Over the years I’ve been in this industry (this was my 33rd InfoComm — 34th annual show with InfoComm/AVIXA though as my first, back in 1987, the show was called COMTEC — before the name was changed to InfoComm in 1988), the show has evolved from a technology-based show to a product-based show and, more […]
Every single person from NEC who was at InfoComm was busy. Not only did they have one of the biggest booths at the show but NEC Display products were all over the show floor in signage and collaboration partnerships and a couple of dozen NEC’ers showed up to run the First Annual AVIXA 5K race, […]
I’d be surprised if Epson’s real-time art exhibit inside their booth didn’t win an InfoComm 2019 award. I’m serious. But, even if you’re not into digital art, you’ll appreciate how they were projecting it off-axis at about 160-degrees — on fabric! It was stunning. But they also had the entire DSE booth inside the InfoComm […]
By the time I returned to my office after being at InfoComm all last week, I had a dozen or more emails or messages from people asking how we pulled-off the LG Booth tour. I was perplexed. How do I respond? With a camera and a mic? Ah, but I had misunderstood the question! LG, […]
It’s called “pay-for-play” and it’s simply unethical — and even illegal in some industries. But in the 70+ year-old AV industry, it’s business as usual. Most of our industry’s awards are not real awards. Sure, manufacturers promote winning them as if they are. And, the magazines that dole them out pretend like they are, too. […]
Plasmonic metasurfaces are being developed for use in future flat panel displays. These are basically scalable electrochromic nanopixels using plasmonics and their color gamut and high spatial resolution blows away even the best OLEDs we have today — by a factor of between 400 and 1000. Right now, according to a research paper published in […]
I suspect most of you reading this will have never heard of MIMESYS — but, I certainly have. When I first saw their technology in person, I immediately thought of how Cisco would have loved to have this back when they were pitching their telepresence systems. Imagine being able to “teleport” someone into a meeting […]
The city of San Francisco, via its board of supervisors voted yesterday to ban using facial-recognition technology. The actual ordinance deals specifically with city governmental organizations and divisions, but it will have long-lasting ramifications that could easily (and quickly) ben emulated all over the country. Designed to protect the average-guy/gal member of the community from […]
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 […]
