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| The Story Behind the Company
My name is Sam Stearman. I retired from the business world in 2003 to travel the world and take photos – two hobbies I adore, and revamped my web site: www.samsays.com to share my photos and travelogues of with family members and a growing number of friends - with current visitors numbering between 150 - 200 a day. Getting active in photography associations (PSA, FAPA) and sharing photos and comments on Internet sites such as Flickr and CouchSurfing and others have expanded my contacts even wider. It's been a blast. A year ago, while on a shoot in Macau I watched with intrigue as a professional photographer friend uploaded his photos from his camera to a pocket-sized external hard drive during lunch. The whole process was so effortless, and the entire routine so unconscious -- as if he were merely entering someone’s number into a cell phone -- that I was immediately afflicted with a major case of “ease” envy. Three weeks later I left on an extended trip to the US, Brazil and South Korea outfitted with my very own pocket-sized “FotoLocket” – as I’ve come to call it -- and hundreds of high resolution photos and countless stress-free hours later I was thanking my lucky stars for having made one of the best investments of my life. Traveling now without my FotoLocket is as inconceivable to me as a world without e-mail or cell phones. I honestly don’t know how I ever managed to get by without one. I had never really thought much about how great the FotoLocket was until I read comments posed to fellow photographers on CouchSurfing about how other members saved photos while traveling. The more I read about how others approached the problem: most lugged a notebook with them, some uploaded to CD's at photo stores, a few used iPods to store media and many bought extra media cards. I realized then that I’m just about the only kid on the block with one of these. This got me started doing my homework. Units like the FotoLocket are still virtually unavailable today. Even though a few "photobanks" are on the market, prices are generally expensive or the quality is shabby and most people who take photos as either a hobby or a profession aren't aware they are available. After doing my homework, I made a list of "essential" features:
I then set about getting these features built in my unit.
Sam’s FotoLocket is the result! My retirement is over. a quality product for photographers by |
And since I have become sort of a reluctant expert on software, based on testing more software than I would care to count during the 1990's with over 100 feature articles written on software and technology for computer and accounting magazines (see partial list of articles published - "