It’s important to think positive. I’m a big believer in thinking positive, and there are all sorts of reasons why it’s important to do so. For one thing, the difference between something being an obstacle and an opportunity is whether or not you see it that way. But don’t discredit the power of the negative […]

In life, presentation is everything. How you present yourself has a huge impact on your relationships with others. How you dress has perhaps the most fundamental impact. Someone once said something that stuck with me: “How you dress indicates the respect you have for other people.” Think about how your clients will perceive you when […]

Maybe it’s the change of seasons, but just in the past week I’ve seen a dramatic uptick in the number of random and uninteresting press releases I’ve had spammed at my rAVe [Pubs] Inbox by lazy and careless publicists. No joke, many of them have absolutely nothing to do with any channel of CE, and even the ones that […]

In the wake of all the public eulogizing and hagiography going on in the media for the past week I’m going to fly in the face of convention and express my grief over a loss that had a more direct, personal impact on me. The death of my favourite tape measure. It stood by me for twelve […]

I generally try to avoid blogging about the mobile category, since I work in it, but yesterday’s events cannot go uncommented upon. I might not have been at the epicenter of iPhone hype yesterday, but I was certainly in the blast area. Yesterday started off as an unusual day: I didn’t get a single phone call or […]

As far back as I can remember, I always wanted to be a sales rep. Even before I got into the CE industry, as a kid working at sporting goods stores I was always deeply interested in the lives and business of the reps that came calling, representing brands as diverse as Adidas and Salomon. […]

Once every few days or so a Tweet pops up in the mentions column that informs me that someone has assigned me +K on Klout. What? Apparently Klout is a service that, and I quote: provides social media analytics that measures a user’s influence across their social network. The analysis is done on data collected from sites such […]

I’m not the first person to say it, but it’s one of those catch phrases that is funny because it’s TRUE. I think I got the first rumblings of how true it is last fall at CEDIA Expo in Atlanta. I was at a distributor’s top dealer dinner (what he dubbed their “Winner Dinner”) and surrounded by high tech AV […]

For as long as I can remember it’s been the case in the CE industry that competitors are also often collaborators. The interplay between OEM equipment production (exhibit A is the recent teardown that demonstrates that 1/4 of the iPhone is made by Samsung), strategic partnerships for good or ill, etc. all play up the […]

Sharp’s announcement that they are going to resurrect the defunct Elite brand with a new line of LED LCD TVs renews my hope that high end flat panel display solutions will come back from the dead. Sharp’s new Elite 60-inch Pro-60X5FD  and 70-inch Pro-70X5FD  panels will be exclusive to upscale dealers, at least for the moment, and priced at USD $6,000 […]

In the wake of the combination of both earnings releases and strategic announcements the business and CE trade press is full of slobbering hyperbole about Apple’s position as The Most Amazing Company Ever. Granted, the hyperbole is grounded for the most part on solid facts. Apple’s 3Q revenue of $28.57 billion, and a record net quarterly […]

If you’ve worked in retail then you’ve seen strange sights that would top anything ever seen by the Northern Lights that Robert Service wrote about. Here’s a couple of tales to make your day at work seem brighter by comparison. I worked for a couple of years for a major department store in what they […]

Once again I find myself motivated to write by one of Joel Rollins’ excellent blog posts. His column “Staying Wired” and its ProAV perspective on wired vs. wireless technologies resonated with me, and reinforced my belief that regardless of the channel we work in we’ve all got the same challenges. Wireless has in many ways been a […]

As a result of the fact that I spend a fair amount of my day communicating with AV industry people I notice things. Call it trendspotting. Sometimes those trends are on a macro level, such as how the economy or new construction is faring nationwide, or the impact that technologies are having on system design and […]

I’ve spend the majority of my adult life in sales. I don’t call myself a “salesman,” mostly because I don’t feel that a label based on what you’ve done for a living is an especially fulfilling tag to wear. That said, having spent a lot of time both being a salesperson, and managing salespeople from […]

The CE trade media frequently bemoans the Race To Zero that happens in the business: the lemming-like drive among manufacturers to “be competitive” by chasing lower price points and lower margins. Notwithstanding the old DotCom-era joke about Amazon.com losing money on every transaction “but making it up on volume” asking whether anybody actually wins long-term at that strategy […]

Regardless of the indicators you may choose to look at, it’s clear that 2011 can be dubbed the Year Of The Tablet. The indicator that got my attention today and inspired this blog post was this week’s Staples flyer, the front page of which is dominated by tablets. Five of them in fact, from Asus, […]

I get a lot of press releases in my email, and quite honestly most of them get skimmed quickly, if at all, and then forgotten about. When one does capture my attention, it’s usually something related to one of my personal hobby horses, such as HDMI distribution or automation and control. The press release/event invitation I got […]

It’s not news, but I was reminded of this topic yesterday while shopping and I saw side by side displays of the Bose SoundDock for iPod and the Around Ear Headphones in the AV section of my local Costco. It wasn’t that long ago that Costco was generally regarded as a pariah in the Electronics industry for […]

We all have funny stories from work. In many cases the stories we tell are funny now, but they certainly weren’t funny at the time. My introduction to AV installation was far from auspicious. I was working at an AV specialty retailer and we (mostly I, which is how I got the nickname “Projector Boy”) […]

It’s been a mystery to me for years. Selling TVs I always counselled customers that “no one has ever regretted buying a bigger TV.” And five years ago, as flat panel prices continued to drop I coined the phrase “50 is the new 42.” Well guess what? 60 is the new 50. And yet, talking to […]

Contrary to analysis that I’ve read elsewhere, Blu-ray is on life support. Despite some of the boosterism that’s accompanied the Year-Over-Year growth numbers for Blu-ray, the numbers are hardly encouraging for a format that’s nearly five years old now. 26% of packaged-media sales revenue? Compared to DVD’s 74%? Hooray, that’s real growth. So what’s stopping the studios from […]

The blog post by Joel Rollins the other day, entitled “Ya Gotta Buy In Sometime,” was on the money. It also reminded me of an episode from my retail days. Back when camcorders were both analog and expensive there was an old guy who used to come into our store regularly who was serious about buying one. […]

Alright. I’ve given it 24 hours, and let it roll around in my brain, and I am still completely baffled by DISH’s $320M bid for Blockbuster. I’m not alone either. Not only has the AV Twitterverse been gobsmacked, even Wall Street analysts whose job it is to cover DISH don’t know what to think. So far, the most positive […]

There’s a perception, and it’s only a perception, that somehow trade media journalism is a lesser cousin to mainstream media journalism. And it annoys me. Partly because that’s nonsense, and partly because, as far as I can tell, it’s a myth propagated by members of the MSM to feel better about themselves. Some people think that all […]

Even though you’re supposed to recycle electronics, the dustbin of history is stuffed with technologies that aren’t with us anymore. Some were victims of historical forces. Take MiniDisc. I LOVED MiniDisc back in the day with all the evangelical passion of a true fanboy. But alas, no matter how cool, and no matter how great the sound quality, it […]

Every time I read a press release that announces that Sony is making “a commitment to the custom channel and the small dealer” I feel like I’m stuck in Groundhog Day. Just the other week Sony announced that it was going to be taking its ES line of audio equipment out of big boxes and […]

Last week’s news that Amazon intends to bow their own unlimited streaming video service to go head to head with Netflix and Apple TV both excites and amuses me. It excites me because streaming media is where it’s at and when it comes to consumer choice, content selection, and technological innovation, the more the merrier. […]

Joel Rollins blog posts Vanishing History parts 1 and 2 got me thinking about my own experiences with analog recording media. Recently I dug up a box of mixed tapes that I had painstakingly duped in the late 1980s. Kids today with their iPods have no grasp on how much work we had to do back then to create compilations of favourite songs. […]

It’s funny how often discussion seems to revolve around the iPad. Some days it feels like that’s all that I write about. One day last year I stopped in at the butcher store and the first thing out of the owner’s mouth wasn’t “Hello” it was “So what’s the deal with the iPad?” And just yesterday my […]

Anybody who has experience with luxury goods, whether buying, selling, or both understands the psychology of Bigger Boat Syndrome. Especially as technophiles, many of us are susceptible to the seduction of toys that are newer, shinier and cooler than what we, or more importantly our friends have now. I recall one retail client I had back […]

I never have been. “Look before you leap” is definitely one of my character traits. People are often surprised by that, given my career in CE and my visibility on social media. Yet despite the fact that it seems like I’m on Twitter 24/7 I didn’t sign up for Twitter until about two years ago, […]