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Eye-Fi is one manufacturer of the type of SD card the grandparent is talking about. Their cards in particular have a small amount of storage, a Wi-Fi radio, and a tiny client which automatically uploads pictures written to the storage via the SD interface to a designated server via a proprietary protocol apparently based on HTTP.

This setup comes with the side benefit that you can sound cool at the same time, if your car has blue-tooth audio, or a blue-tooth/FM transmitter/converter you can control the music from anywhere in the car.

http://www.eye.fi/

We can achieve cameras by adding SD cards? What?

We can achieve adding Wi-Fi capabilities to cameras by adding an SD card, yes.
Eye-fi. And yes, mine works quite well.

" Any suggestions from anyone for those of us who don't live in NY?"

Perhaps an eye fi to some sort of public hotspot, say at the donuts shop? works with most sd card cameras.

You can already buy an SD card with an integrated WiFi chip: http://uk.eye.fi/

Put that in the DSLR, and set up your phone as a hotspot. Problem solved?

(I haven't tried this, the eye-fi card is a bit too expensive to buy when I don't really need it. I have seen one demonstrated though, a laptop picked new photos up straight away from the camera.)

That's why you use a camera with an Eye-Fi card to send the pictures to your phone in your pocket.

You mentioned you have a eye-fi card already. You're describing the eye-fi premium upgrade:

http://www.eye.fi/how-it-works/eyefiview#premium
"Eye-Fi Premium: no limits.
With Eye-Fi Premium, photos & videos sent directly from your camera to your Eye-Fi View are available for as long as you like. Enjoy unlimited storage and the flexibility to access, share and download your media in full resolution anytime. Whether you’re at home on a second computer, on your iPhone on the go or on an iPad on vacation, your photo & video history is always just a few clicks away. Get unlimited access with Eye-Fi Premium for only $4.99/month or $49.99/year. Buy Eye-Fi Premium (Monthly) or save $10 with Eye-Fi Premium (Annual)"

To get the pics on your server, install the eye-fi app, which you already did to use the card, and turn on the computer, it'll then sync.

In summary:

1. Upgrade here: http://www.eye.fi/how-it-works/eyefiview#premium
2. Turn on your computer.

You mentioned you have a eye-fi card already. You're describing the eye-fi premium upgrade:

http://www.eye.fi/how-it-works/eyefiview#premium
"Eye-Fi Premium: no limits.
With Eye-Fi Premium, photos & videos sent directly from your camera to your Eye-Fi View are available for as long as you like. Enjoy unlimited storage and the flexibility to access, share and download your media in full resolution anytime. Whether you’re at home on a second computer, on your iPhone on the go or on an iPad on vacation, your photo & video history is always just a few clicks away. Get unlimited access with Eye-Fi Premium for only $4.99/month or $49.99/year. Buy Eye-Fi Premium (Monthly) or save $10 with Eye-Fi Premium (Annual)"

To get the pics on your server, install the eye-fi app, which you already did to use the card, and turn on the computer, it'll then sync.

In summary:

1. Upgrade here: http://www.eye.fi/how-it-works/eyefiview#premium
2. Turn on your computer.

Already exists. Wifi enabled SD card that can go in most anything, Tether to a laptop or tablet, and it uploads as you shoot. If you happen to be in range of a known wifi spot (starbucks, etc), upload over their network, directly to whatever cloud service you've set up.

Eventually, more and more cameras will have this functionality built in.

It records to an SD card, not useful for spying.

Get an eye-fi then.

It's still nothing more than a product release announcement, as opposed to "OMG NEW TECH," since this very product has been available from others for some time now, and is in (more or less) wide use already: http://www.eye.fi/

that you could incorporate it in a real size SD card, could be news.

Nope, still not a surprise, since over 200,000,000 photos have already been uploaded through Eye-Fi cards: http://www.eye.fi/

On the off chance that the laptop is only there to move the pictures, I thought I'd mention the eye fi cards. I haven't bought one yet, but I'm thinking they might be interesting to use with a smartphone, send pictures from the camera to the phone to an online storage site.

Anyone know if there's some way one could automate cloud storage via such a system? I take a picture with my DSLR, it automatically sends it to the phone, and the phone automatically uploads it to flickr? Seems like there could be some interesting uses there, real-time photostreaming, making sure your documentation of police brutality or other crime couldn't be taken easily, etc.

I'd be lying to myself if I said I would probably ever be in an interesting situation where that would be useful though...

http://www.eye.fi/ perhaps

According to the site:
Features:
  * ....
  * Endless. Get the only card that can free-up space for you after pictures are safely delivered. Never worry about running out of space again.
  * ...

Sorry, but I don't believe your arguments hold water.

For a start, phones don't need to be "very small, lightweight and damage-resistant". Some people might demand this from their phones, but it's not a given. Smart phones these days are getting pretty large - look at the iPhone, or more recent devices like the HTC Touch HD2. These devices need to be big, to fit a screen large enough for web browsing. A big glass screen also guarantees that your phone can't be particularly damage resistant, so you just have to take a bit more care of it.

The electronics don't need to be any more low-power than those in compact cameras, where batteries last tolerably well. Smart phones have 1GHz processors in them these days, so there's no lack of processing power available for image processing.

I'll admit that the RFI problem might be a genuine issue, although I've never heard of any problem caused by cards like the Eye-Fi. If this is a problem, however, it's not rocket science to turn off the radio circuitry while a picture is taken and reactivate it afterwards. Heck, many phones even include exactly this ability as an "airplane mode"

What's more, the camera and the cell phone are a perfect fit. Both have a large LCD screen, a battery, a processor and a storage device. Putting the two devices together is cutting out a whole load of redundancy, both in terms of weight and cost. The resulting device might not be quite as sleek as current smart phones, due to the extra width necessary to fit a decent lens assembly, and admittedly this is a shame. But no doubt manufacturers would produce different models, some sleek ones with crappy cameras (or no camera at all) for people with your needs, and some slightly bulkier but with decent cameras for people like me.

Obviously a cell phone camera will never replace a good SLR, for those who need to take "proper" photographs. But there's no reason that it can't take good pictures, and thereby completely obviate the need for a separate compact camera. I only hope manufacturers hurry up and implement decent cameras in cell phones, because it's long overdue.

"Wifi direct will be great for printers and the like...."

....and cameras and camcorders: imagine a endless storage 1080i HDTV camcorder. That dinky 60gb built-in hard drive full after 6 hrs? No problem: with Wi-Fi Direct just fire up your laptop and stream the video straight to your multi-terabyte hard drive for hundreds of hours of full HD video bliss. Done taking photos of little timmy's b-day? Photos transferred straight to your PC already without a special expensive SD card like eye-fi. You can even select which photos to print out on your camera and have them printed without even touching your PC.

Digital cameras still require you to take the time to get to a computer and do something with the picture via the memory card or the camera itself.

I'm actually rather surprised that nobody (especially Polaroid of all companies) has even attempted a digital camera with tiny printer built-in and enough film for a dozen photos. For sure, you wouldn't fit one into an iPhone, but the resulting contraption could be about the same size or smaller than one of the old clunky Polaroid cameras.

Instant sharing isn't as simple or direct as snapping the picture and handing it to someone, like with a Polaroid.

Well, it could also be argued that physical photos themselves are rapidly becoming a thing of the past. My wife and I are in the process of scanning and archiving all the family photos we can find (some over a century old) because we know we can preserve, distribute, and annotate them digitally a lot more reliably than the physical originals.

What's missing in the present is a simple and fool-proof way to share photos no matter where you are. If I'm with a group of friends and somebody takes a nice photo, I can ask them for their memory card and stick it into my phone or laptop and make a copy, but that still requires a fair amount of hassle and technical know-how. The SD cards that can wirelessly upload their contents to the web automatically are a nice step in the right direction. But instant photo sharing won't be truly fool-proof until we have ubiquitous cheap wireless Internet access everywhere.

I think the problem here would be "programmed feature removal"

http://www.eye.fi/cards/

There's three different cards to buy, and I have no doubt that they're all identical save for what card they claim to be, thereby limiting what features the manager software will allow the user to access.

So, basically it's one of these:

http://www.eye.fi/

I can't believe I don't see more people using this.

Eye-Fi

Or, get an eye-fi SD card, which had Wi-Fi built into it. http://www.eye.fi/

I have never used one of these however... sure sounds like a cool idea... i expect to see wifi built into the next gen cameras

Have a look at the Eye-Fi card.

The Eye-Fi products will help anyone in a situation where pictures are attempted to be deleted from a camera. By buffering images then transmitting pictures to the internet via WiFi, you can effectively remove the ability for people to confiscate film or memory cards.

All you need is a near-by wifi station... Which isn't too hard, but it would be awesome if WiFi devices (phones) had client that could receive as well. You and your friend could embed in a crowd and if the photographer is discovered, your friend's cell phone could be the backup. With the iphone, and other phones you could then automatically email images to others in near-real time...

The eyefi also somewhat supports GPS tagging too, which may help with authenticity.

(I am not affiliated with Eye-fi in anyway, other than having one on my wish-list)

I have the same problem. I came across the Eye-Fi recently and am seriously considering getting my parents one. It's basically an SD card with built-in wireless that auto offloads pics to the computer whenever it's in range of your access point.

See this is why we should have Wifi harddrive that you can easily access without opening your bags. Think about it the customs won't even have to stop anyone they can just leech all the data and check if you got something illegal.

So no long queues, no waiting, everyone is happy. We just have to wait for EyeFi to release a version slightly larger than 2GB..

I've done something similar using a wifi SD memory card that automatically uploads the pictures to your PC or favorite photo sharing site, like flickr, etc.

The Eye-Fi is a novel idea but getting a camera to stay on long enough has been a challenge, most have power save features that only let you select a minute or two. I suppose a way around this would be to wire something to press a button every 30 secs to keep it awake.
Being on a limited budget I purchased a $80 7MP Camera from Walmart and found that it had the option to stay on. Opened it up, soldered wires for power (3VDC) and two for the shutter control. A cheap PIR motion detector with a relay will close the connection and snap a picture. Bought a $15 mini tripod and removed the legs and mounted it to the ceiling. Everytime motion is detected the camera snaps a pic and the Eye-Fi transfers a high resolution jpeg to the PC via Wifi.

For the most part it works really good, other than the camera was too cheap to do wide angle, and had no focus control, so the images are blurry. Cameras that enclose the SD card in a metal chassis will present a challenge for range.
I think enough tinkering with other cameras will do the trick. When I called Eye-Fi tech support they never heard of anyone using their product for security and couldn't recommend a cheap, but good camera that will have the 'stay on' feature.