But the company seems to be in a rush to leave its Flip days behind it. The New York Times is reporting that as of yesterday, videos uploaded to FlipShare, the Flip’s video-sharing service, will expire after thirty days. That apparently includes videos already on the service, which means that anyone who uploaded videos to FlipShare that aren’t disposable needs to find a new home for them.

Here’s the e-mail the company sent to FlipShare owners this week:

Dear FlipShare user,

Thank you for your loyalty and support of Flip Video over the years.  In light of Cisco’s recent announcement regarding the future of the Flip business, we wanted to address your questions related to FlipShare software.

FlipShare desktop and mobile software will continue to be functional and supported for 2 ½ years (until 12/31/2013). However, we want to let you know the following:

• Friends and family can watch, download and save any video you have shared with them*
• Starting May 12, 2011, videos shared with an individual, group, Flip Channel or Twitter will only be available online for viewing and downloading for up to 30 days after being sent (the 30-day limit will also apply to videos shared previously)
• Videos shared on Facebook and YouTube as well as videos stored in FlipShare on your computer will not be impacted and do not have a 30-day limit

We will continue to provide technical support for both Flip video cameras and FlipShare until 12/31/2013. FAQs on these changes are also available at support.theflip.com/flipshare.

We hope you will continue to enjoy your Flip video camera and FlipShare.

The Flip Video team

*Video download requires approval by sender

Now, FlipShare is only one of many places you can put your Flip videos–and the FlipShare software also lets you upload them to Facebook and YouTube, neither of which are affected by the cut-off date. The new policy doesn’t turn the Flip into a doorstop, but it does make uploading stuff to FlipShare into an unappealing proposition–which is, presumably, the point; Cisco is trying to nudge people towards the exit. In the words of my grandma, it’s saying “Here’s your hat, what’s your hurry?“

It seems far too soon to be stripping the Flip of functionality that people thought they were getting when they bought it. And I don’t  see any explanation of this 30 day expiration policy on the Flip’s site. If it’s still selling Flips–and mentioning FlipShare.com as a selling point–shouldn’t people know before they buy?

The good news is that the company isn’t leaving current and prospective Flip owners entirely in the lurch: It will still provide support for Flips through December 31st, 2013, and FlipShare.com won’t shut down until then. That’s fair enough–nobody expects manufacturers to support defunct products forever. But by winding down FlipShare long before Flip recedes into history, it’s not doing much to improve what was already a strange and unfortunate fate for a great consumer electronics product.

While I’m linking to smart coverage of the Flipocalypse : Michael Mace points out that the emergence of smartphones that do good video didn’t have to render Flip irrelevant (he quotes me at the end, but I’d like his post even if he didn’t).

The restructuring will result in the elimination of 550 jobs. And it all seems to be sudden–or at least the company was briefing journalists just a couple of weeks ago on new Flips that it planned to introduce.

At first blush, it’s surprising to see Cisco retreat from an effort which it had spent hundreds of millions of dollars pursuing. Then again, when it bought Flip maker Pure Digital for $590 million two years ago, almost everyone who analyzed the deal wondered why it was spending so much on a product category that was even then turning into a smartphone feature. And while ūmi was cool, everyone I know who had an opinion on it thought it was too expensive–and it didn’t get that much cheaper even after a recent price cut. (Side note: It’s probably a bad idea to give your product a name that a typical American may not be able to figure out how to pronounce or type.)

The one thing tying together the news about Flip and ūmi is lousy timing. With Flip, I was willing to believe that the acquisition might be crazy like a fox–but no, we now know that Cisco spent a bundle of money to enter a market that was about to go away. Flip was once a very cool, very useful product, but if there was a secret plan to keep it relevant, the company never came close to executing it.

ūmi has the opposite problem: it’s way early into a business that doesn’t quite exist yet, and six months simply wasn’t anywhere near enough time to judge its success. I do think that HD Webcams for the living room are going to catch on big time, though, whether or not Cisco is in the game.

Lesson? You can be one of the most successful makers of enterprise technology products the world has ever known, but that doesn’t mean your instincts will carry over to the consumer market. They’re really different, and few companies have ever been successful in both.

Cisco made some announcements today that make it at least somewhat more likely that ūmi will show up soon in a living room near you. First, it knocked the price of the original version down from $599 to $499. Maybe more important, it slashed the price of monthly service from $24.99 to a more plausible $9.99. It also says it’s going to release a 720p version that will go for $399 and require less bandwidth. (3.5-Mbps up and down is recommended for the 1080p edition.) And it’ll offer free ūmi clients for Windows PCs and Macs so owners have more people to talk with.

I’m impressed with what I’ve seen of ūmi and think that consumer HD videoconferencing has a real future–using Cisco’s setup feels a bit like stepping into a distant living room in a way that old-style laptop videocalls and Apple’s FaceTime do not. Seems like the price might have to drop further, though, before any product in this category is a breakout hit. (For a total of $450, you can buy Logitech’s Revue Google TV box and TV Cam accessory, for 720P video calls with no service fee required–not as nice as ūmi at 108p, but fun.)

Back in April, networking kingpin Cisco and Aliph, maker of the stylish and sophisticated Jawbone headset, announced they were working together. The first result of their partnership is being announced today, and it’s a pretty obvious one: a version of Aliph’s Jawbone Icon Bluetooth headset that supports Cisco VoIP business phones.

The standard version of the Icon is available in six rather flashy versions with different colors and textures. The Cisco edition comes in a relatively subdued design in two colors–white and black–designed to complement the colors of the Cisco Bluetooth-enabled phones they’re bundled with. Otherwise, it’s got all the goodness of the standard version, including a small size that works without an earloop (although you can use one if you want, and otherwise adjust the fit using an array of bundled earpieces); NoiseAssassin technology which greatly reduces background noise; and MyTalk, a service that lets the headset talk to you to tell you about facts such as the battery level and permits the headset’s firmware to be updated.

Special software in the headset lets you use it with a Cisco phone or your mobile phone–or both at once–and Cisco says it’ll work with its Cius Android tablet once that’s available.

Cisco and Aliph say that this Jawbone is only their first collaboration–they have visions of melding headsets like the Icon with Cisco’s phones, videoconferencing equipment, and other gear in ways that essentially turns the headset into a tiny information appliance that you happen to wear in your ear. Should be interesting to see where it all leads…

Can setting up a Wi-Fi network ever be drop-dead easy for non-technical folks? Maybe not, but Cisco gives the problem its best shot with a new brand, Valet, that will co-exist with Cisco’s well known Linksys line, now being positioned as “enthusiast” products. Setting setup aside, Cisco has definitely come up with some nice Wi-Fi management software—but I wish there were a way to sell people Wi-Fi gear without removing the technical information that explains how one product differs from another.

At launch, the Valet line consists of three items: the $100 Valet and $150 Valet Plus Wi-Fi routers, and a $100 USB adapter. The somewhat Apple-esque packaging for the Valet router I tried out was covered with aspirational taglines such as “Home wireless made easy” and “Welcome to the new home wireless experience.”

The box was also free of most pesky specs, apart from the Wi-Fi Alliance logo showing certification for 802.11b/g/n. That at least told me that while the Valet does support the fastest Wi-Fi standard, it only supports it on the 2.4ghz band, which in many places is woefully overcrowded by signals from neighboring networks, Bluetooth devices, microwave ovens and some cordless phones.

The package also doesn’t say anything about the number of transmitting and receiving antennas, which also impacts performance. Cisco’s data sheets say the Valet has two of each, the minimum required for 802.11n certification, while the Valet Plus has a 2×3 transmitting/receiving antenna array; the Valet Plus also supports gigabit Ethernet, compared to the Valet’s 10/100 ethernet. Cisco says a lot of novice users are puzzled and put off by this sort of information – they’re satisfied just being told that, for example, the Valet Plus is faster than the Valet.

But inside the box, the Valet really does distinguish itself from other routers promising easy setup. Instead of a quick setup guide or CD, you get a USB flash drive and just three printed instructions telling you to insert the drive into a USB port on your computer (both Windows PCs and Macs are supported), run the Cisco Connect software on it, and follow the instructions. Now, that’s about as easy as it gets, if it works.

And I have no doubt it can work just like that on a new PC, or one that’s never been connected via Wi-Fi before.  But I tried it out on a four-month-old Lenovo notebook that had been connected to another network, and the first thing I got after running the software was a window asking whether I was sure the Wi-Fi on my notebook had been turned on.

Clicking around, I realized that Lenovo’s Wi-Fi utility was waiting to be reconnected to the previous network (even though that network had been disconnected). I had to clear out my old network profile from the Lenovo utility and then start all over again with the Cisco software before things could progress. The setup wizard said it might take five minutes, but it took more like 10 until I finally got a message saying I was connected to the Valet, but might not be connected to the Internet. If I wasn’t, the instructions said, I should disconnect and then reconnect my broadband modem and try again. In fact, that’s what I wound up doing, and after that I immediately hopped online to a secured network.

So much for no-hassle setup. I don’t think my experience will be unique since there are probably a lot of people out there who might consider a Valet to replace an aging 802.11b or g router and might run into similar issues. The problem is, just about every notebook vendor has their own Wi-Fi utility, and Cisco can’t possibly write software to deal with all of them.

That said, Cisco Connect’s usefulness isn’t just about setup—in fact, the best part of the whole experience was how easy it was to add other computers to the network (in my tests, an iMac and another Windows 7 notebook). That’s because the software not only creates settings such as network ID (mine was DizzyDove) and a strong encryption key to secure the network, but it saves them to the USB drive, so when you want to add a new computer, you simply plug the drive in to a free USB port and run the connection utility again. No worries about creating passwords that you then lose, coming up with a network name (or leaving a brand-name default that you might confuse with a neighbor’s Linksys). Adding another computer took only seconds, since no router setup was involved.

But wait, there’s more. Cisco Connect has a feature that lets you give guests Internet access without allowing them access to your computers (a feature more commonly associated with business routers that seems like a good idea for home users, too). There’s also a highly configurable parental controls feature (lots of routers have them, but this makes getting to them exceptionally easy). Finally, you can change the default network name and password directly from Cisco Connect—and, for more hands-on types, there’s a link to the browser-based interface that will be familiar to longtime Linksys customers who like to tinker with advanced settings.

Cisco Connect seems so useful I found myself wishing I had it to use with my more powerful, dual-band 802.11n Linksys router—but the software wouldn’t run without connecting to the Valet it accompanied. However, Linksys says it will put the same software (but for installation from a CD, without the USB key) in the newly reconfigured Linksys line that’s also launching. There’s the $80 E1000, which is essentially the same hardware-wise as the Valet; the $120 E2000, which has either-or dual band support (you get to pick between 2.4ghz and 5ghz 802.11n), a 2×3 antenna array, and gigabit Ethernet; and the $180 E3000, with support for simultaneous 2.4ghz and 5ghz 802.11n networks, two 2×3 antenna arrays, and gigabit Ethernet. (For Linux users, the E2100 offers the same hardware as the E2000.)