RIP Flip, the fridge is here...

In a presentation at Catalyst a few years ago, Guy Kawasaki talked about the ice market. The ice market long ago consisted of companies that cut up and shipped ice to consumers. This was big and expensive, and required a ship and a long trip to an area where there was lots of ice. As technology improved, it became possible to make ice in a giant warehouse, rather than taking a ship to a very cold climate. As you can imagine, this was vastly simpler, cheaper, and rarely involved sinking to the bottom of the ocean due to a particularly bad storm... Eventually the ice house gave way to the home refrigerator, which was again cheaper and easier. The point? Technology marches on and old ways of doing business die.

The latest casualty is the Flip video camera. For years video cameras have been getting smaller and cheaper. The Flip was an innovative camera that made cheap and "good enough" the standard for personal video. Rather than a big camera with a big zoom lens and tape, the flip was small, portable and shot "good enough" video for people to share. The flip has effectively killed off the bottom of the consumer video camera market, just like the icehouse killed off the ship ice from alaska business...

And then smartphones got video cameras, and the idea of a standalone low end video camera made about as much sense as still having your ice delivered by the local icehouse. Not only was it cheaper (included in the phone you already own or just bought) but it was better. Want to upload it to youtube while you are on the go? The phone will, but the flip? Not unless you plug it into your computer. And just like the home refrigerator killed off the icehouse, the smartphone killed off the flip.

Cisco has taken a lot of grief for this move, and at first glance I think rightly so. They paid nearly $600 Million for the Flip just a few years ago, and now they are shutting the whole business down. But I think the people who claim this is too soon are using bad math. In that article, it is claimed that the market for the flip is somehow 1 billion people. But the very fact that those 1 billion people are the same people that don't want, or cannot afford a smartphone is exactly the problem. Those are the same people that are unlikely to spend money on a brand new video camera. They might already own an older one that is "good enough" or they may find that an older flip or other camera is cheaper on ebay or they might look at it as something that they aren't interested in spending money on.

The point is this: It is a contracting market no matter how you look at it, and serving a rapidly shrinking market (these same people probably argued that not everyone had a fridge at home and there was still a need for an icehouse) is not a good business model. Cisco is making the right move by cutting their losses right now, even though it's a tough decision.

The consumer video camera market as a whole is one that I believe will go way in the face of DSLR's with interchangeable lenses that shoot HD video. For the casual crowd the smartphone meets the need. For the enthusiast crowd the DSLR offers far more than a fixed lens video camera, and the big gaping hole of audio is being remedied fast (Better audio accessories are THE hot accessory for the DSLR market right now). Even some pros are using DSLR's (mostly Canon) to do some pretty impressive projects. RIP consumer video cameras, you have become the icehouse. Viva la iPhone!

Joel

ShadeTree

A while back Mark with BigBadCollab gave us a demo of ShadeTree. ShadeTree is a platform being developed that seeks to integrate church members into church life through social networking, spiritual formation, etc.

In some ways ShadeTree could lead to a full blown ChMS at some point, but right now it's really meant to augment what you currently have in place. I was privileged to look "behind the scenes" a bit with a beta church, to see how they are working on using ShadeTree.

Of most interest to us was the Spiritual Formation elements of ShadeTree, and how we can utilize it to help our people easily identify what their next steps are. These steps might be books, sermons, conferences, serving, attending events or whatever else the church establishes. The important thing is the front end survey that helps identify where each individual is, and what resources would be the most beneficial next steps for that individual.

ShadeTree is designed to be fully "skinnable" so that it fits within your website and design philosophies and looks like your church, rather than a generic look. I'm really excited about the platform as a way to give our people access to a path of spiritual formation. This is an area where HDC currently doesn't do a great job, and I really think ShadeTree can help us. The biggest issue will be figuring out Arena integration with the data, but the beautiful thing is that the church working on this with BigBadCollab is an Arena church, so I know they share that desire.

ShadeTree also does social networking. This is where I get less excited. I do believe that the church needs to be involved in social networking, but I don't agree with Mark that the church should be the place where it happens. To me, our people are already on Facebook, we should work to have a great facebook presence and to see how we can best integrate our members church and unchurched lives, allowing their relational networks to see their commitment to Christ. IMHO, if we create our own playground, we lose important opportunities to model our lives to those of our friends who do not know God.

It seems like there are a lot of products that try to integrate the church and social networking, but most of them seem to want to create an isolated sandbox away from "the world" and that isn't an viewpoint I share. That doesn't mean that I'm right though, only time will tell. Perhaps there is a sweet spot of integration between the two that I haven't seen yet.

Technologically ShadeTree is based on the LAMP stack, Linux Apach MySQL PhP, which I absolutely love. The cool thing about this is that all of those products are opensource, and ShadeTree is being developed as an opensource solution. This means that, once available, your church can download and test and even deploy ShadeTree for free. Awesome. If you need help, pay BigBadCollab and they will help you get it all running.

Good guys making good products to further God's kingdom at the lowest possible cost for the churches involved. Awesome stuff all the way around. If I've piqued your interest, click the ShadeTree link at the top and signup for more info when ShadeTree is released.

Joel