The Flip is dead, long live the FlipLive

We covered news of Cisco deciding to kill off the Flip camcorder yesterday, and it seems that if Cisco did not pull the plug on what was the perfect portable casual camcorder device, the world would have had at least one last hurrah in the form of the FlipLive (as you can see above, image courtesy of Gizmodo), at least that is what New York Times’ David Pogue said today.

FlipLive would enable users to post links to their live video stream to Twitter, Facebook or e-mail, and that alone would have huge ramfications since it can be viewed by virtually anyone on the planet who are connected to you some way or another through one of those social networking channels.

This would put Apple’s FaceTime live video chats to sword, since it offers a superior resolution of 1,280 x 720 compared to just VGA quality. In fact, the Flip division wasn’t even bleeding money but was profitable, being the top camcorder Stateside after capturing 21.6% of the market.

Publisher’s note: I’m curious to know why Cisco didn’t try to sell this unit, or do something a bit productive with it, instead of just shutting it down. Maybe it was considered as unimportant, but the buy did cost Cisco $590M. (Hubert Nguyen)