Three years ago, a new kind of memory card went on sale promising to reduce the hassle of transferring photos and video from a camera to your PC or the Web.
The Eye-Fi card has built-in Wi-Fi networking to instantly upload your work. It’s still a niche product, although Eye-Fi is getting closer to its dream of enabling wireless uploads as easily as they’re performed on smartphones.
Since late 2007, customers have uploaded just over 100 million photos. For now, you can only post images online at photo-sharing sites. You can’t e-mail them directly to a friend or yourself. And the card works only in open Wi-Fi hotspots.
But Eye-Fi has formed partnerships with the largest camera manufacturers — including Canon, Nikon, Sony, Pentax and Sanyo — to offer on-screen menus for uploads in what Eye-Fi calls “connected cameras.” And there are apps available for the iPhone and iPad.
Pricing starts at $49.95 for a 4-gigabyte card, substantially more than a plain vanilla 4-GB card (which can be found for as low as $15). The high end: $149 for a superfast 8-GB Eye-Fi card with geo-tagging and other extras.
CEO Jef Holove argues that the time savings is worth the extra money. “Your friends and family will care a lot more about the photos if they’re fresh, and yesterday’s event instead of last Christmas.”
Michael Gartenberg, an analyst at Altimeter Group, calls Eye-Fi a “one-trick pony,” that does “one thing and one thing well — it connects your camera. You get the same benefit you would with a phone, but it’s on your camera. That’s why they’ve been able to carve an interesting position in the market.”
The bulk of Eye-Fi’s sales (Holove won’t reveal numbers) have come since Christmas 2009, when the card got wide distribution at Best Buy and other retailers. The 5-year-old company has…