Eye-Fi makes clever wifi hotspots in the shape of SD cards; your camera sees them as SD cards but you can mount them on your network and automatically feed the images captured by your camera to a nearby laptop. But to make all this work with some models, you need an account on "Eye-Fi Center," a cloud service run by the company that sends configuration data to your card.  Well, Eye-Fi is retiring a number of their products and they're going to stop working entirely.

This isn't so much about Eye-Fi but the premise that anytime you have a device that goes through a server or a company or 'the cloud' to do its job, if the company that makes it makes changes (or stops doing business altogether), that device can stop working.  Period.

This can be older companies that are waning or startups like products from Kickstart that come out of the gates big but just never really catch on.  Unfortunately, I have no words of wisdom here or advice on how to avoid it - just a "buyer beware" warning.  Sorry.

Anecdotally, when I do remote support, there are some great products out there.  I use one that is "self-hosted" and which, once purchased, I own that version outright.  What this means for me is that should the company ever fold, my software will keep running.  That's important to a business like mine.  I'd hate to miss an email and find that my software had stopped overnight and, by opting for a self-hosted option (which means I run software on my main PC to have it function as a Server for the software), it means I'll be able to keep going and support my clients seamlessly.

More info on this trend at http://boingboing.net/2016/06/30/eye-fi-orphans-14-products-wh.html

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