Anyone wants an iCamera?

I was thinking what would be the next big product that Apple could introduce and disrupt the industry.

Has anyone thought about creating an Internet enabled camera?

One that can auto-upload your pictures to the net. One that you can play games on it while you are wasting your time on some long bus ride?

Thats right, how about an iPhone minus the Phone and with a souped up Camera and flash? I think that would be so cool! Many people already carry a digital camera around but somehow they have really lousy UI.

The biggest problem with the current crop of digital cameras is that it just takes too much time to make pictures go from being captured to where you really want them to be.

This is the current workflow:

1. Take pic

2. Gonnect USB, batch download into iPhoto

3. Batch edit.

4. Batch resize.

5. Upload Flickr, tag pics

6. Upload Facebook, tag people

7. Zip and mediafire the high res stuff to friends who ask for it.

When I use my DSLR, the process is exacerbatingly long because each pic is 3.5-5mb. That means after every photo session it is a really long and tedious process.

How I wish it could be like this:

1. Take pic

2. Make Basic Adjustments on Camera

3. Assign each pic to a bunch of macros: i.e. Upload to Facebook, Upload to Flick, Email to Person (with autocomplete from FB friend list or gmail contacts), Archive to Laptop.

4. The camera will automatically perform all these actions whenever it senses a WIFI network. It will be able to store a sequence of hundreds and thousands of batch actions and just process them in the background without user intervention.

I think such a workflow would be really idea. Then people can really focus on what really matters: taking good pics and make decisions on where the pics should be right on the camera. 

It would be really useful because somehow everyone has some kind of free time like sitting on the bus or train. That kind of useless downtime can be better used arranging, editing and sharing photos.

Mundane tasks should really be taken over by algorithms and performed seamlessly in the background.

That’s why I feel it would be really great if Apple could consider make some kind of iCamera that is aimed at disrupting the current crop of digicams. Digicams need to be sucked into the IP crowd.

Most importantly it would be a great platform for AppStore. And we can depend on smart developers out there to address the needs of customers by creating great apps that help do workflow routing to the smartest.

Anyway if you’re interested in automating the workflow of your current iPhone camera, check out this uPoze app!  It detects the latest photos taken and can auto upload them. Now isn’t that what we call a photo stream?

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