A Hint of Social Networked Photo Done Right

For years I have been searching for a ray of sunshine to fall on consumer digital photography. Yesterday I think I saw a little light coming from a digital player that just might have the resources and market position to make a difference. It didn’t come from Kodak, Fuji or even HP…it was hidden in the release of Buzz from Google. To be sure, Google is a very late entry in the social networking space, which today is totally dominated by platforms like Facebook, LinkedIn and Twitter. Besides, in addition to being the dominant web search engine, Google has a lot of other significant irons in the fire. Big initiatives like Gmail, Voice, Picasa, Chrome and Nexus One, just to name a few! Its anybody’s guess if Buzz can leverage its family ties to Gmail and Web Albums and grow share over its already well entrenched competition.

But Buzz’s social networking features themselves are not my “eureka” for consumer digital photography. What makes Buzz so interesting is it’s seamless and uncomplicated linkage to full quality digital images, which remain accessible and safely stored for posterity in a consumer’s Picasa or Flickr Web archives. If done right, Buzz offers simple Facebook like photo sharing, but at the same time it maintains the full capability of the shared images for virtually any use.

Today, the “print everything” mentality has lost its appeal for a lot of consumers who frequent our web connected world (and probably for good reason.) However, I don’t believe that these consumers have consciously adopted a “print nothing” model either! I have serious concerns about photography’s continued consumer relevance if once priceless personal pictures are relegated to the “display only” quality of images “archived” by Facebook and other social platforms.

I have always believed that the road to successful innovation starts with finding real consumer problems and ends with packaging the right technology to solve them. This can often be very difficult in the consumer market as users are often need solutions to problems that they don’t overtly recognize. In the mass market a better motto might be “give the consumer what he needs, disguised as what he wants!”

My professional photographer friends may see this little ray of sunshine as a gathering storm of copyright infringement, but this need not be the case. There are plenty of existing technological solutions to solve those problems as well. What’s good for consumer photography adds gloss to professional photography!

Its way to soon to tell if how Buzz will do against Facebook, but I have tremendous hope for its modern consumer photo model. I would highly recommend that Facebook and others get on the bandwagon!

The air is draining from Kodak and Rochester

After having spent almost 40 years in the photo industry with both Kodak and Fuji, driving innovations ranging from dye sublimation printing to 1 hour web to in-store printing, there are some major issues “between the lines” of today’s Kodak Q3 press release. Although not specifically mentioned in releases, their 10Q contains this ominous statement:

“The Company and one of its significant Retail Systems Solutions customers will not renew a contract that expired on September 30, 2009. The Company plans to replace a significant portion of this volume of business, although the timing and extent is uncertain.”

As many industry observers have noticed, it appears that Kodak Picture Makers, Kodak’s last remaining customer facing brand presence at retail, have recently begun being replaced in some Walmart stores by a new HP instant printing system. In addition, Walmart was noticeably absent from their upbeat enumeration of major and minor “dry lab” and kiosk customers which was released yesterday. We can now be pretty sure that this “significant” customer is in fact Walmart US. While Walmart stores in the US represent less than 4000 of Kodak’s 100,000 “locations”, US retail print volume numbers would predict that this loss should represent at least $100M in annual media sales. In the US market, mass merchants are where the retail printing volume is and Walmart is by far the leader in the category.

While an ongoing loss of $100M in annual sales to Kodak is a very serious issue, their complete loss of customer facing brand presence at US photo retail locations could be even more important. What will this mean to the remaining Kodak retailers, like CVS with its 15,000 Kodak kiosks? Where will Kodak media cost (and therefore price) go with such a significant loss of thermal dye transfer media manufacturing volume? Time will tell, but at least we finally have some closure on the death of the world’s original photo market mover.

The digital transition has been difficult for everyone in the photo industry. Traditional market movers have abdicated leadership roles due to very significant consumable and service volume losses. Many retailers have either disappeared entirely or abandoned the photo category, while the consumer has been left to figure out how to personally manage the entire transition themselves, at the risk of losing personal memories forever.

This now leaves retail photo dependent on HP, Fuji and a few others.  While HP has installed systems at much smaller retail chains, Walmart would be their first major, mass merchant “print at retail” customer. Fuji has enjoyed the dominant share in “behind the counter” solutions for quite some time, and while challenged to lead or follow the industry’s evolution to all digital, is still quite comfortable in this market. Clearly, Kodak and Fuji practiced détente for years; retail photo is a very unique market and where we go from here is much more complicated, depending on how Fuji reacts to HP and whether HP can adjust its focus to become a real “turnkey” retail photo solution provider.

Even at today’s digital printing volume, there is a lot of money on the table!