When you have a strategy that's been successful, you don't change it without a good reason. 

Getting good yardage in football with your rushing game?  Keep giving the ball to the running back.  Want to put out a late-inning rally in baseball?  Send in Mariano Rivera.  Want your next Pixar film to be a success?  Don't forget to include John Ratzenberger. 

Leveraging new technology into a family of image sensors?  Just keep extending the family portfolio. 

This week, Kodak announced the new KODAK KAI-08050 Image Sensor  - the latest addition to our family of products based on the KODAK TRUESENSE 5.5 micron Interline Transfer CCD Platform.  Like the other members of this family, the KAI-08050 shares features common to this portfolio of products - the same reduction in pixel size, the improvements to image quality, and increase in frame rate.  But now, these advances are available in an 8-megapixel sensor - running at up to 16 frames per second - providing a new level of detail to applied imaging markets. 

As the biggest member of this family, the KAI-08050 even has a few tricks up its sleeve.  A Region of Interest (ROI) mode in the sensor allows the center portion to be read out at even higher frame rate, letting customers trade resolution for speed.  Want to use the KAI-08050 as a 6 Meg, 16:9 sensor?  You got it - at 20 frames per second.  How about focusing on a VGA window at the center of the sensor (so you can do a high-speed focus of your image)?  Over 60 fps.

In short, this baby rocks.

With the KAI-08050, Kodak's new family of interline CCD sensors is really taking shape, with this new 8-megapixel sensor joining the 1-megapixel KAI-01050, the 2-megapixel KAI-02050, and the 1080p (16:9 HDTV format) KAI-02150.  And since all of these sensors share the same electrical design and respond the same way to light, manufacturers can easily leverage a single camera design to support the full family of sensors, making it easy for them to provide a full portfolio of products to their customers. 

More choices, more options, better performance.  All by leveraging a common technology into a family of world-class image sensors. 

That's a strategy that never needs fixing.

If you are planning a wedding you might be excited to hear about the new one-time use Disney's Fairy Tale Wedding Camera by Kodak.

Wrapped with a Cinderella's coach design they are perfect for your guests to take pictures of your special day!

"Making single-use cameras available to wedding guests is a great idea," said professional wedding photographer Isabel Gomes. "The candid snapshots that guests take provide the happy couple with another perspective and tell the complete story of the wedding and the reception, complementing the vision of their hired photographer. Some of these images are classic, reminding the newlyweds that, yes, everyone really did have a great time. Doing so with a KODAK camera means you can trust that you will get great images every time."

And for a limited time, if you order 20 or more cameras you get a Kodak digital picture frame - FREE!

The Disney's Fairy Tale Weddings camera by Kodak is available at disneyweddings.com

To see some great wedding photos visit this blog post about Isabel Lawrence Photographers over on 1000 Words blog.

Abraham Lincoln, born 200 years ago, is enjoying today another run of fame.

New biographies of our 16th president continue to earn a place on this newspaper's list of best sellers. Our politicians praise Lincoln's model of bipartisanship, even if they don't always follow it. And President Barack Obama used the Lincoln Bible to take his oath of office.

Perhaps no president has been scrutinized as much as Lincoln. Yet for all this scrutiny, what is less known about the great man is his active support for one of the vital underpinnings of our economy: The protection of intellectual property in the service of innovation.

Lincoln loved patents. In fact, he remains the only president to earn one: Patent No. 6,469, granted on May 22, 1849, for "a device buoying vessels over shoals." Long before he became president, Lincoln worked on the Mississippi River, ferrying merchandise and getting stuck in the mud. To fix that, he hand-crafted a wooden flatboat outfitted with a series of inflatable bellows to allow the vessel to sit higher in the water.

Stuck on a sand bar, could Lincoln have ever imagined that one day intellectual property would be celebrated around the globe?

Perhaps not, but April 26 is that day.  That date marks World Intellectual Property Day, which was established in 2000 by the United Nations to increase the awareness and understanding of how patents improve life and why patent protection encourages creativity and innovation.

Patents, copyrights and trademarks are often taken for granted. But try to imagine a world without innovation and its necessary protection. We would be deprived of life-saving drugs, life-altering communications, and life-enriching computing and imaging technology.

These technologies emerge because their inventors are confident that they will be singularly rewarded by the market - for a time - for their ingenuity. Absent a patent system, there is little to be gained for all the effort that innovation requires.

According to the U.S. Chamber of Commerce, intellectual property in the U.S. is valued at more than $5 trillion - itself more than the gross domestic product of any other country except the United States. Intellectual property is also the force behind more than half of all U.S. exports, driving 40% of U.S. economic output. At a time when the U.S. is looking for a way to jump-start the economy and maintain our competitive advantage, fostering and protecting innovation through a robust patent system is vital.
 
The numbers associated with the theft of intellectual property are just as staggering. Again from the U.S. Chamber of Commerce: Intellectual property theft accounts for more than $500 billion in lost sales globally each year, or 5-7 percent of world trade - an amount equal to the GDP of a nation the size of Switzerland. 

The lack of respect for intellectual property leads to such frightening situations as counterfeit drugs and airplane parts, to name just two examples. According to the OECD, up to 15% of the world's drug supply is counterfeit. These include life-saving therapies such as HIV/AIDS treatments, insulin, cancer and cardiac drugs, and even over-the-counter pain and allergy relievers. The Federal Aviation Administration estimates that 2 percent, or 520,000, of the 26 million airplane parts installed each year are counterfeit.

Lincoln, of course, understood the value of innovation and the need to protect it. He cited patent laws as one of the three most important developments in the entire history of the world, the other two being the discovery of America and the perfection of printing.

Ten years after receiving his patent, he gave a lecture before college students in which he extolled the benefits of a strong intellectual property protection. Prior to the advent of patents, Lincoln said, "any man might instantly use what another had invented; so that the inventor had no special advantage from his own invention. The patent system changed this; secured to the inventor, for a limited time, the exclusive use of his invention; and thereby added the fuel of interest to the fire of genius, in the discovery and production of new and useful things."

The U.S. Congress has once again taken up the issue of patent reform, which reminds us that even a creation as great as the U.S. patent system can be improved upon in order to achieve the appropriate balance of rights. In its deliberations, Congress should take to heart Lincoln's perspective: our strong patent system is meant to protect the inventor and further the production of new and useful things. The system should be updated but in a way that builds upon the strengths inherent in our system.  The patent system must further innovation to benefit U.S. leadership in the world, not by favoring or penalizing any one business model but by deterring abuse of the system that serves as a drag on innovation.

By improving and building upon our strong patent system, we can continue to feed Lincoln's "fire of genius" for the benefit of all.