Flip just got sold.  

Pure Digital, an eight year old, one hundred person company in San Francisco was bought by Cisco (an Ogilvy client) for $590 million in stock.  As the New York Times notes, this is an amazing success story in a gloomy tech world. 

Why was it so successful so quickly?

I got a Flip for Christmas, and it is indeed a groovy little contraption.  There are a couple of reasons that it has taken off.  It is single use.  The opposite of the iPhone, it does one thing very well – shoots high def video quickly, easily and portably.  It also has a super minimal design, with just a few simple buttons.  It fits in my jeans pocket so I take it everywhere.

It’s designed around a well-understood audience:  the Youtuber.

Just like your first Walkman changed the way you listen to music, this changes the way you think about video and, if you think hard enough about it, the way you remember things. 

It also has implications for Planning. 

I remember when the first cheap, handheld camcorders came out in the early nineties, it was something of a mini revolution for Planning.  The BMP Planning Department proudly bought one.  The big change was that you could do their own filming without the hassle and intimidation of a film crew, with their big, pointy camera, interrogation lights and so on.  After two minutes, subjects forgot the camera was there,  and so they talked much more naturally.  It was the first step in anthropological style research that has become so influential. 

The Flip is a leap forward.  Every planner should have one.  The change when you carry a Flip is that you don’t think of shooting footage as a special mission, it’s just something you do as in the course of your daily life.  (Uploading is just as easy – there’s a built in USB plug.)

Having a recording device with you makes you think all the time about what’s worth recording.  It makes you much more likely to do an on-the-fly interview, for example. 

Eventually, subtly, that changes the way in which planners think.  You’re always ‘on’.  It reminds you that all observations are useful at some level.  Not just video, but articles, conversations, any sort of artifact.

I once heard Adam Lury, of HHCL, that the best research he did was eavesdropping on conversations on the bus.  There’ s some truth to that.

Get out and get filming!