Name: Here's How Kodak Got Into the Smartphone Business
Uploaded: 2017-01-13
Duration: 2 min 25 s
Description: CEO Jeff Clarke shares tips with Fortune's Erin Griffith

You guys just launched a phone. << That's right. << Can you please tell me how is a camera company suddenly turning itself into a phone company? << Well phones, phones as you can see, this is the Kodak Ektra, is this unique phone. First of all, it has 21 megapixels, versus 13 megapixels, which means it's gonna give you a better picture. Second of all, it's got a lens With Gorilla Glass on it. And that's giving you better photography and light. And just cut for the Kodak touch you can emulate Kodachrome, you can emulate Ektachrome or on video you can emulate Super 8. So it actually makes it as close to film as you get it. And by the way the rest of the phone features it works fine and so most people today are tired of the same old phone with no more differentiation than the last one. This is really a camera first phone, it's Android based so it has all the features and all the applications you'd want but it's a great camera too. All right but I want to understand more the corporate strategy behind this. Sure. What makes Made you decide, you know we're Kodak, we're great at cameras but we really need to make a phone? Well, most pictures today come from phones. So it's kind of logical that you might go for the biggest part of the market. And so for us it makes sense. The phone part is, pretty again, undifferentiated against all the makers. So we focused on doing something really special, software and with the camera itself in the phone, and then also little things like I have thousands of pictures on my iPhone that are really hard to print. Kodak's good about printing pictures. Remember that little yellow envelope that used to come to your house? Well, we make it really easy to print your photos off the In making your first phone were there any major lessons you had along the way that this is your very first time with this kind of thing. What can you tell our listeners about what you learned We, I think we learned that product design is paramount. This thing does what many others don't. If you had a iPhone you'd try and think, and put it down, and it would fall over What we can do with this, is you can do an interview like that. It might be useful if you're trying to do a video interview. A lot of the things we realized is this is kind of a strange way to take a picture. Well we can even do that with this phone, but you can also do this. Thinking of a phone as you made the camera was our, as you made. Think of a camera as you made the phone was really the biggest insight that we had.

Here's How Kodak Got Into the Smartphone Business

CEO Jeff Clarke shares tips with Fortune's Erin Griffith