At the Google party at Davos, I was enticed into doing the Flip dance with none less than Sir Tim Berners-Lee:
Another Sir Tim video from a session on social media. The first half of this 3:44 is him talking about the need for authority signals i social networks. In the middle, he takes pains to correct people who say that he invented the internet or created the web (no, he invented the web). The last half is his intriguing call for academic study of the web:
And, yes, it was a thrill to meet the man. I was wonderful seeing people come across him, spy his name tag, and gasp with glee and gratitude.
And they never end: Here’s the sixth day of videos from the aborted v-book edition of What Would Google Do?:
A touch dated now, here’s a video I made on my Flip a year ago arguing that it was the Googley way to do video because it serves the creation generation:
A very quick little video about Apple generosity that asks about other companies’:
On Peter Day’s always-informative business show on the BBC, Cisco’s John Chambers said earlier this month that a downturn is a chance to go into new lines of business. Buying the maker of the consumer hit video camera Flip is certainly is that. I think it could be genius. It’s about new ways to communicate easily, new networks. The Flip has many surprising uses.
Last year at Davos, I showed it to Kai Diekmann, editor of Bild, the giant tabloid (in spirit if not in paper size) in Germany, and he lunged for it, saying he simply had to have it. Bild had been doing amazing things with MMS on mobile phones, turnking all of Germany into paparazzi by having them send photos to the number 1414; Bild pays for photos it uses. You should use video, I said to Diekmann. We are, he said. But ahve you seen the Flip? I asked and pulled it out. This was that scene:
I know from Bild staffers that Dieckmann dispatched them to buy a bunch of Flips in the U.S. (they weren’t available in Europe) and out of that came a fascinating business and news move: Dieckmann went to another manufacturer and created a Bild-branded video camera just like the Flip. The paper offered them for sale for 69 Euros. In five weeks, he sold more than 21,000 of them. Note well that the software on the camera defaults to sending video to Bild. So now the paper has thousands of cameramen all over Germany. Here’s that story, recorded on my Flip from this year’s Davos:
