AllThingsD » Flip camera

Cisco Kills the Flip Video Camera Business

Arik Hesseldahl — Tue, 12 Apr 2011 13:39:30 +0000

Cisco Systems today announced what it called a realignment of its consumer electronics business. The highlight, however, is that the Flip video camera business is being shuttered, and 550 people will lose their jobs. Cisco acquired Pure Digital, the company that makes the Flip line, in 2009 for $590 million.

At the time that Cisco acquired Pure Digital the Flip was flying high as the top-selling camcorder in the U.S., according to the research firm NPD Group, and by mid-2009 had clocked sales of about 2 million units. Stephen Baker, an analyst with NPD says on his blog that unit sales were essentially flat in 2010 and that the average selling price on a Flip camera rose by five dollars to $158. And though its hard to know what the gross margins are, Baker says Cisco’s Flip video unit was “far and away the leading consumer video camera company.” What probably did it in was holiday sales last year: Unit sales dropped by 19 percent versus 2009, though for that Baker blames “strategic marketing missteps,” rather than a drop in any underlying demand.

NPD numbers show the Flip maintaining its market share lead as recently as February of this year, with 21.6 percent of the market ahead of Sony which had 20.9 percent. Both saw their shares fall as Kodak saw sales of its Playsport and Playtouch video cameras pick up steam. Kodak boosted its share to 12.8 percent versus less that 5 percent a year ago.

The problem wasn’t the camcorder business. The problem was the iPhone. Months after Cisco’s purchase, Apple added video recording to the iPhone 3GS which went on to sell a million units during its first weekend on the market and 7.4 million units within a single quarter. Video recording is now so common on smartphones that it’s strange if a phone doesn’t do video, and at a quality that matches if not exceeds what a Flip can do. Given time, smartphones will be substantially better than Flip cameras, though again it’s hard to know what feature improvements were on the Flip camera roadmap.

Other changes announced by the networking giant: a plan to “refocus” its home networking business, the backbone of which was Linksys, the privately held home networking company it acquired in 2003 for $500 million in stock. Cisco says it wants more profits from that unit and wants it to be more closely tied to its core networking and infrastructure business.

Another change: The EOS business–essentially a software platform Cisco launched in 2009 that offered media companies a digital gateway into the home–is being gutted and its core video technology redeployed elsewhere within Cisco. Dan Scheinman, the unit’s general manager, Tweeted this morning that he had resigned from Cisco, saying the business had succeeded technically, but was about two years ahead of the market.

Cisco also said its ?mi consumer video conferencing product line–the one that had been the subject of the latest round of ads starring Ellen Page–will be integrated into its business telepresence products.

The reaction from investors has been tentatively positive. Cisco shares are up three cents to $17.50 this morning, though the price is still pretty close to a 52-week low. Cisco said it will take a $300 million restructuring charge.

Standard and Poor’s analyst Ari Bensinger quickly issued a short note reiterating his “Buy” rating on Cisco. “We see these moves as part of a new strategy to de-emphasize consumer-related products that have been dragging down profitability, and believe more announcements are on the way,” he wrote. “We are positive that CSCO is sharpening its focus on its core competency of routing and switching, which should see good growth opportunities as the industry migrates to the cloud.”

Here’s a two-year-old interview Kara Swisher conducted with former Pure Digital CEO Jonathan Kaplan, shortly after he had sold his company to Cisco. He didn’t stay long. Cisco announced his departure to “seek other opportunities” in February.

[ See post to watch video ]

Will New York Times Vet Saul Hansell Run AOL's New Robot Factory, or Something Less Ominous? Let's Ask Him.

Peter Kafka — Fri, 11 Dec 2009 17:19:05 +0000

For much of this year, AOL made a point of boasting about each and every traditional journalist it hired. Message: We’re dead serious about becoming a content company, not one that sells Internet access to people who don’t know any better.

These boasts grew less frequent in recent months as the company’s hiring binge drew to a close, then switched into reverse when AOL announced it would need to shed a third of its staff. Meanwhile, AOL’s plans to inject automation into its content factory freaked out both employees and outsiders.

So the company’s most recent hire, announced shortly before AOL (AOL) separated from Time Warner (TWX), may help soothe some frayed nerves: New York Times (NYT) veteran Saul Hansell, who will run AOL’s new Seed.com content-creation platform.

But what does that actually mean? Is Hansell going to be running “AOL’s News Borg,” as Gawker put it? Or something less ominous?

I talked to Hansell yesterday and the answer is…not really clear.

Hansell, who spent 17 years at the Times, can’t spell out exactly what he’s going to do at AOL because he’s not exactly sure himself. He says he reached out to AOL CEO Tim Armstrong when the paper announced its most recent round of buyouts in October, and then he and the company went about creating a job that made sense for him.

But beyond his new title, “programming director,” a lot of what Hansell will do at his new gig is do is up in the air. The positive spin: That’s okay because uncertainty is a way of life at a start-up and AOL is in many ways a company that has to reinvent itself on the fly, just like a start-up. You can fill in the less positive interpretation of this yourself.

Hansell does have some big-picture ideas about AOL’s ability to combine its audience, workforce, technology and ad sales to produce a next-generation publishing platform. And in the interview, he offers a very nice parable about visiting Amazon’s (AMZN) warehouse, where technology and humans coexist quite nicely.

Okay. But what about the robots he’s supposed to be in charge of? “I don’t know anything about the robots,” Hansell says. “I haven’t gotten there.”

Anyway, Hansell was a good sport about letting me shove a Flip camera very close to his face, and he can tell his story much better than I can. So here you go:

[ See post to watch video ]

EBay CEO Steps Behind the Camera

Geoffrey A. Fowler — Fri, 11 Sep 2009 23:03:47 +0000

Tech CEOs spend a lot of time taking questions in front of the camera. Lately, eBay’s (EBAY) top boss John Donahoe has been spending some time behind one.

Amid a turnaround effort at eBay’s online marketplace, he has been meeting with the company’s merchants and taping the conversations with a Flip camcorder. He’s posted many of these to a video blog for eBay’s internal employees.

Recently one interview with an eBay merchant named Quick Ship Electronics even made its way to YouTube.

Read the rest of this post on the original site

Walt Mossberg Interview on C-SPAN

Walt Mossberg — Sat, 25 Jul 2009 00:02:03 +0000

Walt Mossberg discusses his Personal Technology column for The Wall Street Journal with C-SPAN’s Brian Lamb on Sunday, July 19, 2009.

How to Add Color to a Kindle: Pixel Qi's Cheap Screens

Peter Kafka — Tue, 23 Jun 2009 10:00:30 +0000

Amazon’s (AMZN) Kindle gets many plaudits, but it also gets one consistent criticism: Why can’t it come with a color screen?

It can, say the folks at Pixel Qi, a start-up based in Silicon Valley and Taiwan: It could use the cheap, lightweight color screens that we’re going to make.

Pixel Qi is the brainchild of Mary Lou Jepsen, who was best known as the CTO at the One Laptop Per Child project that makes supercheap laptops for kids in dirt-poor nations. Her new company has a similar thrust with a different goal: Produce cheap color screens that can be used in supercheap “netbooks” or in Kindle-like devices.

Jepsen says she can pull this off and create screens that cost less than the E-Ink ones used in Kindles and other devices like Sony’s (SNE) Reader because she’s using LCD technology, which has an existing industrial infrastructure to support it.

Meanwhile, she says, E-Ink screens will struggle to incorporate color because the only way to do that is to put a color layer above the existing monochrome screen, which will end up making the screen harder to read.

Almost all of these technology claims are impossible for a knuckle-dragger like me to assess, but I will note that I’ve heard other companies working on E-Ink-based readers make the same argument about the difficulty that color poses.

I’m still not convinced that color makes a Kindle or a Kindle-like device that much more successful. I know that the publishing industry wants it, but that has as least as much to do with the business model that industry types think that color can sustain as with anything else. Perhaps readers, the kinds of readers who spring for a reading device that doesn’t make phone calls, will be fine with black and white.

Recall that audiophiles spent years complaining, accurately, that MP3 players like Apple’s (AAPL) iPod produced severely degraded sound. Turns out no one cared. Or at least not enough to outweigh the iPod’s other benefits.

But assuming that the netbook/tablet trend has legs, there should still be a market for the screen that Jepsen says she can make and get on the market early next year.

Recently I sat down with Pixel Qi chief operating officer John Ryan, who happens to be married to Jepsen and who walked me through the company’s pitch. We tried our best to show off the demo screens, but it’s the kind of thing that you really need to see in person; even if I wasn’t using a Flip camera, I think this would be difficult to capture. But Ryan was a good sport about it, and although you can’t see the screens that well, you can get a good glimpse of Central Park during a rare bit of sun.

[ See post to watch video ]

The iPhone From 1983, a Nintendo Bong and a Really Big TV

Peter Kafka — Fri, 05 Dec 2008 20:20:31 +0000

What if Apple had made the first iPhone in 1983? What if you could turn a Nintendo controller into a bong? What would a 103-inch TV look like?

Theoretical questions no longer. At least for people who visit New York’s Lower East Side for the next few days.

That’s where Gizmodo, Gawker Media’s crazily successful gadget blog, has set up a gallery of odd, cool and awesome stuff. For a very limited time–it opened on Thursday and it runs through this Sunday.

Head Gizmodo geek Brian Lam gave me a tour of the gallery yesterday, and it’s great fun: In addition to the iPhone prototype, there’s a handful of other cool things from Apple (AAPL), including a 20th anniversary edition Mac and a prototype of an Apple Tablet machine that never saw the light of day.

So if you’re at all interested in gadgets, or the people who are, drop on by 151 Orchard Street. It’s free, but they’re happy to accept Toys For Tots donations (which also qualifies you for some cool giveaways).

If you can’t make it, you can see still images on Brian’s site, or you can check out my first attempt at Web video-making with the mandatory All Things Digital Flip camera. I’ve added a few subtitles to compensate for the fact that Brian is soft-spoken and the dudes playing “Call of Duty” in the gallery were loud. The fact that the camera is shaky and that the camera-holder says “awesome” a lot is entirely my fault.

[Image Credit: Gizmodo]

[ See post to watch video ]