Picture This

Do you often find yourself in situations - especially during special occasions, events or social gatherings - when you would either be asked to send out the photos you've taken or ask for copies of photos that others have taken? It's a very likely request - not everyone might have brought a camera (or a good camera phone for that matter) and not everyone captures the same set of moments - and I am certain people would be glad to do it. There are amazing online services like Flickr (photo-sharing), Xdrive (storage) and Facebook (social networks) -- and yes, there is still email -- that allow one to share photos effectively, but I find that there are still some unmet consumer needs.

*Sharing is not immediate. People want to have and view copies of the photos now. However, an n-step process is still needed in order to take those images from being stored in one's digital camera to being viewed or downloaded by another person. For normal people, this could take days to accomplish -- if not forever.

*Online services have limitations. I've found that some people want to have original copies of the images -- that means the multi-megabyte ones. They want to print their own photos and create their own albums. However, free accounts in online services -- which most consumers use -- normally have upload, bandwidth & sharing limitations. That implies being able to share mostly "web-friendly" photos (e.g. 300KBs) -- or images with relatively low resolution.


3 possible solutions:
*Hard drive on the go
*Peer-to-peer sharing device
*Remote access to an online storage directly from the camera --> needs high bandwidth/Wi-Fi