Rochester, N.Y. – Kodak is giving consumers a first glimpse of just how the new CPXe program spear-headed by the Internal Imaging Industry Association (I3A) will work in its new EasyShare software.
The new EasyShare software version 2.0 was announced in late May and is shipping with the new EasyShare cameras. It incorporates a propriety Kodak database of several major retailers including CVS, Target, WalMart and Ritz as online print-fulfillment partners. Using the new EasyShare software, consumers can send their prints online to these dealers to have prints fulfilled and either picked up in-store or mailed back to them.
According to Mark Cook, director of product management, Digital and Applied Imaging, Kodak, the company is migrating this database into the national CPXe database of retailers.
This retail directory, one of the centerpieces of the CPXe initiative, aims to put retailers into the heart of where customers interact with their digital images, the home computer. While I3A has indicated that the database will demand a fee from retail participants, Cook suggested that no definitive payment plan has been hammered out.
For the current EasyShare software, the retailers listed pay no fee to appear on the software’s retail database, an arrangement that Cook expects to persist through the CPXe change over.
‘The best thing for the industry is to have everyone participate in this, and so we’re trying to keep the barriers to entry as low as possible’ for retailers, Cook said.
Kodak plans on integrating CPXe architecture across all its professional, online and consumer digital imaging platforms throughout the year.
