• Business Week, Tuesday, November 21, 2006 12:15 PM

For the third time in less than a decade, Kodak is reinventing its core business model by trying to do for photos what Apple does for music: help people to organize and manage their personal libraries of images.

Led by CEO Antonio M. Perez, Kodak is developing a slew of new digital photo services that he expects to yield higher returns. They include everything from online photo sharing to a rapid-fire scanning system--called Scan the World--that takes shoe boxes full of yellowed snapshots and converts them into crisp digital images organized by the date originally printed.

It's not clear whether Kodak will be able to adjust quickly enough to meet the demands of new and untried markets. It has been talking up Scan the World for a year, but it's still not sure when or how it will be introduced broadly. The company hopes to sell or lease scanners to photo shops, plus, get a piece of the fees charged to customers for the service. Among other things, it's wrestling with the $50,000 cost of the scanner.

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