the Onda

Tim O'Reilly is right to point out how much of the hacking/Make attitude we can now start to take towards our devices thanks to every embedded CPU's inexorable march towards Internet connectivity. One category that I've been especially interested in for a while now is digital cameras because no matter what proponents of the uber mobile communicator tell me, cellphone cameras are still too closed, too blurry, and too painfully slow to make most of us even remotely happy with their output.

For some time now, the big pocket camera vendors have been experimenting with Bluetooth and 802.11b/g on a few of their models but most of these approaches have either been brain-dead (like the Kodak Easyshare One which only connects to Ofoto) or too cumbersome (like the Nikon Coolpix P1) to be worth the effort and compromise one had to make on the camera side of the equation. Which is why I was so interested while reading Katie's recent review in the Wall Street Journal of Nikon's S7c Coolpix wi-fi 7MP camera, and in particular, seeing her conclude that the whole wi-fi piece was actually quite usable. So I finally decided to go ahead and take the plunge and get a S7c... and have thus far been pleasantly surprised.

I'm not going to go into a review of the camera (see below for my tabblo doing just that) but wanted instead to focus on a couple of things that Nikon has done which are really smart from the perspective of this whole hacking your devices meme in the hope that others (hello Apple? Sony?) take notice.

First off, you should think of the camera as an open access point sniffer with a lens. Instead of forcing you to have a computer running a software client, or to pre-program a set of access points you want to use ahead of time, the S7c's wi-fi mode is set to start scanning for any access point that it can associate with. This is fabulous and exactly how every wi-fi device should work– instead of futzing around with WEP keys or preferred access points, the S7c just claws its way to a TCP connection and starts sending its pictures out into the ether. Another very nice touch that I am sure some Nikon biz dev guy deserves a steak dinner for is a deal with T-Mobile which gives you a free ride on their Starbucks network for 1 year. This costs T-Mobile nothing and adds a tremendous amount of value to the "platform" that Nikon is building here.

The second great thing Nikon has done is perhaps more important still– it has all but invited hackers into the image stream that the camera can emit. Officially, your pictures are uploaded to a site run by Nikon called nikonipcss.com (though its marketing name seems to be "Coolpix Connect") and an email is sent automatically to whoever you want that contains a link back to the Nikon site with an authentication token that automatically shows your guests the pictures you've uploaded through the camera. To say that the Coolpix site is spare is an understatement but what it lacks in flash it more than makes up in usability. First, no passwords required (the token takes care of that), and second (unlike most photo sites operated by output vendors or mobile phone operators) there is no clutter dedicated to selling you other junk or reminding you that you are trapped in some Sony/Verizon silo where the price of entry entails roach-moteling your data.

But the best part of the whole Nikon experience for me was how easy it was to hack the site and wrap an API around getting my photos out. Having spent a good many hours writing screen scrapers to fight the roach-motel model across different types of sites, I sat down this morning to figure out how to marry the S7c's cool new wi-fi features to our own auto-tabblos (basically a tabblo with an email address that can receive pictures and/or text for automatic inclusion) armed with Firebug and the desire to set my data free. Forty-five minutes later I was done and pushing a plug-in into our email processing infrastructure that can take the Nikon Coolpix emails in one side and end up with the actual assets in your tabblo on the other. Now it's just a few hours later and everyone using Tabblo gets S7c import for free– just create an auto-tabblo and send your Coolpix email to the auto-tabblo's address. [ If you are interested in this for yourself, email me– depending on interest level, I may go through the effort of factoring out the Tabblo dependencies to release it as a stand-alone Python module ]

I haven't talked to Nikon formally about this whole effort but given that the Coolpix site erases your pictures after two weeks (and given that I don't think they are in the business of building advanced AJAX multi-format layout engines), I suspect that they will be ok with my efforts to build on the platform they've put out there. After all, I am now excited by new camera and its possibilities and will recommend it to all of the folks who've asked me in the past about getting one of these w-ifi cameras to route around the issues with cellphones and photos.

Notice that Nikon doesn't have to spend the time and energy developing a nice Flickr-like API in order for folks like us to do this– they just have to make a device/platform that provides enough value (which their camera + access point sniffer + T-Mobile subscription certainly does) and then simply not make stupid decisions that would foreclose experiments like this on the part of hackers. Because the truth is that it wouldn't have been too hard for them to make this a much more involved project (for a good example of this, try hacking on Shutterfly or Ofoto).

Doc Searls (who is a friend and advisor to Tabblo) has recently begun talking and blogging about the need to create photography 2.0 out of an ecosystem of players who all add value around the user's data– with new formats, products, services, etc. He often uses Flickr's open data API and our integration as an example of such a model but the part of his speech that I like the best– and which also scares me the most– is when he starts talking about how the big photo 1.0 players like Eastman Kodak don't see it this way because of their need to maintain "silos of control." For me, this Nikon thing is a good example of a big player who gets it– or at least is willing to let others experiment while they sit back and try to sort it all out.

By the way, if you want my thoughts on the S7c as a camera:

See my Tabblo>

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