Disposable camcorders

Some things don't change at all. When I was a kid, people had home movie cameras that were used to make movies that no one watched. In the seventies, when I studied filmmaking, we used the latest technology--Super 8 cameras, which had the 8 mm film in an easy to load cartridge. These cameras were quite popular because of the relative simplicity, and many people used them to make movies that no one watched.

Then we got camcorders, which were at first quite big and heavy, and we made home videos on full size video cartrdridges--movies that no one watched. Then in the nineties, we got digital video cameras, which are now very affordable; the tiny digital tape cartridges won't even play on anyone's VCR, so we've actually gone backwards. For a while, you could tape a home movie and pop it right into the VCR and watch it. It beat setting up the 8 mm film projector by a mile.

But the new, tiny digital video cameras took us right back to the dark ages. Speaking from firsthand experience, it's a lengthy and tedious process to digitally edit raw video footage, even using great software like iMovie. So I've got a big stack of digital video cartridges. Every once in a great while, when the family is really bored, we do fire up the video camera, plug it into the TV, and watch a bit. But like every previous incarnation of the home movie, you quickly get tired of watching from beginning to end and/or constantly fast forwarding.

Now, we have a company called Pure Digital Technologies that is selling disposable video cameras through the CVS drug store chain. There are several things that are remarkable about this.

• First, it's amazing that the technology has become so inexpensive that you can manufacture and distribute a throw away camera for $29.95, although it is designed for several uses. You shoot your video footage, drop the camera off at CVS, and come back in a couple of hours and get a DVD, ready to play. CVS returns the used camera to Pure Digital, which repackages it for another sale. The company expects to be able to recycle them several times.
• The neat thing is getting the movie on a DVD, which allows you to jump around, fast forward very quickly, and in general is a huge improvement over tapes of any kind. And the company does all the tedious work of transferring the movie clips to the DVD.
• Finally, who could have predicted, even two or three years ago, that a company could make money selling throw away video cameras. Even at the height of the dot-com madness, this idea would have been considered laughable.

The point of this is that as we move farther and farther into the Knowledge Economy and get farther away from the Manufacturing Economy, new opportunities continue to emerge consistently that are creating jobs and work opportunities that a Manufacturing Economy mindset could never predict. Communities and regions have to have economic development strategies in place that are flexible, futures oriented, and can be changed and modified quickly to sieze new opportunities. Wouldn't your community like to have the recycling and repackaging center that will process all those cameras? Somewhere in the U.S., a community just got a great mix of entry level and management jobs, and I bet they had a technology plan that let them sieze the opportunity.