By Paul Konikowski, CTS-D Last week was a big week for cybersecurity news pertaining to the audiovisual industry. Vulnerabilities in Zoom’s Mac desktop client were disclosed, hijacking flaws in Logitech’s Unifying USB dongles hit the mainstream and Draper, Inc. announced that its computer systems and communications networks were being held hostage by ransomware. Let’s take […]
In my biweekly blog series, I am highlighting some of the incredible people who work for the Audio Video Industry and in this post, we are profiling Dave DiGirolamo. Here is his brief introduction. Dave DiGirolamo is the Director of Audio Video Systems at Building Infrastructure Group located in Virginia, USA. He is a Certified […]
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 […]
In my biweekly blog series, I am highlighting some of the incredible people who work for the Audio Video Industry. In this post, we are profiling Chris Bartram. Here is his brief introduction. Chris Bartram is the Managing Director of Crystal Display Systems, Digital Electronic Display Specialists located in Dartford, United Kingdom. 1. Describe […]
“…software is eating the world.” — Marc Andreessen In 10 years or less, what was once the AV industry is going to be a be a footnote in the history of business technology, somewhere among the overhead projector and the fax machine. This hardware-centric industry we call home, this perpetual contest of who sells both […]
For those of you who don’t know me well, I am pretty active in networking with other AV professionals, technology managers, designers, content producers, etc If there is one thing most of them agree on, it’s that doing a proper needs analysis is the only way to assure that our systems meet all of our […]
No other AV publication or agency produced as much content around InfoComm19 as rAVe. I mean, it wasn’t even close. Gary did a ton of pre-show interviews and previews, Johnny and Victoria ran the podcast booth on the show floor at the Peerless-AV booth and were booked day in and day out, and an army […]
See part one of Anthony’s Planned Obsolescence column here. Since planned obsolescence for pro AV gear harms sales, service contracts and product support, the future for the AV industry may be headed toward the “as a service” model borrowed from the software industry. Should there be standards for planned obsolescence? Even the IT industry, with […]
In my last article, I spoke of the need to design the spaces we deal with not by thinking about the tech stack, but instead from the perspective of an experience. But in order to do this, we need to understand WHOSE experience we are referring to. For the most part, when we design a […]
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, […]
In my biweekly blog series, I am highlighting some of the incredible people who work for the Audio Video Industry. In this post, we are profiling Hossam Al-kurdi. Here is his brief introduction. Hossam Al-kurdi works as an AV Pre-Sales and Design Manager at Site Technology, an Audio Visual Solutions Provider located in Abu Dhabi, […]
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. […]
5/30/2019 Rancho Santa Margarita, CA Every year, Phenomenal Industries introduces at least one new GAMECHANGING product before InfoComm, AV’s premier commercial trade show. Last year, there was an explosion of activity around ShareChair, the revolutionary huddle room collaboration product that blurred the lines between technology and furniture to change the way we share information. It […]
A few weeks ago, I sat in on a meeting with the head of global real estate for an innovative company here in California. He was amazingly generous in sharing his strategy on how he approached developing properties for his company, and I took three pages of notes over that 20 minute period. I think […]
By and large, our industry has four players… we have manufacturers, we have dealers/integrators and consultants (let’s be honest though, they are really two sides of a coin) and then we have the end user.Twenty years ago, a user would come to a consultant or a dealer and say… “I need a room built out!” […]
Last month, I spent some time in this column standing on one of my traditional soapboxes, namely that the AV rental and staging company has come to a point in the history of our industry where it becomes necessary to do some reinvention of our products and services. In my usual roundabout way, I came […]
In my biweekly blog series, I am highlighting some of the incredible people who work for the Audio Video Industry. In this post, we are profiling Nawsad Joomratty. Here is his brief introduction. Nawsad Joomratty is the Founder and Managing Director of the engineering office at Home Automation by NJ located in Lausanne, Canton of […]
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’ve spent a fair amount of time in the field troubleshooting systems. These days, as a distributor rep, I’m on the other end of the phone, fielding calls from dealers and helping them troubleshoot installations that use my hardware. Mostly, how I handle those calls is to walk through and confirm what they’ve already done: […]
Last year, Crestron was the focus of some cyber activists who found vulnerabilities in Crestron touch controllers that could theoretically allow someone to use touch screens to spy on the person in the same room. This was covered in a class at a hacktivist conference called DEFCON and subsequently was written up in WIRED Magazine. […]
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 […]
Evolving how we understand and design collaborative spaces One of the most consistent things we see in corporate facilities/classrooms/lecture halls worldwide is that they have been equipped with some manner of technology package that is there for the users of that space to better communicate with others. And one of the most consistent things about […]
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 […]
In my biweekly blog series, I am highlighting some of the incredible people who work for the Audio Video Industry. In this post, we are profiling Marla Suttenberg. Here is her brief introduction. Marla Suttenberg is the Owner of Sapphire Marketing LLC, a manufacturer’s representative organisation located in Greater New York City, US. 1. […]
Whether you’re working on improving yourself personally or professionally, it’s essential to have the ability to be introspective and analytical, in order to identify what you need to work on. That’s also true when you’re coaching others. In that, self-improvement has a lot in common with troubleshooting systems and equipment at work: diagnose, analyze, repair, […]
Security has arisen as a significant issue over the past several years in the AV industry. Several high profile issues have made people question what they should be doing about security. I (and others) have written about it, trying to give our readers some thoughts about where to start. As I read more about security […]
In the last month, I’ve had the opportunity to listen and learn a lot about the modern workplace and the principles behind its design. The philosophy goes well beyond the phrase “open” and really capitalizes on the idea of activity based working and creating spaces that allow for independent work, team collaboration, large team meetings, […]
It’s national stress awareness month, so I thought I’d share one of the techniques I use at work to reduce stress for my readers. We’re a company that focuses on making your meetings something you can actually enjoy, and my own design team will talk about “de-stressing” opportunities in our own UI. However, there are […]
For many years, the joke in the rental and staging industry has been that we exist as the unpaid (and uncredited) research and development arm of the manufacturers that we buy from. Often, we are the first buyers of new technologies for a number of reasons. First, because of the technological pressure to stay ahead […]
A start-up audiovisual systems integrator needs to take every single lead seriously because, with no backlog of client work, every new lead feels like immediate gratification as a sales lead. When this company grows and has plenty of work, do the leads become less important or is every new lead still a sales lead? The […]
