After a couple of weeks in Costa Rica, I’m back to work and back to blogging. In case you were wondering. Costa Rica does have beautiful mountains, volcanoes, lush jungles, tropical beaches with younger and some older kids trying to learn to surf – and lots of photographic opportunities. As usual, I’m torn as to how to store and share my photos. I have a Mac at home and the lazy part of me enjoys just connecting the camera and downloading to iPhoto. While iPhoto is a nice package that’s free with your Mac, it has very basic tools and sharing options, but I’m always left wanting more features, like digital watermarking. Especially if I want to post the images to a shared social site and don’t want to queue the images through Photoshop.

So what does this have to do with “What’s next”?

As you might have noticed, the digital watermarking process is tied to Adobe imaging solutions unless you are an enterprise customer. This is an issue if you don’t use Photoshop or Elements, but would like to keep track of your images on the web. This is especially true now that many of you post your camera phone shots directly to sites like Facebook. There’s currently no option to watermark those images before they take off into the wild of the internet. What happens if you post a great shot of you and Jessica Biel learning to surf in Costa Rica? (Nope that didn’t actually happen on my trip.) Think TMZ or the Enquirer will call if a friend of a friend of a friend emails them that photo. They might keep Jessica, but your head would probably end up as a bunch of large pixels. Worst of all your friends will think you added yourself into that photo; yes that would be a major crisis… OK, maybe that isn’t your idea of a crisis, but I think you get my gist, so how can Digimarc help you watermark images without Photoshop?

We’ve had some internal discussions at Digimarc on how to provide digital watermarking capabilities to people who do not use Adobe Photoshop or Elements. Some of the ideas we have thought about might interest you:

1. Provide an online embedding service where you register your account and simply upload images to be watermarked and then either have them returned to you or forwarded to another site. No doubt our marketing folks wouldn’t mind using the latest buzz of “cloud computing” in our product description. It would require users to have an internet connection and high speed for larger batches of images. Mobile phone users would be able to upload images directly and have them watermarked and forwarded up to their favorite sharing site
2. Develop a standalone embedder application for Mac and PC. Again, this would allow non-Adobe users to watermark files easily and features could be expanded for premium accounts
3. Build more plug-ins for Mac and PC applications that process images, including the upload apps to popular photo sharing sites and social networks

Of course these all require development time and dollars, and we need to make sure what we do will best meet the desires of our customers. So I’d like to ask you to comment on what you’d like to see as future watermarking applications. 

1. While we love Adobe, do we need an internet based or a stand-alone app for your Mac or PC?
2. Does automatic watermarking as you upload images to Facebook or Picasa a good solution and have value to you?
3. Would you rather directly control the watermarking? Then which applications besides Photoshop and Elements would you use to embed a watermark?
4. Got an idea for an even different approach?

Seriously I’d like to get some feedback. We’re doing our product planning for 2010 and beyond and this is your chance to tell us what you want.

Last, but not least, some of you might be wondering what else we did at Digimarc this summer. Since early this year we’ve been working on a very cool improvement to our watermarking technology. With a little more testing this fall you’ll be seeing the fruits of this summer’s labors as we upgrade the embedder and the DFI website early next year. So make sure our emails aren’t going to your spam filter and keep an eye out for this free upgrade in Q1 of 2010. It’s going to be a good one!

Hope you all had a great summer and are ready for fall!