This was hard — there are so many. But, here are the top five dumbest AV products currently for sale right now — do not buy these: Curved TVs: This has to be the worst ideas for a TV ever. Why in the world would you want a curved TV? Why would you want to […]

Have you heard the news? As you are well aware of by now, the hottest smart home product ever sold is the Nest HVAC controller. In fact, it was so hot that Google took note earlier this year and bought the company for a little over $3 Billion. Well yesterday, Amazon was outed for secretly […]

As a college professor, I am fortunate to have met and even participated in the education of some really talented and bright students. In addition to teaching a New Media Technologies class that includes social media marketing, I also teach a semester-long course on personal branding. Basically, it’s a 4-month class where you create and […]

Having attended probably 15 to 17 CEDIA Expos over the past 20 years, I feel I am comfortable in saying that this year, the 2014 show, is the best they’ve had in the past six years. Don’t get me wrong, last year’s event was well attended and was a good show, but there was a […]

Well, the annual eye-candy AV show known as CEDIA kicks off this week and I thought I would write a quick blog that, hopefully, you can print out and keep with you to make sure you see these seven things while in Denver: 1. The projector market is back! For years, the projector has been […]

If you travel a lot for business, I’ll bet you can name the top five services all business travelers want off the top of your head — without thinking about it. But, if you’re not a weekly road warrior, you might not realize what you want (aka NEED) when you travel until it’s too late […]

I had a bittersweet weekend. I moved my eldest daughter in to college. And, if you’ve ever done that for your own kids, you know that last line is a massive over-simplification of the process. I mean, moving someone in to college entails a plethora of things including spending thousands of dollars on dorm room […]

Did you know that what you think of rAVe is not all that rAVe is? OK, are you one of our readers that reads our eNewsletter? You are, great! But, did you know that we actually have seven, yes, seven, different newsletters? Yep, we have seven, count them – seven: rAVe ProAV – this is […]

Last month I installed a mount for a 46” Samsung TV I hung on the wall in my daughter’s bedroom. It was, literally, déjà vu to the last time I installed a TV — some four years ago — when I realized that having a TV light enough that one person can hang it on […]

Wow, what an InfoComm! Although the show was barely 45-days ago, the aftereffects are still being felt like tremors following an earthquake. We shot over 1300 videos of new products that debuted on the show floor- an industry record- we recorded over 25 InfoComm-related podcasts, blogged some 100 or so times, wrote news stories on […]

I feel the need to post about soccer — excuse me, fútbol. The soccer-craze has hit the U.S., finally, after decades and decades of “them” telling “us” that soccer would, one day, be the hottest sport in America and compete for our attention like basketball and football do. My middle school coach said, “You need […]

When you think of super-bright projector lines, you automatically think Christie, Barco, Digital Projection, Panasonic, NEC and maybe Sony sometimes, but it’s very unlikely you think EPSON. I sure didn’t. But, I was in sunny southern California recently and was invited over to the EPSON U.S. headquarters to check out the company’s 4000, Pro G […]

First, it billed itself as an eco-friendly room management system and then it was a simplified control system architecture. Now, three years after its USA debut and having never shipped a working system in America, ARRIVE Systems is back calling itself a “collaboration solution” — today’s buzzword for wireless room systems. Am I being too […]

The coolest thing about Royal Caribbean’s next-generation cruise ships are something called the Virtual Balcony. And, it will help make the worst rooms on a cruise ship some of the best! It will start with their newest ship, the Quantum of the Seas, that will set sail later this year. What is a Virtual Balcony? […]

I just delivered my newest keynote here in Orlando at the ALMO Pro E4 AV Tour — being held in conjunction with the ISA’s International Sign Expo (the association for the sign people who’ve primarily made printed signs, banners and billboard for years) and I saw nothing but opportunity for the AV integrator world. Why? […]

A new study by ABI Research forecasts that over 500 billion smart sensors will be integrated into homes by the end of 2018. Half a billion. This is good and bad news for the HomeAV community. As the home automation world becomes less of an art and more of a science, it also becomes commoditized. […]

Tightrope and BrightSign announced a partnership this week that will package its software and hardware, together, for turn-key digital signage systems — Tightrope’s Carousel system will be integrated with BrightSign players. Both companies’ dealer networks will have access to the combined products. Tightrope needs this alliance/partnership as the company has not done well in the […]

I just spent 30 minutes or so on the phone with Mike Blackman, managing director at Integrated Systems Events, talking about the 2014 edition of the Integrated Systems Europe show and he filled me in on all the details for next month’s ISE show in Amsterdam, 4-6 Feb. I recorded the entire interview via video […]

Cisco, making its second appearance at the show, will be showing five new products and technologies at the Integrated Systems Europe show in Amsterdam next month. We have the inside scoop — we spent the day there this past Tuesday and shot six videos that include an overall review of everything Cisco will have at […]

What a great profession — a pill counter (sort of). Actually, pharmacies now have machines that count pills for them. When my local grocery store added a pharmacy about a dozen or so years ago, I was very excited to learn there was a Starbucks opening right next to the awful, local coffee shop I’d […]

The biggest news in electronics the week after the giant CES (Consumer Electronics Show) wasn’t even talked about at CES because it happened the very next day. Google puts up $3.2 Billion to buy Nest, the three year old company started by former Apple design guys Tony Fadell and Matt Rogers. Nest is best known […]

In your twenties, trade shows are awesome. You’re single, traveling to all the cool big cities, getting free dinners at night, going to late night parties, networking, exchanging business cards, making new friends — then you go to bed and get up and do it all over again. In your thirties, you’ve seen (and smelled) […]

The New Jersey version of the Almo Pro A/V E4 AV Tour was held last week in the Meadowlands Exposition Center and not only did it set an attendance record for a New York area show, at over 600, but it was also an all-time attendance record for the four year AV Tour. If you’re […]

Last week’s announcement from Time Warner said that it had the largest loss of subscribers (users of Time Warner CableTV) in history in the last quarter, which is not surprising at all. What is surprising is what the company’s blaming the loss on and thus deceiving the investor community. In playing the blame-game, Time Warner […]

While most of you were sleeping last night, Sony execs were mostly sleepless as they’d just announced a huge loss — one of the worst in company history. I mean huge. In fact, after releasing a 40 percent reduction in their 2013 profit forecast and a nearly $200 million loss for the most recent quarter, […]

We just returned from the ALMO ProAV E4 AV Tour in Irvine, Calif. Friday and I can’t imagine that anyone went home disappointed. There were over 450 people who attended LIVE in person and about another 200 who “virtually” attended through our LIVE video streaming of the event’s Keynote and Brain Freeze panel discussion. We […]

If you’re a regular reader of my columns, my blogs or our publication, you likely know that I am not a fan of 3D movies. No, it’s not just because that, statistically, somewhere in the range of 20% of humans can’t even see 3D, nor is it because you have to hold your head in […]

Panasonic will be announcing the death of plasma later this month as it plans to wind down its plasma panel production in March of 2014. Panasonic, the world’s largest manufacturer of plasma displays, will cease production because the consumer group just can’t sell enough plasma to make it price competitive (or profitable enough) against LCD-based […]

I am excited to announce that we will be streaming LIVE (in HD) both my Kayye’s Krystal Ball Keynote as well as the Tech Expert Brain Freeze Panel (sponsored by NEC Display) during both of the fall Almo ProAV E4 AV Tours; in Irvine, Calif. on Fri., Oct. 18th and in Seacaucus, NJ on Wed., […]

The Nest thermostat is one of the most innovative, yet simplest, HVAC controllers ever created. It has made controlling your air conditioner cool AND has been proven, over and over, to save homeowners using it money in energy costs by using less power and auto-scheduling when the heat and air turn on and off based […]

There’s no question that the theme for this year’s CEDIA Expo is, “We’re going commercial.” What? Yep, the HomeAV’s annual trade show is full of ProAV gear. It’s all over the place. In small ways — like Draper showing its VTC camera-lift systems and in big ways where AMX and Crestron are showing as much […]

The annual CEDIA Expo is the industry’s premier HomeAV trade show, where every major manufacturer of home automation, whole-home audio and video distribution systems, HDMI gadgets, HDTVs, projectors and set-top boxes convene annually to show their new stuff. And, the 2013 edition opens this week in Denver, Colorado. We have a handful of reporters there […]