Excellent article in tonight's WSJ.
Subscribers only
interactive.wsj.com
As Cameras Plug In to Net,
Snapshots Go Everywhere
Jim Clark founded Netscape, Silicon Graphics and Healtheon. Now here's his latest big idea: Digital cameras and the Internet are about to change the way people take pictures.
"This will happen very, very quickly -- more quickly than compact disks replaced LPs," Mr. Clark says. Envisioning a day when film canisters seem as quaint as slide rules, Mr. Clark agreed earlier this year to back Shutterfly.com, a cyberspace Fotomat that will print images for consumers with digital cameras. "It's about to explode," he says.
That may sound like a lot of fuss over vacation pictures and snapshots of the school play, but photography is swiftly shaping up as the Internet's next breakout business. Digital photography, which stores images on computer chips instead of recording them on film, has been around for a decade, and taking high-quality digital pictures is still relatively expensive and complex. But already, with some digital-camera prices down to a few hundred dollars and the Internet standing ready to beam images anywhere you want, e-photos make a lot of sense.
They're certainly stirring up the industry. From giants like Kodak to small shops that develop pictures in an hour, established businesses stand to lose if consumers abandon film. Kodak is trying to bridge the digital and analog worlds in a venture with America Online that sends digital copies of 35mm prints to a customer's AOL account. There are new opportunities, too, from Web sites that let people show off their pictures to services like Shutterfly that will print those virtual images and make them permanent.
But more than reshaping the photo industry, this revolution could change the way we think about photographs. When e-mail came along, people started writing notes and letters again. E-photos are a lot like e-mail. They're instant, they're essentially free and they let people share information across great distances. Digital photography may turn us all into shutterbugs -- and it may trigger a new information deluge as we bombard each other with snapshots.
For a glimpse into this future, visit a Web site called Zing.com. At Zing, anyone can sign up for free space to post their pictures on the Web. Though services like Yahoo's GeoCities have offered no-cost personal sites for several years, Zing is devoted entirely to photos. Members don't create home pages -- they create albums. In a matter of minutes, anyone can join and upload a bunch of digital images. You can choose to keep your photos private, but many opt to let them be seen by anyone visiting Zing.
Browsing through these public albums, you can see strangers' children, dogs, cats, cars and houses. You can peek into parties, soccer games, recitals, weddings and bar mitzvahs. Some of the e-photos are excellent; others are blurry.
Mark Platshon, Zing's chief executive, thinks that eventually his members won't just show their photos -- they'll sell them, too. Right now, when magazines and advertising agencies need generic photos, they purchase professionally produced images. Mr. Platshon expects Zing to build in features that would let anyone sell their photos to anyone else.
How does Zing plan to make money? Like GeoCities and the other free home-page services, Zing displays paid ads. It also sells products that can be customized with your photos, including T-shirts, mouse-pads and even shortbread cookies (the images are etched in frosting). And like Shutterfly, Zing believes there's money to be made turning digital images into traditional prints and enlargements.
Prints -- the pictures you can stick in your wallet or hang on your wall -- remain the missing puzzle piece in digital photography. Taking digital photos is now pretty easy. Getting the image files off the camera and onto a computer is trickier. But producing a print comparable in quality to those from the local one-hour photo store is still harder, even with color ink-jet printers that are better than ever.
Shutterfly.com
www.shutterfly.com
Zing.com
www.zing.com
Zing already lets members buy prints and enlargements made from the images they've uploaded to the site. It uses industrial-strength equipment that prints digital images onto standard photographic paper. Shutterfly, which expects to hit full stride in December, is promising to turn your digital snapshots into ultra-high-quality prints with help from some behind-the-scenes technical tricks. Though e-mailing and displaying photos online is fun, Jayne Spiegelman, Shutterfly's CEO, believes people won't fully commit to digital photography until they can get high-quality permanent images, too.
Philippe Kahn, the technology-industry veteran who founded Borland International and sold Starfish Software to Motorola last year, thinks it will take even more to turn digital photography into a mass market. Through a venture dubbed Lightsurf, he is developing technology for wireless digital cameras.
In Mr. Kahn's vision, these camera/cell-phone hybrids would let consumers snap away and then beam their photos directly to the Internet, where they could be e-mailed or posted to a Web site. The wireless connection would eliminate the need to fumble with cables or tote a laptop along on vacation. Lightsurf's photos would be like Polaroids, but available instantly around the globe.
After home video cameras came out, amateurs started sending tapes of tornadoes and plane crashes to local TV stations. Think of the impact made by the Rodney King videotape, Mr. Kahn says. Then imagine legions of consumers armed with digital cameras and the ability to send images world-wide all by themselves. "Breaking that time lag between the moment you click the photo and the moment others can see it -- that's revolutionary," Mr. Kahn says. |
