A couple of weeks after mentioning The Flip I finally got my grubby little hands on one. I went to the European launch this evening and came out with one for free (and a lot of beer mats). Nice little event. No hard sell, great venue (The Soho Hotel) and free food and drink. I would have been impressed if they hadn’t thrown free cameras at everyone…
I did a short(ish) unboxing video:
And had a conversation about the thing on Seesmic and Twitter. I also threw some FLIP video up on YouTube. You can see it here, but the built in software (and by built in I actually mean built into the device which is handy) seems to have over compressed the video. The sound especially is weird. I just reviewed the raw file in fullscreen and its actually very impressive considering the price of the camera.
I’ll take it along to tomorrow’s Tuttle if anyone wants to have a play with it.
I’ll be writing more about it and have some very particular ideas in mind in how to use it, but for now I need a coffee and am weirded out by using a white Macbook (mine is in for repair at the Apple store).
Once I get all my kit back I’ll really put the thing through its paces, but for now I’m quietly impressed.
The video does a great job of making the audience sit upright, but who is that audience? America? Perhaps. The presentation was originally for only 150 teachers in Colorado. So, the West? Certainly.
There’s a jolt around the 45 second mark when we’re thrown back to 1900 and Great Britain was the centre of the world. Do You Know? Asks questions in order to show that we have some work to do if we’re not going to get left behind again and pushed further back to become a footnote in someone else’s history.
It’s the ’someone else’ aspect of the presentation that alarms me more than the statistics.
The overwhelming message as I hear it is that the near future is going to be a seriously interesting place to spend our time. For others, however, it’s all about not being swept away by India and China. I prefer to take the broader view that it’s remarkable that the human race is pushing forwards so quickly, but if India and China are going to be pioneering so much of that next frontier then we need to find a way to move our insular 20th century burdened brains towards a 21st century global perspective.
It’s not them and us anymore. It’s simply us.
Note: The randomly chosen frame that YouTube choose to represent the video speaks volumes. MySpace? No mention of Facebook at all.
I’m still hovering around the purchase of a PS£ and GTA IV. I’m actually looking for a way to justify getting the game. I saw this a couple of days ago on Ivan’s blog which reminded me of something I saw in Borders the week the game was released:
