As usual, I'm behind on getting my latest weekly tip out.  There has simply been too much going on this week.

Steve Jobs announced the fourth-generation iPhone at the World Wide Developer's conference on Monday, which may be the most serious competition for Flip, as things stand... more in a minute.

Flip/Cisco announced a social collaboration platform and the "Prosumer Video" solution which includes a new, pro model of the Flip, to work in conjunction with a social collaboration platform called "Cisco Quad."  This is starting to take things in a new direction that I have long been anticipating -- a direction which I think motivated Cisco to acquire Flip in the first place -- which is videoconferencing with a Flip as the front end.

The new iPhone features a 3.5 inch screen - same as the Flip Slide, 16 GB of memory -- again, same as the Flip Slide, 720p video -- same again, and, oops, a price of $199 --$80 cheaper than the Flip Slide.  And this is an iPhone, with all those apps and functionality.  You will be able to do rudimentary editing on the phone itself.

Here's a link to a description of the iPhone, with some comments about its Flip-killing potential:

http://newteevee.com/2010/06/07/did-apples-iphone-4-just-kill-the-flip/

Here's Flip's announcement of a whole raft of business-oriented social collaboration products.  You need to scroll down to the bottom to read about Prosumer Video:

http://news.idg.no/cw/art.cfm?id=273A641B-1A64-67EA-E45BBBB2F7ED56D3

If the iPhone lives up to its promise, for Flip to stay competitive, they will need to drop the price of the Flip Slide, but more importantly, they need to capitalize on their strength -- Cisco networking solutions -- and get a consumer version of Prosumer Video out pronto.