Last week we added more things to Kodak Gallery you folks have been asking for. 

Big Beautiful Full Screen Slideshow -  You can view and share your Kodak moments in a glorious full screen view. It's amazing how good your pics look and what you notice in them when you see them in our new slideshow. Your friends will be blown away. A tech writer even said to me "wow, that's mac like"



Facebook Sharing - yep, we finally did it. Upload your pics to the Gallery and share via Facebook.  You use our photo tray to pick the pics you like and then simply select share to Facebook and your pics are posted as a link to a gallery slideshow on Facebook. Here is what's super cool- No more little Facebook pics. Now its big beautiful pics from Facebook. (see big beautiful slide show above). If you want to share lots of pictures no problem, you don't clog your friends news feed with a hundred photos. And all your pics are now in one place, Kodak Gallery.



New books and a new way to make them - we added three new books a small 5x7 autofill book, a paperback 8x10 book and a large 12 x 14 printed cover book. With the autofill book you select your pics with the photo tray and either just blast them into the book or arrange the sequence. You can also now arrange pages and drag and drop pictures form page to page. Super easy to be creative or just simply make a great book without any hassle. We also added a bunch more layouts

What's next?  We are working making the new Kodak Gallery even easier and faster and a few new cool things as well.

Thank you for helping us make the Kodak Gallery better and check out this 1000 Words blog post to see how to get your free $15 gift!

I have always been a big fan of National Geographic Magazine, so it was a big thrill for me when I was invited to speak last Tuesday week at an event commemorating the release of their latest book, National Geographic Image Collection.  This book is a magnificent collection of famous and never-before-released photos from the extensive photo archives of the National Geographic Society, which dates back over 100 years. This speaking event was billed as the "insider's look" at the making of the book.  I, of course, had nothing to do with the making of this book, but the other people also speaking certainly were.  They included the insightful Maura Mulvihill, who is the director of the Image Collection and helped select the images for the book from over 11 million possible images, plus a set of world famous photographers whose work appears in in its pages.  David Doubilet, Maria Stenzel, Chris Johns and William Allard all spoke about their work and what it means to them.  To top it off, Kodak CEO Antonio Perez started the evening off by sharing some of the common history that National Geographics and Kodak have together. He even held up a copy of the first advertisement that Kodak had in the magazine from the year 1909.



    The event was attended by several hundred photographers in their auditorium at the National Geographic's building on M street in Washington DC.  I was scheduled to be the last speaker of the evening and you might expect that I would have spent the evening nervously waiting my turn.  That was not the case however because all of the speakers before me had such interesting and compelling narratives about their photographs that I lost all sense of anticipation and got lost in their stories.  What wonderful photos of the mysterious polar ice cap, elephants sleeping on a moonlit African plain, and elusive snow leopards on rocky cliffs. There were stories of how to get a white shark to "pose" for that perfect shot (secret: don't get too close!) and the capturing of desert landscape scenes at dusk.



    My small part in all this was to talk about the invention of how I invented the digital camera here at Kodak and the contribution that digital imaging has made to photography. The real testimony, of course, is found in the pages of this book and the amazing images made possible by digital.

Common to all of the photographers who spoke was their passion for the medium and its power to express the wonders of our world.  It was a magical evening and I will not soon forget the stories I heard or the people I met. It was a great reminder that photography is really at its best when the art and science of the discipline come together in the hands of passionate storytellers. I hope everyone gets a chance to experience this wonderful collection of photos from National Geographic.

Why keep buying more expensive ink when you can replace the printer instead? Just in time for the ho-ho-ho-lidays, we're launching a new wave of advertising this weekend as part of our Inkjet Print and Prosper campaign. So far the campaign has been a huge success at driving awareness (and sales!) of our inkjet printer solution to Big Ink's trickery. We'll be online & on-air through the holidays, but check out a couple of new TV spots now.



This ad aims to get people to think ink, and switch to a Kodak printer.



This one calls out Big Ink's naughty practice of charging high prices for ink.

'Tis the season to stop overpaying for inkjet printer ink!  See how much you can save by visiting printandprosper.com.

More than 1,400 people participated in the Eyes on the Future 2009 annual economic development summit on Friday October 16 at St.John Fisher College, with Eastman Business Park the naming sponsor, and Greater Rochester Enterprise (GRE) the host of the event.

The purpose of the event was to promote collaboration and engagement among businesses, organizations and individuals in the Greater Rochester Region. The event also included a business and career event, EyesExpo, which preceded and followed the general session.

Fifty companies exhibited to include Eastman Business Park (EBP) which featured a large screen virtual model of available properties, and drew great interest from attendees.   In addition, several EBP key suppliers participated in the expo, along with a Kodak booth that featured our newest digital consumer products.
 








The summit highlighted a keynote address by Richard A. Bendis, president and CEO of InnovationAmerica, who emphasized how improving the economy requires a focus on an area's strengths, not its weaknesses.

The keynote highlighted the Greater Rochester Region's significant potential with 19 leading educational institutions, a skilled and talented workforce and a vibrant network of innovative businesses. He also called on business, political and community leaders to connect and work together on supporting entrepreneurial growth to further enable the nine-county area to successfully compete with the rest of the country.

GRE presented its Intellectual Density Quotient (IDQ), which provides a measure of the region's workforce in several areas.   IDQ includes the percentage of the population enrolled in college, patents issued per worker, the number of workers trained to excel in a knowledge-based economy and the number of companies ranked among the best places to work in the country.  Based on these criteria the nine-country Rochester Region outperforms communities five times its size.  For more information visit www.rochesterbiz.com.

It was a great event and another valuable opportunity for Eastman Business Park to share who we are and the outstanding features we have to offer.

To see something clearly, sometimes you need to change your perspective. Think out of the box. Turn the problem on its side. When you start to look at things differently, you sometimes start noticing things you couldn't see before.

A lot of times, the real challenge is figuring out just how to get that different perspective. It might be as simple as taking a walk and coming back to the problem when your mind is clear. But often, the best thing to do is to step back, look more broadly, and try to get a "big picture" view of the problem.

Satellites in orbit around the Earth do this all the time - they "step back" by hundreds of miles to provide a unique perspective on our planet. Today, a number of different commercial satellites are in operation around the Earth, each providing information used in applications as diverse as urban planning, mapping for natural resources, or evacuation planning and disaster response.

And that doesn't even count the really cool pictures you can call up on your computer in Google Maps - that really provides a different perspective on things.

Earlier this month, the latest of these commercial satellites - DigitalGlobe's WorldView-2 - was successfully launched into Earth orbit. The capabilities of this satellite are pretty spectacular - from 770 km (about 500 miles) above the earth, it can capture images with a resolution of up to 50 cm (about 1.5 feet) over an area almost 1 million square km each day (which is a pretty big number, given that the entire surface of the earth is only around 150 million square km). Its orbit will also allow the satellite to revisit any location on the Earth's surface typically in just over 1 day, allowing for quick, high resolution updates of rapidly changing conditions on the surface.

As you might imagine, the entire process to design and launch a satellite is pretty complicated, involving sub-contractors who each specialize on different parts of the entire project. For the imaging system on WorldView-2 - the "eyes" of the entire satellite - DigitalGlobe worked with the Space Systems Division of ITT Corporation, who designed and built this key component. And when ITT needed custom CCD image sensors for this new imaging system, they came to Kodak.

This isn't the first time Kodak has worked with ITT to design and manufacture CCD image sensors for a commercial imaging satellite - we also worked with ITT on the sensors used in DigitalGlobe's WorldView-1 and QuickBird satellites, as well as the IKONOS and GeoEye-1 satellites. But the CCD image sensors used in WorldView-2 give this satellite a unique set of imaging capabilities.

"Normal" color image sensors (like the one used in your digital camera, or in your phone) typically capture images in three different color ranges - red, green, and blue - and then use software to combine them into a single full color image. (Actually, this is very similar to how cone cells work in the retina of the eye.) The CCD image sensors in WorldView-2, however are different - instead of using three colors, they actually capture images across eight different wavelength regions, extending from the visible out into the IR. This extra color information can then be used to more accurately analyze vegetation on the ground, or generate more accurate "true-color" images from the satellite. In fact, this capability makes WorldView-2 unique, as it is the only commercial satellite that provides high resolution images across 8 different wavelength bands.

Less than two weeks after its launch, the first images from WorldView-2 have already been published by DigitalGlobe, as the satellite works through a 90-day initial calibration and check-out period. (If you're interested, you can even watch a replay of the satellite's launch.) After that, WorldView-2 should be fully on-line, providing new views of our planet from its orbit 500 miles above the Earth.

Not a bad place to gain some perspective.