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Over the past three years, while his fellow commuters jostled for space or scanned the morning paper, Yamada, 55, devoted his four-hour daily commute to a higher cause--dreaming up the next great consumer gadget. In 1997 Ricoh president Masamitsu Sakurai commissioned Yamada to create a device that would help catapult his company, which had built its fortunes on heavy office machines, into the forefront of digital technology. The trouble was, Sakurai didn't really know what he wanted. "The idea was to develop a product that uses all our senses," says Yamada. "There was no paper, no specifications...
...many respects, such features are not new this year. What makes the i700 an invention is its wireless Web-publishing capabilities. Ricoh engineers wrote custom software that resides inside the camera and allows users to correlate images with specific Web pages, then transmit them to a live website of their choice. Not only can you send photos from the road, you can also automatically display them exactly where you want them to appear on your website...
...resolution of 3.34 megapixels or less, she selects the snaps she wants to upload to her personal website. Users in Japan--where the product was released in September at about $1,500--can transmit images with a tiny wireless modem that slides into a slot on the camera. Ricoh expects similar wireless cards to be available in time for the i700's U.S. release early next year...
Because of the i700's relatively high price (competing digital cameras with the same resolution sell for as little as $800), Ricoh expects its first U.S. customers to be business users, such as real estate agents making Web pages for new listings or news organizations posting photos of fast-breaking stories from the field. In Japan, the government-contracted information service Hokuriku Kensetsu Kosaikai uses the cameras to collect pictures from scenes of natural disasters to help repair workers and rescue teams prepare for the task ahead of them. "We used to use a PC, but not all the workers...
...While Ricoh was first to market with a Web-enabled digital camera, the competition is coming on strong. Two California software companies, FlashPoint and ActiveShare, are working to make Web-coding capabilities standard features on the internal operating systems of digital cameras. The companies have begun testing wireless solutions with insurance companies and Web auction houses. By next year, Internet-ready SprintPCS phones will be able to hook up to a Kodak DC290 digital camera and send pictures to a Sprint website. Polaroid is developing a $350 digital camera with a built-in modem for release next spring. The first...