Product development plan and service description framework

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 the needs of a family member who had been travelling and used up all of her storage taking photographs in Krueger Park in South Africa. 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 is an opportunity with the project. All of those companies have the financial and technological means to create their own version of the PhotoDrive, and they all have access to the marketing channels needed to get their products onto the market. This poses a direct threat to PhotoDrive, since we cannot underwrite our business with profits from other areas like those companies can, and we do not have the brand recognition within the photography industry either. The threat level from new entrants is therefore considered to be quite high.

There is also the threat posed by existing technologies. While we believe that the PhotoDrive is a transformative technology, users will still have the option of cobbling together their storage needs using laptop computers, conventional hard drives and the like. These solutions generally utilize items that the photographer already has, and computers in particular can be loaded with a greater variety of software than the PhotoDrive can presently support. Thus, while there is more functionality with laptops, they do not have the portability and safety features that the PhotoDrive has.

There are a number of computer manufacturers that are used by photographers, and a number of established providers of storage. All of these are indirect competitors. Many such solutions will be more affordable than the PhotoDrive, albeit less specialized. Such indirect competition is likely to capture most consumers at the low end of the market, which leaves PhotoDrive as a niche product.

Marketing the PhotoDrive will require emphasizing all of the product benefits, and illustrating how the device adds value to the customer's business. The Photo Drive's attributes will be appreciated by the target market, and this target market does generally consist of early adopters, so this is positive because they will understand the benefits more easily than perhaps the mass market would. However, there will still need to be a clear emphasis on what can be accomplished with the PhotoDrive that cannot be accomplished with existing technologies. By focusing on the portability, the ability to handle multiple climates, the ability to be a storage device capable of operating on its own and processing photos -- all of these attributes are essential to ensuring that the marketing of the PhotoDrive is going be to successful.