InfoComm 13 is over, and after 3 days on the floor there, I started asking myself if I found what I was looking for.   I made a comment that I was looking for three Howard Hughes-esque traits in manufacturers or their employees.  Those traits were Courage, Passion, and Innovation.

I only received a couple nominations from the show floor, but I have my first winner!

Without further ado, the winner of the Howard Hughes AVator Award for Courage is (drum roll). . .

WyreStorm!

Ironically, I had to consider myself for this award, just for walking into WyreStorm’s booth with my rAVe badge on.  I wrote a blog awarding them a “Promises, Promises” Marketing Award for a press release they wrote back in April, and I was hoping they either didn’t read it, or didn’t remember.

However, despite my fears, I wanted to give them a chance to put their product where their press release was.  They gladly accepted the opportunity to come and enter my HDMI Extender Shootout.  Courage embodies two things in my eyes.  The first is confidence.  When approached in her booth to compete, Martha Brooke’s initial response was “Badass, let’s do it!”  No hemming or hawing ensued.  She took product off the wall, found some power supplies and was ready to go.

The second part of courage, in my eyes, is tenacity.  Every time I would get in the ring to fight, it took one type of courage to enter the first round, and it took a whole new level to come out in the second round, especially if I had taken a few unexpected punches in the first.  Nick Roberts at WyreStorm embodied tenacity.  He knew that his product worked, and he was bound and determined to come out a winner in the challenge, and he did.  He even took a victory lap, by having us max out my laptop resolution to 2560×1080, which the WyreStorm extender passed at 299 feet over Cat5e UTP without any issues.

So in my best Jerry Orbach impression from Dirty Dancing, “When I’m wrong, I say I’m wrong.”   I revoke the “Promises, Promises” award (they fulfilled the promises) and give WyreStorm the Howard Hughes AVator Award for Courage, because “Nobody puts Baby in a corner.”