Automatic Sharing and Geocoding with the Second Gen Eye-Fi Lineup
Mon, May 12, 2008
The wireless SD Card product, Eye-Fi, just released two new versions of its wireless card for cameras.
The original Eye-Fi seemed exciting when it launched last year, but upon inspection was somewhat limited. The Eye-Fi device is a 2 gigabyte memory card for digital cameras that includes a wi-fi chip that allows photos to be moved automatically, and wirelessly to the user’s computers. The product includes integration with a variety of photo sharing services, so users can have their photos automatically uploaded to Flickr anytime their camera is within range of your home wi-fi network. The Eye-Fi card is very affordable at around $100, but was originally more limited than one would expect. The biggest drawback was that the card would only connect to your own network.
The second generation of the Eye-Fi appears to have overcome this issue and gone even further. The Eye-Fi Explorer, their new flagship card, runs $135 and includes the ability to connect to any open wi-fi connection. The new feature that has me most excited is that the card will now automatically geotag your photos based on the Skyhook wireless location service. This is the same system that is being used by the iPhone (in conjunction with triangulation with cell-phone towers) to generate surprisingly accurate location information without GPS.
Geotagging is something that will eventually be a standard feature on cameras, but for now is not easy to achieve. For $135, this seems like a no-brainer for anyone who takes a lot of photos. Or even for parents and grandparents that are unlikely to bother syncing and sharing photos manually.
I hope to give the Eye-Fi Explorer a try sometime soon and let you know if it lives up to expectations.


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