On sale at a big chain near you today is “The Flip,” a point-and-shoot video camera from Pure Digital the size of your palm which plugs directly into a USB port and will upload your video directly to YouTube, according to Matt Marshall at VentureBeat. A 30-minute model will sell for $119.95 and a 60-minute model will sell for $149.95.

Pure Digital also chose the launch to announce a new $40 million venture round led by Morgan Stanley, raising its total to $68 million. The San Francisco-based company sold a previous handheld camera that uploaded to Grouper and Google Video, also has a line of disposable “one time use” cameras and camcorders, and touts a double-digit market share.

Other camera features include playback on TV or PC and the ability to take the camera to participating retailers for a DVD copy. The quality isn’t great, but is tolerable, at 640×480 resolution encoded in DivX format at approximately 2.3Mbps. The software that comes with the camera will allow you to edit footage as well as upload.

Noticeably missing from the announcement is direct compatibility with MySpace. Which makes this article in Rupert Murdoch’s New York Post all the more hilarious for its fairly transparent bias:

Thanks to Morgan Stanley’s $40 million investment, young fans at music concerts can bootleg instant video action to YouTube even before a tune is finished.

Oh how conflicted News Corp must be with a vast trove of copyrighted material on the one hand and a property that thrives on user-generated material and social content sharing on the other.