BRIEFS: June 14

Adeal recruits Ricoh exec to head up sales…Fujifilm’s Instax re-relaunch…Kodak to auction patents…Olympus to go niche?…Kogan charges ‘IE 7 tax’

Adeal recruits ex-Ricoh exec to head up sales

Adeal has appointed Peter Vogel to the position of national sales manager, a position previously held by Glenn Ward, who was with Adeal for 12 years in a range of roles.

Mr Vogel will head up Adeal’s sales and customer service teams to ensure the delivery of seamless services to Adeal’s customers.

Peter Vogel comes with an impressive background in technology sales, having worked as the regional lead for corporate sales with Ricoh Asia Pacific, Singapore and in similar roles in Australia in the imaging and optics industry.

‘I am enthusiastic about the opportunity to join Adeal, who has earned an outstanding reputation for its dedicated customer service over the last 35 years,’ said Mr Vogel. ‘I am looking forward to working with our internal and external sales teams to ensure that we build mutually profitable partnerships with our customers, both now and in the future, by offering top products backed by top service and support.’

 

Fujifilm’s Instax re-relaunch

In December 2010 we ran a new product story on Fujifilm’s Instax instant print system, so when a press release came out last month on Instax we were keen to read about the next generation of Fujifilm’s instant photo system. Alas, it’s deja vu all over again, with the new release focussed on the two cameras previously announced in 2010. The significant difference is that the price of the cameras has fallen in the intervening 18 months, with the white only Fujifilm Instax Mini 7S now carrying an RRP of $109 ($164 in 2010) while the Instax 210 is now $149 (previously $176).

 

Kodak to auction patents

Eastman Kodak Company has filed a motion seeking approval to auction its Digital Capture and Kodak Imaging Systems and Services (KISS) Patent Portfolios, comprising more than 1100 patents related to the capture, manipulation, and sharing of digital images.

To date, 20 parties have signed confidentiality agreements and have been provided access to an electronic data room, Kodak said.

The two portfolios being sold have different characteristics and may interest different buyers. The Digital Capture Portfolio includes over 700 patents covering image capture, processing, and transmission technologies that are crucial to the design and operation of digital cameras and multi-function devices. The KISS Portfolio includes over 400 patents that cover technologies including image analysis, manipulation and tagging, and network-based services, including image storage, access, and fulfilment.

Since 2001, Kodak has generated more than $3 billion from licensing its digital imaging portfolio to industry leaders, including Samsung, LG, Motorola, and Nokia, and is currently pursuing patent litigation against infringers that include Apple, RIM, and HTC.

 

Olympus to go niche?

Olympus has provided details of its medium-term plan for recovery, which will see it concentrating camera manufacture on mirrorless interchangeable and high-end compact cameras. It projects a 180 percent increase in mirrorless unit volume and a 70 percent increase in high-end compact unit volume by 2017, while reducing it’s low-end compact range by 50 percent. This will turn Olympus into a niche player in the marketplace, says camera tech website www.sansmirror.com, without the range and marketing budget to continue to match Sony, Canon and Nikon in motivating dealers in some markets such as the US in co-op advertising spend.

Stories early last week that Panasonic intended to sink over $600 million into Olympus were denied by Panasonic later in the week.

 

Kogan makes lemonade

Anyone who operates a website will be aware of the complexity of getting sites to work with the variations of browsers and operating systems available. Old software that Microsoft or whomever is no longer maintaining with upgrades is particularly challenging…

Maverick online grey marketer Kogan, having recently launched a fancy new website, seems to have come to grief on the reef of out-dated software. They’ve cleverly turned this into an opportunity to get their customers to upgrade, introducing ‘world’s first “Internet Explorer 7 Tax”.’

The new 6.8 percent tax comes into effect today on all products purchased from Kogan.com ‘by anyone still insistent on using the antique browser’.

‘The way we’ve been able to keep our prices so low,’ says a Kogan press release, ‘is by using technology to make our business efficient and streamlined. One of the things stopping that is our web team having to spend a lot of time making our new website look normal on IE7. This is an extremely old browser, so from today, anyone buying from the site who uses IE7 will be lumped with a 6.8% surcharge – that’s 0.1% for each month IE7 has been on the market:

‘To avoid the tax, customers upgrade to a newer browser.’