Flip Video
The pocket camcorder of the early YouTube era. Just press record, flip out the USB arm, plug into your computer — that was the whole idea. Barely any buttons, cheap, and it became the best-selling camcorder in America before its own parent company killed it.
Pure Digital Technologies launched its one-button pocket camcorder on May 1, 2006 — renamed Flip Video a year later — with a simple pitch: forget everything about complicated camcorders. Just a record button, and a flip-out USB arm that plugged straight into your computer. Cheap, tiny, and it worked — "simple to shoot, simple to share."
The Flip Ultra arrived September 12, 2007, and something clicked. It became the best-selling camcorder on Amazon and captured about 13% of the camcorder market; by 2008, the Flip was the best-selling camcorder in the USA. The pocket-sized Mino arrived in June 2008, then HD versions, all riding the same wave: you didn't need to understand cameras to use one, and YouTube's upload page made sense of what you'd shot. Every family vacation, garage band, and dorm-room sketch suddenly had a dedicated little recorder.
Cisco Systems bought Pure Digital on May 21, 2009, for about $590 million in stock. And then, on April 12, 2011 — while the cameras were still selling strongly — Cisco abruptly announced it was exiting its consumer business and killed the Flip entirely. Tech critic David Pogue noted at the time that smartphones were still only a small fraction of worldwide phone sales; the smartphone didn't kill the Flip so much as Cisco did. Though soon enough, the phone in everyone's pocket would have finished the job anyway — and the little camcorder that taught a generation to hit record became a drawer-bound relic almost overnight.
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