UK To Build Useless Facial Recognition System

Photo Sharing For Grandparents Doesn't Use Tags Or Ajax

from the maybe-next-a-dedicated-RSS-reader? dept

Tue, May 23rd 2006 9:18am — Joseph Weisenthal

It seems that whatever the hot internet application is, there's always some company looking to strip it down and sell it as a standalone service to those who aren't tech-savvy. A few years ago, a few companies were trying to market email-only devices, primarily aimed at grandparents who didn't have computers. Now that photo sharing is all the rage, one company is selling what they call a "Printing Mailbox". Basically, it is a printer attached to the internet, which can print photographs when they're sent as attachments. Again, the target market is grandparents who want an easy way to receive pictures of their grandchildren. But unless the user can expect to receive a high volume of photographs over a long period of time, having a dedicated device and a regular monthly fee for just this task seems a bit much. It would be more economical to have a service that accepts attachments, prints them out, and sends them to the grandparents via the mail, though that's not nearly as alluring has having a dedicated device. Like the email devices, it doesn't make much sense to sell both gear and internet connectivity with so little functionality.

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5 Comments

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TriZz, 23 May 2006 @ 9:34am

Thank God!
If the grandparents want pictures that bad - it should be up to the savvy parents/grand kids to mail grammy a photo via post.

PS: First post!!
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kelly jeanie, 23 May 2006 @ 9:55am

Yeah, what TriZz said
Yeah, that's what I was thinking, too. It's really easy to upload pics to a service like Snapfish or something and have the pics mailed directly to Grandma.
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Anonymous Coward, 23 May 2006 @ 10:14am

Wow... imagine the spam coming out of that thing! Someone gets a hold of your device's address and you'd get all sorts of... "unwanted" pictures. And imagine the ink costs.
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egon, 23 May 2006 @ 11:11am

From Ofoto you can have them delivered next day for like $2.
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