Some people get revelations in the shower. Others solve puzzles in their dreams. Yousuke Yamada, a lead engineer for the Japanese office-equipment and camera maker Ricoh Co. Ltd., gets his best ideas on Tokyo commuter trains. "I cannot create an idea at my desk," he says. "I like to walk around a crowded train, where nobody disturbs me."
Over the past three years, while his fellow commuters jostled for space or scanned the morning paper, Yamada, 55, devoted his four-hour daily commute to a higher cause--dreaming up the next great consumer gadget. In 1997 Ricoh president Masamitsu Sakurai commissioned Yamada to create a device that would help catapult his company, which had built its fortunes on heavy office machines, into the forefront of digital technology. The trouble was, Sakurai didn't really know what he wanted. "The idea was to develop a product that uses all our senses," says Yamada. "There was no paper, no specifications. Just his wish, his hope."
After reviewing the most promising new technologies--and meditating endlessly on the train--Yamada felt he was prepared to design a digital camera like no other. The fruit of his cogitations is about the size of a videocassette and weighs in at just over a pound. But the genius of the RDC-i700 camera is revealed as its top flips up to display a bright, 3.5-in. touch-sensitive screen--a window on the World Wide Web that surfs the Internet, records voice memos, accepts scribbled notes and drawings in 16 different colors and receives and sends e-mail.
In many respects, such features are not new this year. What makes the i700 an invention is its wireless Web-publishing capabilities. Ricoh engineers wrote custom software that resides inside the camera and allows users to correlate images with specific Web pages, then transmit them to a live website of their choice. Not only can you send photos from the road, you can also automatically display them exactly where you want them to appear on your website.
"We created the first camera that allows HTML coding, which can be sent to a Web page and instantly published," says the camera's U.S. marketing manager, Jeff Lengyel. After the photographer takes pictures, which can be shot at a resolution of 3.34 megapixels or less, she selects the snaps she wants to upload to her personal website. Users in Japan--where the product was released in September at about $1,500--can transmit images with a tiny wireless modem that slides into a slot on the camera. Ricoh expects similar wireless cards to be available in time for the i700's U.S. release early next year.
PICTURE PERFECT
In our own tests, TIME's editors were able to upload a low-resolution image to a website in about a minute simply by selecting the desired image onscreen, then hitting a few more buttons to send it through the ether. Skeptical at first about browsing the Web on a screen the size of a drink coaster, we were pleasantly surprised at how easy it was both to enter Web addresses and write e-mail with the slim gray plastic stylus included with the camera.