Eye-Fi Changes How You Deal with Digital Pictures

One of the first companies I saw at CES was Eye-Fi.  They dropped by CntrStg early on Thursday and showed off their products. Ziv Gillat, Vice President of Business Development and Co-Founder, showed off the latest in Eye-Fi goodness. I had never heard of Eye-Fi prior to CES this year, but now that I have seen this product in action, you can bet that I’ll be buying one shortly!  So what is so great about these Eye-Fi guys? Easy, they take your standard SD card and add in wireless plus a little smarts. So now when you take a picture, it will automatically upload your pictures over your wireless router to your home computer or to your flickr account. That means you will never have to take the card out of your camera, insert it into your computer, and manually copy pictures off it again and that’s hands down cool.

Ziv told us about their latest announcement – video support.  With the latest card, you can automatically upload videos you take from your camera right to YouTube! Or, if you really feel the need, you can put a copy on your computer as well.

The Eye-Fi cards support all of the popular online photo sharing sites, including SmugMug and Flickr. Certain cards also support Geo-Tagging of your photos through the use of SkyHook. The idea behind SkyHook is actually pretty slick. It uses cell tower triangulation and Wi-Fi Positioning to get a fast, accurate and dependable location information for your pictures. And unlike GPS, it works great indoors.

Eye-Fi has been in operation for approximentaly 2 years, and have had product available for about 1 year. In that year, they have seen over 5 million pictures uploaded to online photo sharing sites via their Eye-Fi cards.  That number does not include the pictures people have had sent to their computers.

I’m going to be adding one to my gadget bag shortly.  I’m just trying to decide if I should wait for my local store to carry the Geo-Tagging card, or just grab the regular version and do without the location goodies. I highly recommend this card to anyone that snaps pictures on a regular basis.  You won’t be disappointed.