Kodak's hometown newspaper, the Democrat and Chronicle in Rochester, N.Y., has a more detailed article than CNET News' about Kodak's camera phone strategy and working with Cingular Wireless and Nokia.
As I wrote yesterday, Kodak has established Kodak Mobile Service to provide kiosks for printing camera phone photos (among other types of photos) and also has an online photo album -- through its Ofoto service -- for camera phone users.
Ben Rand of the Democrat and Chronicle reports Kodak will be replacing its existing kiosks with new ones that can print a photo in five seconds, which is a major advancement. The first of the new kiosks will show up at CVS drug stores.
Kodak's advances, strategies
By the end of the second half of next year, about 50 percent of the Kodak Picture Maker kiosks will feature the faster printing and camera phone capabilities, the article says.
Kodak's press release offers some information I've been waiting for: How will camera phone users transfer photos to the kiosks? According to the press release it will be via infrared and Bluetooth.
Use of infrared for transferring data between cellular phones and computers has been a dismal failure in the United States, although it has been much more successful in other countries. In fact, handsets in the U.S. often seem to have infrared -- you can see the plastic infrared "window" -- but the capability actually has been disabled!
Bluetooth is slowly but surely gaining some ground in the U.S. (especially in the Apple community because Apple has made efforts to foster compatibility), although it's still a very slippery slope that's with strewn with incompatible devices.
Hmmm. If I were Kodak I might want to pay attention to the Apple community because of its relatively greater use of Bluetooth. The Bluetooth devices of choice appear to be Sony Ericsson handsets, but Kodak and Cingular, for example, could encourage use of Nokia handsets through attractive deals and good marketing/advertising.
Camera phone strategies
As a result, Kodak and/or the cellular operators and/or handset vendors will have to spend time and money educating cellular subscribers about infrared and Bluetooth. If Kodak wants to tap into the mass market of camera phone users -- and it certainly does! -- the "mass market" is going to need a lot of educating.
Kodak is working with Nokia and there will be joint marketing efforts beginning next year with the 2004 Nokia Sugar Bowl, according the press release. Kodak and Nokia also are working together to develop printing solutions for camera phone users.
(Just for the fun of it, I typed www.kodakmobile.com and found the page was "coming soon" at the GoDaddy.com hosting service. Checking Whois, I found it is registered to "Asia Sun," whatever that is. Is this a front for Kodak or did Kodak not think to register the URL of its new service? There are two "real" URLs for Kodak Mobile: One is at the Cingular Wireless site and the other is the "main" www.kmobile.com site. Shame on you Kodak if you didn't also register "kodakmobile.")
picturephoning.com
A thank you to Emily Turrettini at picturephoning.com for alerting me to the Democrat and Chronicle article. Picturephoning.com has had a major hard disk crash, so for the past few days Emily has been posting camera phone information at another URL.
Both Kodak and voice telephony providers, particularly wireline ones, are facing major business challenges. You can find a brief review on pp. 139-140 of "Sense in Communication," available at www.galbithink.org More important, of course, is to try to understand where this all leads. I've tried to do that in the above work. See in particular Section V. The evidence suggests to me that camera phones and related services will rapidly become a major part of the communications industry.
Posted by: Douglas Galbi | Thursday, November 13, 2003 at 04:10 PM