This is not closely related to business planning or entrepreneurship (unless you take a broad view of startup requirements), but it seemed like a tip worth passing on.

David Pogue from the New York Times posted recently on the Flip Ultra video camera. Apparently it’s a “mega-hit,” though he’d never heard of it, and neither had I. I’ve asked around the office, and it seems like news to everyone.

So in case you haven’t heard… The Flip is a dead-simple camcorder with three buttons (Record, Play, Delete), built-in Flash memory, and a handy USB connection that flips out to the side. It looks like a toy, but the video quality is surprisingly good, especially in the kind of low-light situations where low-end video cameras typically fail. It’s the size of a small digital camera and costs $150. The resulting video is plenty good enough for small business use.

According to comScore’s presentation at the recent Search Engine Strategies conference, nearly 20% of Google search result pages now include some sort of “universal” content (video, news, maps, etc.) in addition to the standard ten blue links. Most common among these are video clips — so if your web activities do not include video activities, you may be missing out on an important path to mindshare.

Josh Cochrane
Director of Online Marketing
Palo Alto Software