Impression-based licensing for online photos.

Why didn't anyone think of this before?



Brilliant. Just brilliant.

I tried Amazon's S3 service last year to get some measure of off-site backup for my documents, movies and photos, but I couldn't find an FTP/DAV app that worked quite right. Jungle Disk was clunky and Interarchy just didn't work right, and so I gave up.

Then I found the S3 Firefox extension. Easy to use and install, it can access your S3 files from anywhere there's a machine with Firefox and a net connection.

Wow.

If you need cheap off-site backup, give S3 and S3Fox a try.

I actually worked for Polaroid for a couple of months a few years ago, working on an email-marketing strategy for their consumer and pro photog lines.

To say they didn't understand the fix they were in back then is an understatement. Their customer database was disorganized and nigh useless, they had no concrete e-marketing plan and their management was still believing they were a major player in the consumer photography market.

When you put out an email to your customers telling them how your brand was one of the most-recognized on the planet, you know the end is near.

And it's not like they didn't see this coming. Polaroid was one of the first with a prosumer digital camera, yet somehow they managed to squander that lead and now are fighting for marketshare with all the other camera and electronics manufacturers out there.

If they're smart, they'll still try to capitalize on what Polaroid means to we Gen-Xer's. License the Polaroidnizer and make it viral. Sponsor a Flickr contest. Work with phone manufacturers to brand cellphone cameras as Polaroids. The electronics gig is nice and it's selling a lot of DVD players, but how much of that is based on price, and how much on brand name?

Polaroid is getting out of the instant film business.

Not surprising, though it makes me a bit sad. We'd go through 669 and Type 54 by the case 10 years ago, and that all stopped when we went digital. That left just the art market: I loved doing Polaroid transfers and was quite good at it back in the day. But seeing how you can do almost the same thing in Photoshop now, it was only a matter of time.

Gonna miss the old roller, squeegee and stacks of Type 59, though, but I guess nothing lasts forever.

Complicated instructions, incompatible setup, and frustrated users are par for the course with Windows software.

But I think they're a first for the box that Windows comes in.

Whether or not improper opening results in a Blue Box Of Death remains to be seen.