposts like Snapfish, Shutterfly, Kodak Gallery, Wal-Mart and Walgreens continue to dominate the market, the report said. Nevertheless, net-to-retail printing continues to rise in popularity, the researchers reported, particularly among younger users. Net-to-retail users told surveyors that they used the service to receive their prints faster and to avoid paying for shipping.
"While many respondents see benefits in both delivery methods, net-to-retail is clearly taking some business away from net-to-mail services, and some 60% of survey respondents indicated that they expect their online printing to shift even more toward net-to-retail in the coming year," InfoTrends Associate Director Alan Bullock observed in a statement.
To better compete with net-to-retail, he recommended that net-to-mail providers "differentiate their products and services from those available at retail, focusing on items that cannot be easily produced at retail locations."
Some of us are old enough to remember the old advertising campaign by the Telephone Company that popularized the catchphrase "reach out and touch someone." With a little modification the tagline might serve as the motto of a new consortium announced yesterday by a group of imaging industry heavyweights. Instead of "reach out and touch someone," however, the new battle cry will be "reach out and touch something."
The new TransferJet Consortium has been formed to promote a proximity wireless technology that enables the rapid transfer of high resolution video, music and images between electronic devices. With the technology, when two compliant devices touch each other, files can be transferred between them without the need for an access point. For example, touching a TV with a digital camera would allow photos in the camera to be instantaneously displayed on the TV.
The list of founding members of the consortium is an impressive one. It includes Sony, Canon, Kodak, Hitachi, Kenwood, Panasonic, Nikon, Olympus, Pioneer, Samsung, Seiko Epson, Sony Ericsson and Toshiba.
According to a statement from the consortium, it will be developing specifications and guidelines to ensure the interoperability between products incorporating the technology, as well as establish licensing schemes and administer the use of the technology's logo.
How long it will take the technology to make it to the mainstream is anyone's guess, but its developer, Sony, demonstrated prototype TransferJet devices at CES earlier this year.
Adobe software plug-in maker onOne Software, of Portland, Ore., announced today it's buying, for an undisclosed sum, the seam carving technology of Liquid Resize. The technology was developed by an Austrian-based couple, Ramin Sabet and Irmgard Sabet-Wasinger based on the research of Shai Avidan and Ariel Shamir (see video above). What seam carving allows you to do is resize photos in radical ways--turning a vertical into a horizontal, for example--with a minimum of distortion. According to onOne, a beta version of software incorporating the seam carving technology will be available at its Web site at the end of this month. A Photoshop plug-in using the tech has a release target of the middle of this year. If you can't wait until the end of the month to tinker with this stuff, you can try your hand at it at a Web site called Rsizr.
Now that the season for review and reflection has passed, prognostication is in order. Among the valiant souls willing to venture into that dicey realm is Mason Resnick, who today fearlessly made these photo industry predictions for 2008.
- Starter DSLRs will have face recognition technology.
- More pictures will be shot, fewer will be saved.
- Digital camera prices will reach parity with film cameras.
- Wi-Fi cards will rock the camera world.
- Digital frames will surpass cameras as biggest holiday gift.
- Kodak will be saved by its new sensor (photo above).
- The Leica M8 will have company.
- Infrared photography will become cliché.
- 2008's sleeper pro cam will be the Olympus E-3.
- Cameras will be able to change focus after the fact.
Resnick says that 60 percent of his predictions were on the mark last year. That's a success rate that any horse bettor would love to have.
