PhotoDrive Product Description

The PhotoDrive is a portable hard drive that is aimed at the photographer market. Professional photographers and serious amateurs alike have storage needs that cannot always be met in the field without a laptop. This creates a need for a solution that is geared towards their specific needs. The PhotoDrive is a portable hard drive that will come in a few different sizes, likely ranging from 256GB to 1TB. The hard drive will be more sophisticated, however, than the average portable hard drive. It will have a screen, a flip out keyboard and an operating system. In terms of size and power it will be nowhere near what a laptop offers, but it will have some of the same functionality to organize the photos that are being dumped onto it.

There are a number of benefits and expected uses of this product. The PhotoDrive offers a lightweight storage solution that has some processing ability, allowing the photographer to leave the laptop at home. This is ideal for a number of situations, such as adverse weather conditions or shooting in dangerous areas where theft is a risk. The PhotoDrive is also lighter than a laptop, and smaller, so it is less cumbersome for a photographer to carry into the field.

The ability to process the photos in the field is also valuable, because the photographer will be able to manage the photos on the fly, instead of waiting to get back to the computer to do this task. The sizes of the device will allow for very extensive shooting in nature on multi-day trips, or the shooting of video under the same circumstances.

This innovation was sparked by...

Since she is now set to embark for another photograph-intensive trip to Antarctica, she has been looking into storage options. This sparked the idea because of conversations about the subject and about what professionals must do. There are wildlife photographers who shoot in adverse conditions for days on end, yet there does not appear to be a storage system that will allow them to leave their laptops at home.
The innovation represents a combination product. It starts with a portable hard drive, builds in a screen and flip out keyboard, and ends up something around the size of a tablet, but with more memory and less computing power. It is designed especially for the needs of professional and serious amateur photographers and videographers. This sort of innovation fits a narrow niche in the market, but it is believed that the PhotoDrive will have tremendous benefits for this segment. For the average consumer there might not be much benefit to this product, but for the niche that needs it, PhotoDrive represents an astonishing innovation that will revolutionize the concept of shooting in the field, and open up more of the world to expert photography.

Competitive Analysis

This is an innovative product, so there are no direct competitors. However, there are indirect competitors and there is the threat that direct competitors will emerge. The direct competitors are most likely to be in the form of established camera companies like Sony, Canon and Nikon that will see that there…