the dream flip ultra. - utilize your me.dm

For me the flip ultra is a great half way house between getting an interview and not, taking video quickly at a reasonable framerate of 30fps and 640×480 with fairly decent colours and very little shearing of the picture when moving. It is a great little webclip camera. But it could be so much more. If the next version of the flip had wifi and a number of services built into the firmware at bootup we could see a real explosion in video conversations.

Image by jeffisageek via Flickr

Imagine having the ability to record a clip and have the video stream up to a backend service via an open wifi - even make the camera so smart that it deals with all that side of things (not sure about how you go about doing auth of course and not being secure) - the perfect flip for me would be one that can shoot video and at the same time either stream to seesmic or a variety of other services.

Seesmic came to mind first because of the big red recording button in the actual recorder in the site. Although i love my n95 i find myself annoyed by the time crunch in actually getting it to the record mode phase where as a flip is literally just a side slip of the power button away. Adding wifi to the flip is obviously going to put up the price a little and add a whole dimension of possible problems but i think if you keep to the simple practice and ideals that the original did you could make it work.

Imagine being able to give these out at a conference, branded to people so they could record opinion about their time at the event, give the people the tools to do it and make it easy and people will use them. I'm not sure if you could make the system two way so you could watch the responses to your videos but if you could that opens up the idea more so. You could have private one to one cameras for loved ones that allow them to record videos send to a secure point on the internet and have any replies sent back to them when they are near an open network. Or maybe some kind of integrated monthly rental for a direct secure connection to retrieve it.