Arik Hesseldahl in D9 on June 1, 2011 at 10:17 am PT
Jonathan Kaplan still doesn’t know exactly why Cisco Systems opted to shut down its Flip Digital video camera unit rather than selling it. But he has a pretty good guess.
Arik Hesseldahl in Enterprise on April 12, 2011 at 4:38 pm PT
Cisco Systems always seemed a strange owner for Pure Digital, the company that made the Flip video camera. The biggest question left over from Cisco’s announcement that it will shut the Flip business down is this: Why didn’t Cisco try to sell it to someone else?
Kara Swisher in News on April 12, 2011 at 1:08 pm PT
Right after BoomTown heard the sad news this morning that Cisco was jettisoning its Flip digital video camera division–part of a transparent effort to assure Wall Street that it was no longer serious about its wacky foray into the consumer market–I lobbed in a call to its founder Jonathan Kaplan to get him on video talking about the loss.
The Flip, of course, has been my go-to tool to harass and annoy Silicon Valley moguls, since it appeared on the scene many years ago. The technique for the simple device was to essentially stick it up someone’s nose until they cried “Uncle!” and told me what I wanted to know.
Arik Hesseldahl in Enterprise on April 12, 2011 at 6:39 am PT
Cisco is shaking up its consumer business. First on the list of things to go? The Flip video camera.
Arik Hesseldahl in Enterprise on April 6, 2011 at 7:48 am PT
Cisco CEO John Chambers promises changes, but problems at the networking giant run deep.
News Byte
Arik Hesseldahl in Enterprise on February 10, 2011 at 5:30 pm PT
Cisco Systems announced that Jonathan Kaplan, SVP and GM of its consumer products unit and the former CEO of Pure Digital, the company behind the Flip line of digital video cameras,
is leaving the company. The Consumer Business Group will now report to Marthin De Beer, who also heads the TelePresence and Emerging Technologies groups. The move comes a day after Cisco reported earnings that beat the expectations of analysts, but which included a disappointing forecast that sent Cisco shares down by more than 14 percent today.
Voices
Ty McMahan, Reporter, The Wall Street Journal in News on July 27, 2010 at 12:38 pm PT
Steamboat Ventures Managing Director Scott Hilleboe admits that investing in video technologies is a bit frenzied these days.
“The short-term horizon, it’s like the wild, wild west,” Hilleboe said. “The growth of online video is causing a land grab.”
Kara Swisher in News on April 28, 2010 at 8:40 am PT
Today at a partner event, Cisco will unveil a wide-ranging collaboration with Aliph–a San Francisco start-up that is famous for its noise-cancelling Jawbone Bluetooth mobile headset–to deploy its software and device in its IP phones in the enterprise.
It is a big win for Aliph, since the networking giant is a dominant player in the arena to provide telephony solutions to businesses, part of its Voice and Unified Communications division.
The idea, said sources, is to use the Jawbone device and the software that manages it to allow workers to move around an office and have the call move with them, echoing increasingly mobile consumer behavior.
Kara Swisher in News on March 12, 2010 at 9:00 am PT
Earlier this week, BoomTown had lunch with Michelangelo “Mike” Volpi, the high-profile tech exec who turned into a VC recently at Index Ventures.
We also did a video interview about his new life as a an investor, based in London, although Volpi did manage to leave out the big news.
That would be a just-inked $25 million investment by Index in wireless home music system maker Sonos, as well as a new board seat there for Volpi.
Kara Swisher in News on March 9, 2010 at 8:04 am PT
In a highly hyped announcement, Cisco today unveiled a new version of its key routing system, which the networking giant said has a dozen times the traffic capacity of competitors and three times as much as the company’s previous version.
Cisco’s CEO John Chambers said the CRS-3 Carrier Routing System is aimed at the huge growth in video on the Internet, a trend that has also caused increasing slowdowns.
Cisco claimed the system could deliver all the movies ever made in just a few minutes or allow everyone in China to make a video phone call at once.
