On the day that InFocus shocked the AV industry and announced they’d bought its largest competitor, I was actually there. It was Monday, March 6, 2,000 — I remember the details of the day very well but my old Franklin Planner helped me keep track of the date for the purpose of this article. Let me […]
All of us in the digital signage market have been preaching the call — and future potential — of interactive signage. Interactivity makes signage more engaging, can be used to “gamify” the information and, in some cases, makes signage more multi-purpose — think about the case where the sign can magically transform into a huddle-room […]
This is the tweet heard ‘round the AV world — or at least, it should have been: The March 21st tweet from R/GA read: A thousand years from now humans will have shed their physical form and ascended to a higher state of consciousness and conference room AV systems still won’t work. — R/GA (@RGA) […]
I love writing this annual predictions article. If you’re a regular reader, you already know this but for those that don’t, my Kayye’s Krystal Ball piece is an annual article where I not only tell you what I think is going to happen in the AV market for the upcoming year, but I also go […]
Update: We just heard from Christie, who told us that although it’s true the original Christie MicroTiles are being retired, an all-new version that’s “smaller, brighter and faster to install” will be announced at ISE next week in Amsterdam. Stay tuned for more information! I just received an official notice from Christie Digital, today, that […]
There are 15 halls at ISE 2019 in Amsterdam 5-8 February and show management has worked year after year to try to find a way to help visitors, well, visit. It’s LITERALLY impossible to go to the show and stay all four days and see the entire show floor — impossible In fact, that’s why […]
There’s no doubt in my mind that 2019 will be the year we look back on that the industry transitioned from signal routing and distribution via HDMI and so-called “digital-media” to AV-over-IP. Certainly not the entire industry — just most of it. But buyer, specifier, installer and designer beware. Not all AV-over-IP is the same, […]
We’ve been covering, tracking and following the digital signage market for well over 10-years now. And, it’s gone from good, to great, to fantastic to incredible. In those 10+ years, there’s never been a negative sales year and, in most years, the digital signage market has enjoyed double-digit growth. It’s grown from a few giant […]
As you may know, I have been teaching both new media advertising and branding at the University of North Carolina (UNC) for more than 10 years now. Nearly my entire professional life has been spent in marketing and branding and I was excited when the dean of the School of Media and Journalism (where advertising and PR live at UNC) […]
CEDIA Expo is the ultimate AV geekfest. Walking around CEDIA is like being an eight-year-old at Toys ‘R’ Us wishing you could have everything. But like Toys ‘R’ Us, it’s on the verge of disappearing. Let’s be honest here — the show has had flat attendance (right at 20,000, INCLUDING exhibitor personnel) for the past […]
Every business owner in every company hopes, especially when they invent or pioneer something unique, that their competition will be good. Bad competition tends to shred an industry and can lead to its eventual demise. For example, I have many friends that own AV integration firms — they love the good competition and loathe the […]
Just two days following one of my most popular blogs, Barco’s Overture Dilemma, Barco announced exactly what I suggested inside the blog — they’ve integrated Overture into ClickShare! In a blog post from ClickShare Product Manager Steven Lampshear, shrouded as an educational piece about how ClickShare can make meetings simpler, near the bottom, is a section […]
AVIXA is going out of its way to say that its new Integrated Life @ InfoComm isn’t competitive to the industry’s defacto HomeAV show, CEDIA. But, I call bulls*t. First, look at this. That’s basically the what’s new at InfoComm page — letting everyone know what all the new things AVIXA added to the industry’s top […]
Update: Just two days following the publication of this blog, Barco announced exactly what I suggested — they’ve integrated Overture into ClickShare! It will be shown at InfoComm. Click here to read more about the announcement. At least year’s ISE show in Amsterdam, Barco officially launched itself into a (potentially) competitive fight with the […]
Maybe I’m a skeptic. I don’t think I am but, maybe. Having lived in technology for nearly 30 years, it’s not often a new tech product debuts that I get excited about. The iPhone was a giant WOW. Wireless networking was an “its about time” kind of moment as I was one of those power-travelers […]
As the rest of the advertiser-supported AV press just reprints the Polycom or Plantronics press releases, we’re going to call it how we see it — with the truth about this “acquisition.” Yes, Plantronics is taking control of Polycom — a history-making videoconferencing company that all but invented the space — for what amounts to $2.0 billion in enterprise […]
Kids love the Apple iPhone. And most kids in schools who have smartphones have an iPhone — this, all while Android is the world’s leading smartphone platform. And, they mostly don’t use them as a phone. They text on them, Snapchat on them, they post on Instagram and they store their photos on them — lots of photos. And, […]
Since the introduction of the plethora of collaboration boards launched February at ISE, I’ve noticed a troubling and concerning trend: In some segments of AV, the non-AV’ers are doing more AV than the AV’ers are doing. What the heck do I mean? Well, let’s take the huddle space as an example. At first, the AV […]
If you’re not headed to Amsterdam next week for ISE, you should be. So, PLEASE, PLEASE, PLEASE make reservations to go next year. ISE has quietly and quickly become the most important AV trade show on this planet. I don’t know which show AV people on Mars go to, but on Earth, nearly all of them are […]
In the five or so years since Barco debuted the ClickShare, no company has had anything significant, as a stand-alone packaged product, which comes close to the simplicity and compatibility of their BYOD solution. The ClickShare likely has a more than 70 percent market share of this segment even though there have been a half-dozen or so […]
During the CES (Consumer Electronics Show) each year, nearly every big consumer tech company debuts something new — and many of them will declare it “disruptive” or “game-changing” or “innovative” or one of a dozen or so other self-congratulatory adjectives that mean nothing. And all the while, the city for Las Vegas commences to ripping people off […]
After writing this piece on how CEDIA needed women on their Board, I received overwhelmingly positive feedback from the industry. Some of you wrote to me via my LinkedIn post, some commented on Facebook and Twitter and some of you emailed me privately. I even got four phone calls from current and former CEDIA Board members — and one […]
PR (public relations) in the AV industry, generally, sucks. Trust me. Not only do I teach to PR students at the University of North Carolina and see (and read) great PR pitches all the time from them, but the agony of reading boringly written or overly-flub-ridden press releases from MOST (not all, just most) PR […]
With their new product UniSee, Barco is doing something that no company’s ever done in the video wall market – launching a turn-key product that includes a completely bezel-less 55” LCD monitor integrated with a purpose-built mount (specifically for UniSee) and integrated with a modular electronics design. Yes, it’s three things in one: a native 1080p panel with […]
ZOOM Video Communications was the brainchild of WebEx founder Eric Yuan. He wanted to find a way to make people happy using videoconferencing — not frustrated. In six years, it’s gone from his idea to a company with headquarters is in San Jose, Calif. that’s projected to be valued at well over $1 Billion. And, Yuan […]
Like many of you, I’ve known Scott Sharer for many years. He developed the first videoconferencing classes more than 20 years ago and taught them for 15 or so years. He and I served on numerous committees together at InfoComm and we taught at InfoComm’s and PETC Institutes for 20+ years all over the world. […]
At least five MAJOR ProAV manufacturers have relented to Amazon’s push into the ProAV market. In case you haven’t heard, Amazon quietly launched a business-to-business initiative earlier this year called — appropriately — Amazon Business. Its charter is to become a multi-billion-dollar supplier of anything a business needs to operate. And, Viewsonic was one of […]
It appears that Crestron can, in fact, predict the future. The 2017 CEDIA Expo is shaping up to be a very good show. We have a team of five people out in San Diego right now covering it live and you can follow our coverage here. The show floor is beautiful and we’ll spend the morning, right before the […]
There’s no doubt that Amazon’s Sarah Zenz will be one of the best keynote speakers CEDIA has ever heard. She’s one of the smartest people at AMAZON, she’s an amazing speaker and she was a kick-ass product manager. But, in a doubly-irony, she’s been asked, by the ALL-MALE CEDIA board to address the attendees who […]
Here’s a list of the current CEDIA Board of Directors. Notice anything wrong? Yep, you got it — all dudes. No women. How could this have happened? Is CEDIA so arrogant to think the the way to solve the world’s HomeAV problems is to have a group of dudes sitting around making decisions on how […]
Earlier this week, we broke the news that Plantronics was entering the ProAV market with a new product called Habitat Soundscaping. It wasn’t a complete surprise as Plantronics is one of the worst companies I’ve ever seen at keeping secrets. I found out about the product five months before they called me out of the blue to “tell […]
A few months back, I wrote a column: Will Microsoft Be Able to Continue to Rip People Off With Their Surface HUB? Most of you agreed; some didn’t. And now, four months after writing that piece, I still think it’s way, way, way overpriced for what you get. But on the same week that Whitlock recently awarded Microsoft’s Surface Hub […]
