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How to Add WiFi to Your Digital Camera

Apple is the king of simplicity. A huge amount of engineering and thought goes into making every aspect of every product -- from how the thing works, to how it's packaged -- simple. One could argue that's Steve Jobs's greatest gift: taking the enormous complexity out of technology, and making a tool work as it should.

Luckily, lots of companies are finally starting to get this. A smart, new product I've been fooling around with lately, the Eye-Fi Card, is a great example. The gadget takes something complex (uploading digital photographs) and let's you do it simply (on most cameras, via Wifi).  The $99,  2-gigabyte WiFi-enabled memory card went on sale this week at finer online  stores everywhere.

Perhaps uploading photographs isn't complex so much as it is too-many stepped and annoying. Either way, people simply don't do it: Some 4 out of 5 pictures are never uploaded and languish, forgotten, on digital cameras. Eye-Fi solves the problem by converting most digital cameras to WiFi, and allowing them to transmit photos over home wireless networks. The card works on any digital camera that has a slot for an SD memory card -- that would be more than 60% of digital cameras out there.

The Eye-Fi Card looks like a garden-variety SD card, but contains a tiny WiFi transmitter. It's a real feat of engineering, given that the entrepreneurs who founded the company two years ago figured out how to embed a WiFi chip on an SD card without drawing too much battery power or adding an external antenna. Try doing that for under $100. Some half-dozen patents (pending) flowed from that work. (See Fortune writer Michal Lev-Ram's report on  Eye-Fi, "New WiFi camera technology a boon for photo-sharing sites.")

While setting up WiFi networks can be an exasperating exercise, installing the Eye-Fi Card may be the simplest tech chore I've ever performed. It was Apple-like, starting with the packaging: There's only one way to open the box -- via a tiny tab that juts out on the side. Pull the tab and the card slides out on the left side, and a Quick Start Guide slides out on the right side. Follow four steps -- which take about two minutes -- and you're good to go.

The Eye-Fi Card slots into a USB reader, which fits into your computer during configuration. (PCs and Macs are supported.) During the config process, you can choose whether to automatically upload your pictures to your computer and to most major, photo-sharing sites, including such Web 2.0 stalwarts as Facebook, Flickr and Typepad. When you're done with the setup, simply remove the USB reader, pull out the 2-gigabyte card, and put the card in your camera. The rest is automatic. When you take a picture, it flows to your computer and to any photo-sharing sites you selected, as well as to your free, online Eye-Fi account.

It's pretty fast, too. The picture above was taken with a 5-megapixel Casio Exilim; it took 10 seconds to stream from my camera to my MacBook Pro. Some tweakage may be required. I had to adjust the power settings on my camera to ensure it stayed awake long enough to transmit the images.

Emboldened by how easy it was to use, I took the Eye-Fi on the road and attempted to add a public WiFi network at a conference, and then my local network at work. Inadvertently, I had stumbled onto two things that the system cannot currently do. The public WiFi network had a "landing page" -- as do many sites that offer free Wifi or sell it at airports so users can sign up for the service. Eye-Fi can't handle landing pages. And in the case of my office wireless network, Eye-Fi can't deal with so-called transparent proxies -- a common protocol used on such networks for security reasons. A company spokesman said that future versions would address those issues.

But for now, the Eye-Fi works quite well on home networks, and you can add as many of them as you can access. I predict this will be a huge hit at the holidays. Indeed, it may be the first holiday season to actually be seen by future generations in too many awful digital photos.

Sonos Sonata

It amazes me that people still buy music. Though I love it above all other forms of entertainment, I've not bought a single CD, nor iTunes tune, for the past 18 months. Instead, I rent music from the streaming music site Rhapsody, and play it over my wireless Sonos network at home.

It costs me $10.99 a month. That's the annual pre-pay; it's $12.99 a month if you pay as you go, and $14.99 if you also want to download anything you want to virtually any portable MP3 player except the iPod. For that fee, you get access to most of the world's great music—Rhapsody is vague on the numbers, though it was 2.5 million songs the last time they advertised it on their home page. My colleague at Fortune, David Kirkpatrick, smartly refers to this setup—Sonos hardare + Rhapsody subscription service—as "music dial tone." I can't imagine life without it. In fact, take my real dial tone and cable TV service. You can have my Sonos remote control if you pry it from my cold dead fingers.

That said, both the Sonos system and Rhapsody aren't perfect. But today, the Santa Monica Barbara, California-based Sonos unveiled a number of improvements that  moved them much closer to the Platonic ideal. I wish the same could be said for Rhapsody.

iPhone Blogging for Dollars

Apple's iPhone has been very, very good to the blogosphere.

Whether the $500 gadget  actually sells out at Apple stores on Friday remains to be seen. But the blogs that have been fanning iPhone Fever since January can already declare a healthy windfall: Millions of extra dollars in ad-generated income have already flowed into bloggers' pockets, thanks to record pageviews, according to estimates. And the best may be yet to come.

I love you, man

From D5

They started lining up a half hour before the doors even opened to the Grand Ballroom of the Four Seasons Hotel in Carlsbad, California. Wednesday night was to be the main event of the Wall Street Journal’s D Conference, and many here were already calling it, hopefully perhaps, The Smackdown: Bill Gates, the richest man in the world would be appearing on the same podium as his presumed nemesis, the most revered man in the world, Steve Jobs.

The Fathers of the Personal Computer have appeared together a few times. In fact, they were at D two years ago. Still, the power geeks twiddled their over-developed index fingers in anticipation of the fireworks sure to come. A lot has happened in two years. Apple’s share of the digital music market is as overwhelming as Microsoft’s in the PC market. Earlier in the day, when Jobs was on stage alone, he even gave the crowd a taste of blood when he responded to a comment about how popular iTunes had become on the PC platform: “It’s like giving a glass of ice water to someone in hell.”

The historic meeting tonight though turned out to be anything but a smackdown. It was more like a love fest. “We’ve kept our marriage secret for over a decade,” quipped Jobs.

Johnny Astro II

She is the best wife ever. I can't wait for my birthday.

Steve Jobs's Biggest Bet Yet

Business, unlike rock & roll, is an old man's game. Steve Jobs's performance at the Moscone Center today was his best since his triumphant return from NeXT to Apple in 1997. It was all the more remarkable coming from a man who claimed "I didn't sleep a wink last night." He was clearly riding the adrenalin-wave of announcing the newest revolution from Apple (AAPL). Or from anticipating the extra $1 billion that will flow into Apple should his company actually sell 10 million iPhones in the next year.

Of course, the beauty of Jobs is he is always first in line to drink his own Apple-ade—-not that there's anything wrong with that. (Every business would be better if we did that.) A perfectionist to an obsessive degree, Jobs won't unveil a device until every thing about it, from its design to its marketing campaign, thrills him. His products are almost always the closest thing we mortals can experience when it comes to seeing the Platonic ideal of form and function expressed in a gadget.

And that's why the iPhone  will be the biggest challenge of Jobs's insanely amazing career, and could yet prove to be his, and Apple's undoing...

Why the Sonos Beats the iPod

After becoming disillusioned with the whole iPod/iTunes Music Store experience about a year ago (HATE HATE HATE the way Apple manages the DRM) I bought a Sonos system to play digital music at home. It's like other Wifi-based music systems: You can easily cobble together  a wireless network around your house, streaming music to any stereos you might already have, or adding stand-alone Sonos boxes and speakers to rooms not already wired for sound. The best part of Sonos,