Apps are not the issue; coolness is

Apps are not the issue; coolness is
Sometimes it seems the gap between consumer-technology experts and consumers is as wide as the gulf between Marxists and Marx Brothers. My latest reprise of this epiphany was at the Japan Electronics Show (JES) in Osaka, where I wandered laymanlike and bemused among myriad prototype doohickeys, many of them in the burgeoning field of digital imaging. This is a technology that strikes me as an eventual revolution in snapshot photography and the death knell of Polaroid, but not until the makers of digital cameras can get the unit price somewhere below your typical Patty Hearst ransom demand.

Meanwhile, there's Purinto Kurabu (Print Club).

I've been a Print Club fan since last year in Tokyo, when I squeezed into a Day-Glo-hued photo booth with three women and came out a few minutes later with a sheet of 12 stickers showing all four of us, framed by a cartoon forest and accompanied by a drunken raccoon.

"Cool!" I said.

The verdict of a technology expert at JES-in this case, Jacques Kauffmann, technology adviser to the Photo Marketing Association International-was less gushy. "The only market," he said dismissively, "is 13-year-old girls." This is bad? The same 13-year-old girls who turned a schlocky shipwreck movie into the biggest grosser of all time?

Besides sticker trading for bubblegummers, there are numerous practical uses for itty-bitty sticky digi-photos, including turning your latest postcard to Mom from Japan into a visual memento. But apps are not the issue here, I think. Coolness is the issue.

Itty-bitty sticky digi-photos are (a) cool, and (b) the only segment I can find in the whole digital-imaging consumer market that's making money. Purinto Kurabu is paying for a lot of those sophisticated apps that don't cause Jacques Kauffmann to curl a lip in contempt.

I remember that, while I was working for a technology company that made beautiful, efficient solar cells that each cost a fortune and antagonized the oil companies, Sony and Matsushita in Japan were making toys, calculators and profits from solar cells so inefficient that somebody should have been embarrassed. But nobody was-because consumers understood and liked these products without a clue about the quality of the engineering involved. While oil companies drove the serious solar labs out of business, these consumer-electronics companies were developing better solar technology paid for by cheesy solar technology.

From little acorns . . .

And meanwhile, I have all these keen cartoon stickers of me in Japan. Four bucks a dozen. Cheap!

— David Benjamin, an occasional contributor to EE Times, keeps one eye on consumer-electronics trends and the other on cultural curiosities.