Volume 14, Issue 10 — May 24, 2017
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Editorial Editorial Editorial Editorial
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Industry News Cables, Furniture, Mounts, Racks, Screens and Accessories Lighting Audio
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Even Apple Sees the Future Is Services – Not Just Products
By Gary Kayye rAVe Founder
I have been harping on this for years. I have been telling everyone in the AV industry that to survive the future of AV, services need to be front and center, along with the products.
Sure, a good mix of products with both established technology as well as future-forward, emerging technology is a giant part of the story of the evolution of AV into or part of IT, but just as important is a host of services.
Like what? Well, the low-hanging fruit is obviously service contracts, proactive maintenance contracts, systems monitoring contracts [Let me get off on a tangent on this one — I was at the AVI Systems LIVE show in Chicago a few weeks ago and I saw something they are calling AVI INSIGHT — genius! The company has developed a universal systems-monitoring software dashboard to monitor (and control) disparate systems from any manufacturer. Again, genius. This is a service AVI Systems can pretty much charge whatever it wants for it because the purchaser (i.e., the client) is basically buying job security from AVI Systems], creative services, digital signage network management, collaboration network management, training, etc.
You get the point. Services are way, way more profitable than products. But the truth is that not everyone can sell an intangible. The same salesperson who can sell a $100K system can’t always sell that $7K service contract. But someone can! And, if not, you’d better figure our how to or “they’ll” find someone who can.
Selling intangibles — or at a minimum, giving away intangibles to ensure both client loyalty and customer satisfaction — is the the future. But, selling something you can’t hold, touch, demo or ship isn’t as easy as selling a widget. It just isn’t.
Take a look at this from Apple — it’s called TODAY at APPLE and it launched last week with very little fanfare — but you can bet it will be big. Apple knows it. I know it.
In the video, you saw an Apple Store that looks more like a cross between a private concert venue, a Starbucks and a classroom lab. No product commercial, no tech specs. Just people hanging out in the Apple Store having fun, getting educated, learning a new skill, just meeting people or just living the Apple life.
That’s not only a glimpse into the Apple future — a future where Apple will likely, inexpensively turn their mall-based stores into gathering places for all-of-the-above — but this video is also a glimpse into the tech future too. A future where people buy what they feel more comfortable with — not what they are sold. A future where people value services over products. A future where peer influence is the strongest factor in purchasing decisions — what your buddies say and do becomes what you trust.
I can go on and on about this, but this should be lighting bulbs inside of your head, reader. The ideas are (and should be) endless.
But the lesson here is one of how important the true service is — not just talking about service or assuming the product (or the salesperson, for that matter) will garner the loyalty.
Good, fun, interesting, educational, job-saving service will. Leave a Comment
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AV Companies and the Threat of New Entrants
By Lee Distad rAVe Columnist
In recent editorials, I’ve been going over Porter’s Five Forces and putting them into context for businesses of the AV business. To review, here are the Five Forces:
- Threat of new entrants
- Threat of substitutes
- Bargaining power of customers
- Bargaining power of suppliers
- Industry rivalry
For this installment, I want to discuss the threat of new entrants, which is highly relevant to companies in the AV channels. We’re in a period right now where there is a growing overlap between channels and disciplines, AV/IT being perhaps the most obvious.
What do we mean by threat of new entrants? It’s the challenge incumbent businesses face when new competitors enter their market. Like the circle of life, the potential for profits in a specific market will attract new entrants. If the barriers to entry are low, it’s easy for new competitors to get involved. Possible consequences of this are either dilution of market share; the pie gets sliced into smaller pieces or lower profit margins as competition devolves to battling over price.
At the risk of stating the obvious, while the increased likelihood of new entrants can increase competition and negatively affect the profitability of incumbents, a low likelihood of new entrants decreases competitiveness and can protect the profitability of incumbents.
As great as that might sound for the incumbents, there are other downsides to a lack of competitiveness in a market, and that can give rise to other challenges, which are addressed in some of the other Five Forces. What determines whether or how new competitors enter a market are called the barriers to entry.
A barrier to entry is any factor that increases the expense or difficulty of entering a new market. That can be a large up-front capital expenditures to get started — or high economies of scale, the need for production to be high in order to reach profitability. Lack of access to resources, locations or technology can also hamper new entrants. Other considerations are high switching costs for the end-user customer, or government regulations or subsidies that are adverse to new entrants.
Conversely, the opposite of those situations, low barriers to entry will entice newcomers to enter an existing market: Low initial investment, low economics of scale and ready access to resources, locations or technology, or government regulations or subsidies that encourage new entrants.
While many barriers to entry boil down to money and resources, other barriers can be more ephemeral. The strength of existing brands and their customer relationships and the clear differentiation of their products from competitors can also act as effective barriers to entry. It makes sense then that the converse, weaker brands and undifferentiated products would attract new entrants that seek to take market share from incumbents perceived as weak.
When evaluating your company’s position, whether as an incumbent who needs to defend against new entrant, or whether you’re considering becoming a new entrant yourself, it’s necessary to conduct an analysis of the relevant factors.
Bear in mind, the picture you paint of the market factors will seldom be a clear cut ‘Yes’ or ‘No.’ There will be gradations and nuances to consider. That’s why it’s helpful to itemize the relevant factors, describe them and check them off to help make the picture more clear.
Here, let’s break it out into a table:
How all those factors balance out will help you to complete your analysis and inform your conclusion.
As an incumbent looking to protect your business, there are factors you can control and ones you can’t. The most obvious to me is the need to ensure that you have a strong brand, well differentiated products and services, and foster strong relationships with your end-users to ward off attempts to woo them away from you by new entrants.
And if you’re considering moving into another channel, all these factors need to be weighted in order to can insight into whether or not it’s feasible or even desirable to do so. Leave a Comment
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What AV Integrators Should Know About WannaCrypt
By Sara Abrons rAVe Editor
Last week, a group of hackers released a nasty piece of ransomware that quickly spread across the world, touching anything and everything connected to a network. Deemed WannaCrypt (or WannaCry), the ransomware infected thousands (approximately 200,000, according to NBC) of computers in thousands of countries and in particular wreaking havoc in Europe, where many medical institutions — including the UK’s National Health Service, schools, government institutions and businesses were essentially shut down. One AV/IT victim was Deutsche Bahn, German’s state railway operator, which had a digital signage network alerting passengers to train schedules that went down.
Once inside a system, all user files became encrypted and inaccessible to the owner, essentially held hostage, hence the term ransomware. To get the files back unencrypted, a user has to send $300 worth of bitcoin (an untraceable digital currency) to a certain account within three days. After three days the price doubles to $600. On the seventh day, all the files are deleted forever. The list of file types the code could encrypt was extensive, but included .doc files and most media files types such as .mov and .jpg (you can see the list here), so it would cripple most users who became infected. Pretty nasty, huh?
Fortunately, the spread of the attack was halted when a British cybersecurity researcher registered a domain he found hidden in the code in order to track the attack. The registration actually stopped the spread of the malware altogether, since it relied on connecting back to the domain and receiving no response in order to encrypt the files. If you’re interested in learning more about how the attack was stopped in such a seemingly simple way (it’s not), read the blog by the 22-year-old engineer, known primarily by his online handle MalwareTech, who unknowingly halted the spread. This was an extremely lucky break for everyone (except the purveyors of WannaCrypt, of course).
One of the reasons this attack spread so much further than other Ransomware attacks was because it took advantage of two exploits in systems running Windows that allowed remote attacks and remote control — codenamed “EternalBlue” and “DoublePulsar” respectively. Most ransomware attacks rely solely on phishing techniques, such as getting a user to click a link, in order to infect a computer. These vulnerabilities were identified earlier this year and on March 14th, Microsoft released a patch that fixed the vulnerability.
The threat isn’t over, however — the ransomware could reemerge at any time with a few alterations and any system without the patch would be vulnerable.
What You Should Do Immediately
- Run any and all security updates, if you haven’t already, on all computers, phones and everything you have connected to the Internet for your company. Windows computers running Windows XP, Windows 8 or Windows Server 2003 are extremely vulnerable and need to be updated immediately. More information on how to protect systems using Windows, including a link to the security update that should be installed, can be found here. Microsoft says Windows 10 was not vulnerable to the attack.
- Call your clients and make sure they have done the same, especially if you know they are running systems that use Windows at all.
- Consider offering to come to clients’ businesses and run software and firmware updates on all equipment (you can charge for this service!). How many pieces of AV equipment are floating around out there that don’t have the latest firmware?
What You Should Do After That to Protect Yourself and Your Clients
- Install security updates regularly to all systems. This includes not just software updates, but also firmware updates. If you don’t want to make them automatic, then you should be checking for updates and completing the installs regularly. Out of date devices are a huge vulnerability.
- Train staff and clients regularly in how to recognize phishing attempts. Phishing attempts have become more sophisticated of late and tricking even Internet savvy users. Earlier in May, a convincing email that looked like an invitation to see a shared Google doc made the rounds, and it wasn’t just grandmas who clicked the links and got infected. Regular training is key.
- Use strong spam filters to stop employees from ever even seeing phishing attempts. Use firewalls and anti-virus software.
- Back up files regularly, both to the cloud and locally to another hard drive.
- Have a prepared worst-case-scenario recovery plan in place in the event that something in your network does become infected.
- Whenever possible, at your own company or in designing systems, consider using operating systems other than Windows, which has consistently been the most vulnerable to attacks.
Here’s some additional info on steps businesses can take to protect themselves. Much of what I’ve described probably sounds obvious, but without a protocol in place to do these things regularly, they easily fall by the wayside, even to the large businesses. Just ask the U.K.’s National Health Service or Russia’s Interior Ministry. Now is as good a time as any to review procedures and put a plan in place.
Stefan Baur, project lead of open source project X2Go and owner of BAUR-ITCS (website in German, but English speakers can contact the company through a form), a company offering X2Go support and an X2Go-based security software, gave some additional advice for systems designers and network operators:
- Don’t run Windows when/where you don’t have to. Depending on your area of work, there will probably be some apps that are only available for Windows. That doesn’t mean you have to use Windows for everything else as well, though. Solutions are available that allow you to display single Windows applications coming from a remote server on the screen of a Linux or macOS machine (Citrix, etc.), as well as for the other direction: Displaying a remote Linux application on a Windows or macOS screen (this is what X2Go [and others] does/do).
- Don’t go all Linux, either — diversity is the key. Run some macOS systems here, some FreeBSD there… whatever does the job best. This minimizes the chance that you’ll experience a total meltdown due to an exploit hitting you, as they are usually operating-system- or application-specific (think Microsoft Office).
- Keep systems that require different levels of security (customer/patient data, company data/intellectual property, internet) on separate networks. With the current attack, the pictures spreading on Twitter hint at Deutsche Bahn (Germany’s largest railway operator and infrastructure owner) having placed those infoscreens on their production network and joined to their regular Windows Domain (though we have no solid proof for that yet) — and from a security standpoint, that’s one of the biggest mistakes you can make, and an easily avoidable and totally unneccessary risk to take.
- When I say “separate networks,” I mean it. Don’t even use VLANs. Use separate switching and routing hardware. VLANs are a valuable tool when you have to manage large networks, but they are not a security measure. Yes, more hardware means higher expenses, but everything else will come back to bite you in the long run.
These suggestions supplement the usual security measures, like locking down and hardening systems, regular backups, patch deployment, etc. — they are not meant for being able to safely neglect basic security measures, nor will they work for that. If you want to experience what placing a nice tall building on unsafe ground looks like, book your next vacation to Pisa, Italy — don’t try it out on your company network.
Unfortunately for those infected by WannaCrypt, no one has figured out to decrypt files yet, and security experts are scrambling to get systems back up and running. The only solution is to completely wipe infected systems and restore from an offline backup.
Read more about WannaCrypt here. You can also see the spread of infections over time here. Be safe out there on the Internet, friends. Leave a Comment
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AV Parents
By Hope Roth Just before Mother’s Day, I wrote a long, passionate post on my personal Facebook feed about how this article stirred up a lot of thoughts and feelings. Facebook friends from all walks of life chimed in to say that they, too, struggle with work/life balance and societal expectations. Being a working parent is hard, especially when your kids are still young. The push and pull between getting your job done and being there for your kids is there in just about every industry.
That said, parenting a small child in our industry comes with its own set of unique challenges. Men feel the brunt of this, too. I know a lot of men who want to spend more time with their kids, who worry about balance, who have made career decisions around these very issues. But in a society where women have extra expectations put on them when it comes to taking care of the kids and housework, these challenges could end up being a real barrier to entry. As an industry, we have some work to do if we ever want to approach gender parity.
Sorry, Honey, I’m Stuck on a Ladder
It’s become a running industry joke at this point. We’re all just one broken part away from spending the night on a ladder somewhere. I can’t tell you how many times I’ve had to call my husband to let him know that, oops, something went sideways; don’t wait up.
Any service-oriented work is going to have its share of jobs where you stay until the client is happy. I do think that our industry has a mentality where you stay as long as necessary and you do whatever it takes to get things done. That mentality is one of our greatest assets, but it can also be a great liability. Too many late nights can send workers to the hills.
Have Laptop, Will Travel
When our clients love us, they often really love us. Which is why they’ll want us to fly to the other end of the country to work on jobs for them. It’s great, until your kid catches sight of your suitcase and starts crying.
Mitigation Schemes
I work long hours. I do crazy things like take day trips from Boston to Chicago (and back, natch). I’ve been known to spend a Saturday making sure that a job finishes up on time. I feel my fair share of burnout from time to time, but it never lasts. How come? My job gives me flexibility, and the ability to say “No, I can’t travel the next few weeks.”
When I’m not stuffing PPE into a carry-on bag, I work from home. I organize my work schedule around my family’s schedule and not the other way around. I can shift my schedule around so that I can bring my daughter to karate class. Or sleep in a little after a late night of off-hours uploads.
More importantly, my company makes my family time a real priority. They’ll make travel arrangements to get me home faster. They’ll put a hold on my schedule if I have something I need to do at home. They’ll hold off on out of town trips if I’m starting to feel like I haven’t seen my family enough lately. A lot of women feel like using flex time at work holds back their careers, but my boss has made it abundantly clear that he doesn’t care how I organize my schedule, as long as I get the job done.
The work/life balance isn’t an issue that’s going to be easily solved by our industry. Or any industry, really. But we need to work on solutions. Otherwise, we’re going to lose good talent, and we’ll never attract that next generation of stellar performers. Leave a Comment
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Vin Bruno Leaving CEDIA CEDIA announced today that it has accepted the resignation of Global President/CEO Vin Bruno, effective immediately. The organization says that Vin has resigned in order to focus on new opportunities in the residential and commercial technology industries,.
Over the next two weeks, the CEDIA board will meet to create a strategy and timeline for appointing a new president/CEO. Until then, Tabatha O’Connor, CEDIA’s current COO, will take over Vin’s duties as president/CEO. She has served as CEDIA’s COO since 2015. She has worked for CEDIA for 15 years, having previously held the post of senior director of human resources and finance.
Bruno joined CEDIA in September 2015 from his role as marketing director for Crestron Electronics. Prior to this time, he was vice president for VCOM International Multimedia Corporation, a distributor of professional AV and digital equipment.
Earlier this year, CEDIA made waves in the industry when it announced earlier this year it had sold its show to Emerald Expositions. Leave a Comment
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Just Add Power to Debut 3G Ultra HD Over IP and 2GΩ/3G+ PoE at InfoComm Just Add Power (J+P) will launch a new 3G Ultra HD over IP transmitter (707POE) and receiver (508POE), 2GΩ/3G+ PoE options, 3G+4+ Tiling Transmitter and the Plug-Play-Present application that adds simple logic control to any transmitter in booth 4081 at InfoComm 2017. New for the show is the J+P web-based control application, which allows users to easily control the company’s video matrix from any web-enabled device.
Designed for 4K HDMI distribution and HDMI matrixing application, these new models allow also are spec’d to accommodate HDR distribution. These entry-level models can be mixed and matched with more advanced Ultra HD over IP devices and include features like audio extraction, downmix from Dolby 5.1, and CEC control in zones. The 3G Ultra HD over IP transmitter (707POE) and IP receiver (508POE) distribute up to 4K Ultra HD over a single Cat-5e cable, but it is compressed.
J+P will also show its new 2GΩ/3G+ PoE models, the VBS-HDMI-515POE receiver and VBS-HDMI-715POE transmitter. They combine the audio feature-set of the 3G system with the maximum 1080p resolution of 2G devices. Both also support for maximum 1080p video with HDCP 1.4, all lossless audio formats including Dolby Atmos, control endpoints with RS-232 and IR (using VBS-HDMI-IRD), stereo audio output with 170ms audio delay, CEC control and image play capabilities. The receiver also features a video wall with rotation option and USB 2.0 over IP. The transmitter offers HDMI pass-through and USB 2.0 functionality.
Here are all the details. Leave a Comment
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Draper Debuts Industry’s Biggest Thin Bezel Screen Draper announces Profile+, the industry’s biggest ½-inch-thin bezel screen, which will officially debut at InfoComm 2017. Draper’s Profile+ fixed screen include a ½-inch-thin bezel, which frames any Draper flexible viewing surface. Available in sizes up to 30 feet wide, as well as standard HDTV (16:9), 16:10 and CinemaScope 2:35.1 aspect ratios, the Profile+ provides the industry’s biggest flat panel look. Draper also says the frame is lighter and easy to assemble, and the new sliding hook-and-loop viewing surface attachment system is incredibly simple. The Profile+ also comes with a Zero Edge option – again, at 30 feet wide, the biggest in the industry. The Profile+ can be wall-mounted or flown, and optional LED lights frame the Profile+ with thousands of color possibilities, helping offset the picture and providing extra flash that’s sure to impress.
Also, the Profile+ is available with all of Draper’s Optically Seamless, ISF-certified, 8K-ready TecVision formulations, so there’s a Profile+ solution for any need – from 3D to Ambient Light Rejection. The Profile+ is lightweight, easy to put together and ships unassembled for simplified transportation.
Draper’s new Profile+ is here. Leave a Comment
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Holm Debut Landscaping sStrip-17 Surface-Mounted Luminaire Holm just launched the new sStrip-17 surface-mounted luminaire with ZDC Technology. With this technology, designers can add up to 30,000 colors to an additional category of popular low-voltage LED surface-mounted luminaires. With ZDC Technology, Holm says the sStrip-17 wall light now provides almost unlimited capacity for zoning, dimming and color creation using the ZDClink controller.
The low profile of the sStrip-17 allow it to accent hardscapes without drawing attention to the fixture. In addition, the proximity of the fixture to the hardscape allows the light to softly graze the area, highlighting texture and illuminating the local path for safety.
The sStrip-17 is now already shipping and here are the details. Leave a Comment
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Grimani Systems Announces New Delta LoudspeakerGrimani Systems announced the availability of their new Delta speaker. Specifically designed for use in smaller rooms (200-400 square feet), Delta speakers have the conic section array (CSA) waveguide for constant wide dispersion and sound staging throughout the range of frequencies, ensuring that every listener is immersed in the same soundfield.
The Delta speaker is active speaker with digital crossover and room correction equalization features. It’s shallow at 5.5 inches deep, and is designed to be concealed behind an acoustically-transparent screen or stretched fabric room decor.
Delta is one of the core speakers in Grimani Systems’ CinemaThree ensemble, specified for rooms up to 400 square feet. It lists for $6,400. Here are the details. Leave a Comment
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Acoustic Geometry Ships CornerSorber
Acoustic Geometry’s new Acoustic Bass Management (ABM) line, the CornerSorber, is now shipping. This corner-placement bass absorber utilizes a Mass-Loaded Vinyl (MLV) absorption membrane in a cutting-edge design that mitigates low-frequency room modes for accurate sound reproduction in a room.
The CornerSorber is a bass absorber design that allows maximum pressure-zone room-mode reduction due to close-corner placement. The uniquely-shaped bass absorber is beveled on two sides and the top, allowing a pair of CornerSorbers to be set up three inches from, and parallel with, each corner wall, either vertically or horizontally, for the most efficient and effective reduction of low-frequency room-mode pressure waves.
Acoustic Geometry’s ABM system allows for a high level of low-frequency performance when utilizing both CornerSorbers and Curve Diffusors, which also feature accurate, lab-tested low-frequency MLV membrane absorption. The combination has a complementary range of frequencies that produces consistent bass-energy absorption from 45Hz to 200Hz, which corresponds to room-mode dimensions from 5.5 to 25-feet. The CornerSorber’s form factor of 24 by 42-inches, with a 6-inch depth, allows both a small footprint and either vertical or horizontal orientation. With the Curve’s smooth phase-coherent diffusion, the combination of Curves and CornerSorbers will evenly control frequencies below 200Hz, as well as evenly diffuse mid and high frequencies, which is the ideal acoustic treatment solution for nearly any room.
This cost-effective system can be used in many applications, including recording and mastering studios, video production and post houses, audiophile listening rooms, home theaters, live-performance and event venues, concert halls and auditoriums. Acoustic Geometry’s ABM CornerSorber will also complement any room design. Various finishes are available, including black-painted oak (stock), custom stain and paint colors, and several wood veneers (including clear-finish maple, cherry, and walnut).
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PlanterSpeakers Introduces The Metropolitan PlanterSpeakers just announced the launch of its new Metropolitan model featuring a modern design using a marine-grade waterproof shell, 8” of planting depth and Smart Pot USA drainage bags. And, it’s available in any custom color.
These are weatherproof speakers and can be fitted with 90° or 180° projection and use braced construction and teak legs. Its three-way speaker system features a 1” soft dome tweeter, a 4” mid-range and a down firing 10″ HD woofer. A pair of Metropolitan planter speakers can cover an area of up to 1,000 sq. ft.
Metropolitan pricing:
- Metropolitan $3,950.00 pair
- Metropolitan 90° or 180° projection $4,500.00 pair
- Metropolitan 90° or 180° stereo $2,577.00 (single speaker)
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For all you REGULAR readers of rAVe HomeAV Edition out there, hopefully you enjoyed another opinion-packed issue!
For those of you NEW to rAVe, you just read how we are — we are 100% opinionated. We not only report the news and new product stories of the high-end HomeAV industry, but we stuff the articles full of our opinions. That may include (but is not limited to) whether or not the product is even worth looking at, challenging the manufacturers on their specifications, calling a marketing-spec bluff and suggesting ways integrators market their products better. But, one thing is for sure, we are NOT a trade publication that gets paid for running editorial or product stories. Traditional trade publications get paid to run product stories — that’s why you see what you see in most of the pubs out there. We are different: we run what we want to run and NO ONE is going to pay us to write anything good (or bad).
Don’t like us, then go away — unsubscribe! Just use the link below.
To send me feedback, don’t reply to this newsletter – instead, write directly to me at gary@ravepubs.com or for editorial ideas: Editor-in-Chief Sara Abrons at sara@ravepubs.com
A little about me: I graduated from Journalism School at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill (where I am adjunct faculty). I’ve been in the AV-industry since 1987 where I started with Extron and eventually moved to AMX. So, I guess I am an industry veteran (although I don’t think I am that old). I have been an opinionated columnist for a number of industry publications and in the late 1990s I started the widely read KNews eNewsletter (the first in the AV market) and also created the model for and was co-founder of AV Avenue – which is now known as InfoComm IQ. rAVe Publications has been around since 2003, when we launched our original newsletter, rAVe ProAV Edition.
rAVe HomeAV Edition, co-published with CEDIA, launched in February, 2004.
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rAVe HomeAV Edition contains the opinions of the author only and does not necessarily reflect the opinions of other persons or companies or its sponsors. |
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