Eye-Fi Plays the Waiting Game With the SD Association

14.06.2012
Note: This article is a follow-up to our and our story about , both of which were published in January 2012.

Back in January, Eye-Fi CEO Yuval Koren caused a bit of a stir with . According to Koren, the SDA was ignoring its own procedures in announcing a new specification, iSDIO, that would allow storage-card manufacturers to sell standardized SD Cards capable of transmitting data to other devices via a wireless connection--something that Eye-Fi has been doing exclusively for about seven years now.

Koren wasn't too happy with the SDA's announcement of iSDIO as a standard for a number of reasons: The iSDIO specification sounded very similar to Eye-Fi's own proprietary wireless-card technology, and the SDA didn't review Eye-Fi's intellectual-property claims before announcing iSDIO as a standard. The SDA didn't follow its own rules in ratifying the standard. And other storage-card makers started marketing their products as "iSDIO-compliant" after the SDA skirted the normal approval process.

Since then, all had been quiet on the Eye-Fi-versus-SDA front, until the past couple of weeks. According to Koren, the SDA has notified him that it has completed the review of Eye-Fi's intellectual-property claims regarding iSDIO. Beyond that, however, nothing much has happened, Koren says.

"They've completed [the IP review], and we've asked the SDA's legal counsel for the results in some amount of detail," Koren said in a telephone interview. "In the last week, they haven't complied with our request for those results. I didn't think there would be much of a delay. We're curious to see it when it's available."

Replying to an email request for comment, Kevin Schader, the SD Association's director of communications, said that the SDA is still working through the process for the iSDIO standard and does not have any new information to announce at the moment.