By Michael Santo
Editor-in-Chief, RealTechNews

I wrote about the Flip Mino when it was first introduced in June. It was a smaller addition to the Flip Video line, 40% smaller than the Ultra series, with a rechargeable battery and 60 minutes of recording capacity. Well, now you can completely personalize the Mino as well, creating just about any design you can think of, prior to ordering from the Flip site. The program is called “Now Playing: You.”

Flips have become extremely popular, doing what they do and doing it well, in a pocketable form. In fact, according to NPD the Flip series is now sits at #1 and #3 in their latest rankings for camcorder sales.

What Flip is doing is similar to what Microsoft did when it launched Zune Originals last year. Flip has hundreds of pre-made designs, or they have a pattern generator so you can create your own. Or you can start with your own image.

They’ve also teamed with CafePress, an online store where people can create their own designs for products and sell them. At the time of this writing, there appear to already be 79 designs available at CafePress.

An emailed press release said:

“We created the Flip Mino to be a fun and simple way for people to share their stories with video. And now they can express themselves not only with the videos they record, but the camcorders they use,” said Pure Digital’s Chairperson and CEO, Jonathan Kaplan. “We see this as the new design frontier in personal electronics.”

For no additional cost, the Flip Video personalization platform gives consumers unlimited options to create a Flip Mino to fit their individual personalities. Users can choose from thousands of designs from artists, leading design firms, celebrities, and iconic brands, or they can easily upload their own image to create a one-of-a-kind camcorder. Adding to the fun, Flip Video has built an exclusive design engine – the Pattern Generator – that makes it easy for anyone to make a truly unique device. By partnering with CafePress, the leaders in user-generated commerce, over 6.5 million individual CafePress users have the ability to design Flip Mino camcorders to sell on www.cafepress.com or www.theflip.com, creating an unprecedented mass design community for Flip Mino. Consumers can add their creations to the open marketplace and earn commissions for each camcorder sold using their designs. Users can also elect to have their designs earn commissions for non-profit causes.

Yep, “no additional cost,” the best price of all. BTW, among their pre-made designs are some from studios such as Elemental8 and Astro Studios. Pretty cool. Unfortunately for us, we’ve already bought our Flip …