Kodak Deletes Aunt Minnie

My reaction upon hearing that Kodak (NYSE: EK) was selling its AuntMinnie.com site last night was a lot like running into a strange face at a family reunion. Who knew that Kodak had an Aunt Minnie? When was she invited? Who is she, exactly?

Naturally I went to check the site to see what Kodak was unloading on IMV, a privately held market research and consulting firm. Was it an edgy family-themed photo site to complement Kodak's popular Ofoto destination? Was it a website spurred by the company's long-standing relationship with Disney (NYSE: DIS) as its official imaging sponsor?

Not even close. With a "radiology decisions start here" tagline, it wasn't exactly what I was expecting until I realized that Kodak's health-care industry imaging business is a $2.4 billion contributor to the company's annual top line.

So it dawned on me why I had never heard of the site as I checked out the intuitive site's community, research, classifieds, and job board features. I'm not a radiologist, nor do I play one on TV. Yet most of the site's 130,000 active members obviously have a keen interest in health imaging. So why give up the site, Kodak? It clearly has a captive audience that a health-care player like Kodak would love to get to know a little better.

Kodak is trying hard to make itself relevant in the age of digital photography. It has suffered plenty, including getting kicked out of the Dow Jones Industrial Average last year, along with fading giants AT&T (NYSE: T) and International Paper (NYSE: IP).

Digital cameras have given budding photographers the ability to print out only the shots worth keeping in a film-free world, but Kodak is surviving. Beyond Ofoto, even rival Snapfish uses Kodak paper for its rendered prints. That's why a company that has embraced the Internet -- a necessary strategy when others such as Shutterfly and Hewlett-Packard's (NYSE: HPQ) HP Photo are carving out slices in digital photography services -- shouldn't be letting an asset like AuntMinnie.com go in the lucrative health imaging market. Bad call, Kodak. Next time go for a second opinion. The family reunion was about to start getting exciting, too.

Do you still use film cameras, or are you exclusively one with the digital movement? Who makes the best digital cameras out there? Are all memory and storage devices the same? All this and more -- in the Photography discussion board. Only on Fool.com.

Longtime Fool contributor Rick Munarriz has never tried to shake it like a Polaroid picture. He does own shares in Disney. He is also part of the Rule Breakers newsletter research team, seeking out tomorrow's ultimate growth stocks a day early.