Why Can’t Eye-Fi Work Backwards
Over a year ago a company called Eye-Fi created a cool device. It’s an SD card that connects to your existing wifi network to send pictures from your digital camera to your home computer. Their software works with several online services to allow easy blogging and social networking updates. Also it instantly downloads the pictures to your hard drive so you don’t need to sync your camera. Overall this is a cool thing, but, I can’t convince myself to buy one because I don’t cringe at the thought of dumping an SD card.What would be cool is if an SD card could pull data off of your home computer. This would be a great tool for digital picture frames and desktop gadgets of all types. Your digital picture frame could splice in a picture that told you what your stocks were up to or what the weather was like outside. It could even let you know about calendar items and other time sensitive information. You could sync to remember the milk so that your tasks showed up in your living room while you watched TV.
The concept wouldn’t just be useful for digital picture frames either. The sony E-reader or variouse MP3 players could use this technology to add cheap streaming or instant updates to very inexpensive technology. An MP3 player that is capable of reading from an SD card sells for around $20, but if it automatically got podcast updates it would be a killer device. You could leave it in your car and it would have current news for your drive to work.
As it stands the only really cool application I can think of for the Eye - Fi card is digital archiving. Scanning reciepts is so mundane. Taking pictures of reciepts is quick and painless. An Eye-Fi card and a digital camera placed in the kitchen (or wherever you open your mail) would make archiving simple and more doable. Unfortunately, I don’t think thre is any software designed to leverage this technology in this way. Maybe something that worked like neet reciepts and had some OCR horse power could take this device to the next level.
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Wireless connectivity is big nowadays. It’s an innovative concept that offers increased flexibility and freedom over traditional methods. This little device seems like it would be great for archiving things, as the author states. Having said that, a good wireless internet solution for the Portland, Oregon area is currently being offered by Clear . Give it a look if you’re thinking about wireless internet as well as a phone.
I already commented on your ‘Using a camera as a scanner’ post (http://nickprojects.com/?p=39) - for OCR check out http://www.eye.fi/evernote/