Photo books are replacing 4x6 prints as the most important products in the printing business. Photo: Shutterfly.

Photo site offers lens into the post-print world.

At lunch on a recent afternoon in Silicon Valley, Shutterfly CEO Jeffrey Housenbold is remarkably upbeat, considering the miserable year the overall photo business is having.

Almost any way you slice it, people are making fewer glossy prints in a rough economy. The numbers are off for at-home printing (down 2%), photo-counter printing (down 6%) and kiosk printing (down 12%), according to the Photo Marketing Association. The only big growth category? The under-the-table printing that people do for free at work. (That’s up 42%.)

Fortunately for Housenbold the photo recession hasn’t hit online photo finishers like Shutterfly (SFLY) as hard as some other parts of the industry. In fact, Shutterfly and rivals like Eastman Kodak’s (EK) Kodak Gallery and Hewlett-Packard’s (HPQ) Snapfish are still growing – partly because they’ve embraced ideas like photo books, social networks and smartphones to push their business beyond the old-fashioned glossy print. More

With the launch of the Flip video camera in May 2007, the camcorder market has never been the same. Flip brought video creation and sharing to the masses, which meant even more footage of cats riding skateboards. (We can't thank them enough for that.)

Consumers embraced the convenience, simplicity, portability, and affordability of Flip's "point and shoot" video camera. It has few buttons, records video on an internal chip, and uploads footage to a computer through a USB key that "flips" out of the camera. Software loaded on the device transfers clips seamlessly to the Web. Models start at $150.

Soon the device was grabbing market share from Sony (SNE) and JVC — more than two million of the cameras have been sold — and earlier this year networking giant Cisco (CSCO) snapped up Flip maker Pure Digital for $590 million.

But there's a new rival on the scene: Apple iPhone 3GS, introduced in early June, boasts a video capture function. And some technophiles are asking if Flip's days as the No. 1 pocket video recorder are numbered. More