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The Tragic Death of the Flip

pogue.blogs.nytimes.com

41–50 of 66 posts

Re: The Tragic Death of the Flip

#41
Phil Torrone at Make made a passionate if somewhat optimistic call to Cisco to open source the Flip tech now it's being killed off:

http://blog.makezine.com/archive/2011/04/rip-flip-camera-hey...

Although if it was a technology acquisition, as TFA speculates, they're even less likely to do that.

Re: The Tragic Death of the Flip

#43
post #17

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Forget about live, I'd buy a flip that had the ability to automatically upload its videos whenever it's in a hotspot and save to card when it isn't.

Your prayers have been answered -- Eye-Fi SD cards do just that. Stick one in a digicam, and you're good to go. http://www.eye.fi/products/mobilex2

As a bonus, you get a camera with far higher image quality and better ergonomics than a Flip cam.

Re: The Tragic Death of the Flip

#46
I'm kind of curious why, if they were profitable as this seems to imply, they wouldn't just spin it off as a subsidiary. If it wasn't profitable, perhaps they tried to sell it and failed.

One of the theories for shutting this down that I've heard is that having consumer electronics companies lumped in with the rest of the company lowers the margins, which is a bad thing in the eyes of Wall Street analysts. Cisco stock price took a huge beating (20%) this past quarter when their margins dropped by a couple percentage points, and I believe they're scrambling to get those numbers back up. Seems they're "reorganizing" Linksys as well, probably to get margins up there as well.

Re: The Tragic Death of the Flip

#47

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Do you also think we'd be better off without the many van Gogh paintings that didn't sell during his lifetime?

Terrible argument - Flip cameras aren't suddenly going to become valuable in 200 years. Or 50. Or 2.

I'm not trying to argue, I was simply trying to discover how much he thought popularity matters. If he figured van Gogh was unimportant, it'd be pointless to try to convince him that sometimes having companies doing interesting things is worthwhile.

(On another note, is Mac OS 9 valuable now? Will it become more valuable eventually? Should Apple just have closed shop since they had a small marketshare and a product that isn't valuable now? Could the lessons learned from the Newton have possibly been applied to make some other kind of consumer device?)

Re: The Tragic Death of the Flip

#48
post #2

This article doesn't mention it directly, but after reading the bit about the FlipLive makes this more likely to me: the wrong people in Cisco finally realized what Flip might be able to do. Which is replace Cisco's teleconferencing enterprise business. And doing so even a little bit would probably cost them a pretty penny, so they're dumping it to protect what they see as their "core" business.

There was never any risk of v1 of FlipLive cannibalizing the teleconferencing business - it was one-way only - no way for the 'viewers' to send a stream back to the publisher's camera. BTW - I wrote some of web software (the ActionScript) for FlipLive.

The whole premise of Cisco's teleconferencing business is maintaining the illusion that that it has to be expensive to do -- which isn't true for 80% of the market at least.

Cisco won't make billions on peddling their stuff to the 20% of the market who has a few million to drop on a telepresence system.

Re: The Tragic Death of the Flip

#49
post #5

There’s a second part of the tragedy, too, something that nobody knows. That new Flip that the product manager showed me was astonishing. It was called FlipLive, and it added one powerful new feature to the standard Flip: live broadcasting to the Internet. That is, when you’re in a Wi-Fi hot spot, the entire world can see what you’re filming. You can post a link to Twitter or Facebook, or send an e-mail link to frien…

FlipLive is kinda awesome, but as you said... when you’re in a Wi-Fi hot spot ... Personally, I cannot think of too many occasions where the average person is: 1)in range of wifi, 2) has something worth sharing with an audience who are available there and then, 3) wouldnt rather use Skype video conferencing so as to get two-way communications. There are a few, but I'm not sure there's enough.

Most modern smartphones have the ability to turn into a wifi hotspot.

Re: The Tragic Death of the Flip

#50
post #14

Earlier quoted context omitted.

More than 40 hours of video uploaded to youtube every second of every day. A good portion of it is people just sitting in their bedroom talking about all the stupid shit they just bought at Target. And if they could record and upload in one easy step, that's a huge market right there.

Yes, but they didnt have to spend $200 on a new device to do it - they just used the camera built into their $400 laptop

This is not about the 2million people who already do this.

It's about the 2billion that don't and don't have a $400 laptop.

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