Realtors are always looking for ways to save money while growing their business. At the National Association of Realtors Conference, held in San Diego CA, 11/13-16, Kodak had an opportunity to share just how using our solutions can do both. Over 20,000 real estate professionals descended upon our fair city and it was an amazing time. The Kodak booth was decked out with messaging and demos on how Kodak solutions can be used to cut printing costs with the ESP series of All-in-One printers, improve efficiency with our high-powered ScanMate or differentiate successful Realtors from the competition with digital cameras, frames and of course, the Kodak Zi-8 video camera.

The Kodak Booth at the NAR show

The Belles of the Ball were the Kodak ESP 9 All-in-One and the Zi-8. With its print, scan, copy and fax capability and built-in WI-FI and Ethernet, the ESP 9 was a huge hit. Many of the Realtors that came by our booth print a LOT! Some said they print in excess of 25 reams per year. With the ESP 9, realtors can save an average of $230 on ink for every 10 reams they print*. If you print 25 reams, that's a savings of $575! Now what could you do with that kind of cash? When you combine the savings with Kodak's leadership in water resistance, fade resistance, and output image handling, the ESP 9 was a hands-down winner for Realtors at the show.

The Zi-8 demo had people waiting 4 deep to see and learn about the product. With its HD video capture, image stabilization and 2.5 inch LCD, Realtors were very excited about the possibilities - create virtual tours, capture testimonials from satisfied clients to post on their websites, take photos of aspects of the homes that their clients like...the list is only limited by the Realtor's imagination. One of the conference speakers, Max Pigman, Vice President and National speaker for Realtor.com, is very impressed by the Zi-8. While speaking at the conference on Mobile Technology, he featured the Zi-8 as a "must-have" for the effective Realtor.

The Kodak booth at the National Association of Realtors was definitely the place to be for technology tools. By the end of the conference, we conducted over 3000 demos, completed over 100 online surveys, met with numerous real estate thought leaders, sold thousands of dollars in Kodak product and helped Realtors know that there is a way to save money and grow their business when they choose Kodak as their technology partner.

* Results based on average ink costs of leading productivity class inkjet printers utilizing print volumes of 3150 black text pages and 1850 mixed color graphic pages using standard cartridges available in single quantity pricing.  MSRP pricing as of October 1, 2009.  Actual results may vary.  For more information and a list of all printers tested, go to Kodak.com/go/inkdata for details.

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!

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.