CES prize goes to $100 memory card

By Brian Bergstein

updated 7:04 p.m. ET Jan. 9, 2008

LAS VEGAS - A memory card that wirelessly sends pictures from a digital camera to a computer — letting you skip the tedium of plugging the camera in to upload images — got bragging rights Wednesday at the International Consumer Electronics Show.

Eye-Fi Inc.'s wireless card beat nine other contenders for the top spot in the traditional Last Gadget Standing session, a breezy and informal CES contest staged by Yahoo Inc.'s technology section. The winner is determined by the volume of audience applause.

The $100 Eye-Fi card, which has 2 gigabytes of memory, uses Wi-Fi to instantly zap pictures to computers and photo-sharing Web sites. The company, based in Mountain View, Calif., announced earlier at CES that it had a deal to get its technology into memory cards made by Lexar Media.

Eye-Fi's diverse set of rivals included a golf simulator, a Toshiba Corp. wireless projector and the Sansa TakeTV, a USB memory stick from SanDisk Corp. that is designed to transfer video from the Internet to the TV.

But the closest challenger appeared to be the Looj, a $99 gutter-cleaning robot from iRobot Corp. That would have been the home-robotics company's second triumph in the Yahoo contest: its Roomba vacuum was the champ for 2002.

Other previous winners include General Motors Corp.'s OnStar car-information service, but the prize is not exactly a guarantee of success. The Last Gadget Standing in 2004 was the Tapwave Zodiac, a handheld digital assistant with multimedia features. The company went bankrupt in 2005.

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