The Flip Flops: Smartphones Helped To Kill The Little Video Camera
The Flip SlideHD pocket video camera. Eric Risberg/AP hide caption
The Flip SlideHD pocket video camera.
Eric Risberg/APTwo years after paying $590 million to buy Pure Digital Technologies and its Flip video camera business, Cisco Systems is killing the Flip brand altogether.
It is, The Wall Street Journal says, "an admission that [Cisco's] multiyear campaign to build a consumer brand has largely failed."
Or, as Brian Sullivan writes on Fox Business' New Ideas blog, "in flopping on Flip, Cisco acknowledging what technology is already telling us," that digital and video cameras are "migrating into just one [device] — your phone."
Cisco said it's eliminating about 550 jobs with the shut down of Flip and other moves.
Some in the Twitterverse are mourning:
-- tommy george: I may be weird, but I kinda liked having a dedicated little video device. #RIP #flip
But others say it was inevitable:
-- Vinny La Barbera: It was only a matter of time before #iPhone / #Android made some technologies obsolete. RIP #Flip Camera.