Flip video recorders were all the rage, what, a few months ago? Now, they are toast. The New York Times on it here:
http://www.nytimes.com/2011/04/13/technology/13flip.html?_r=1&ref=business
The story is quite remarkable. Flip was founded by two guys in San Francisco in 2007. In 2009, they sold to Cisco for $590 million. Now, in 2011, Cisco has shut the product down.
The reason? Smartphones. They are replacing one gadget after another. As I ponder my own iPhone, for me it has replaced:
- cameras
- video recorders
- GPS devices
- clock radios
- white noise machines
- kitchen weather stations
- dictionaries (ok, not a gadget)
And it does a whole lot of things that no gadget ever did, like show me in an instant whether my flight's on time or show me discounts near my current location.
Not everybody carries a smartphone yet, but they will. Smartphone usage is supposed to hit 50% in the U.S. by the end of the year. Ten years from now - maybe five - teenagers will marvel that their parents ever lived in a time when they left home without a computer.
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