One item that caught my eye at the Sony Consumer Electronics show on the weekend – and probably because it was placed on its own stand and punched up with renaissance lighting – was the GC1 Net Sharing Cam.

True technophiles will balk at it because it doesn’t have the latest subset of flimflams and can’t run its groobyplumpet at 90 floms per second. What it DOES do is take Internet-ready compressed video that you can upload to YouTube, Facebook, etc. using the cam’s built-in software. Because the software is on-board, you can take it to a friend’s house after a wild night at the wherever (the lifestyle pics on the display seem to clearly suggest “BAR”), and just jack the thing into your friend’s machine without having to download and install software from the Sony Style site.

Let’s face it: a lot of so-called consumer devices come with too many bells and whistles for Joe Average to wrap his mind around. i totally dig the idea of an easy-to-use cam that’s all prepped for you to just upload your stupid vids of cats playing floor hockey and cigarette-smoking babies to whatever online service is en vogue this week. How much effort should you really have to expend to share a video of yourself lip-synching to Careless Whisper in your underpants?

i like the idea of this device. i can’t actually vouch for it because i haven’t used it, but the concept of dumbing down electronics for increasingly dumb end usage makes perfect sense to me.

Ryan Henson Creighton is a Toronto-based game developer, and founder of Untold Entertainment Inc., specializing in online games for kids, teens, tweens and preschoolers.

Ryan Henson Creighton

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