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InFocus Is Getting Out of the Projector and Display Business (Updated)

InFocus PanelBook 450 LCD Panel

The industry’s first portable “projector” manufacturer, InFocus, is getting out of the display and projector businesses overall. The company apparently held an all-company meeting at 12:30 p.m. today to inform their teams that they were ceasing display operations. Telling their teams they were “looking at new strategies,” they started to layoff the majority of the employees today starting at 1:00 p.m. EST – calling them one-by-one.

Author’s Note: Let’s help them get jobs! Tell them to post their resumes here (in rAVe’s AV Industry Professionals LinkedIn Group) and we will share them over and over on social!

What a fall for a company who was not only once the darling of the AV industry but whose name was synonymous with their product itself — like people call tissues Kleenex, lots and lots people call projectors InFocuses.

InFocus PLAY IN72

Founded in 1986, I put the term “projector” in quotation marks intentionally as their first product was actually called an LCD panel that you’d place on top of an overhead projector (OHP) to allow for projection of images from a computer using the OHP’s lamp. Soon after that, they became the first-ever DLP projector manufacturer using Texas Instruments’ DMD chip technology. As the company’s website says, many firsts followed, including first sub-five-pound projector, the first ultra-thin projection television and the first all-in-one interactive whiteboard with touch technology with built-in videoconferencing — many people credit them with inventing the collaboration board market with the Mondopad.

InFocus Mondopad

In 1999, InFocus purchased PROXIMA — coincidentally, I wrote about that debacle of an acquisition earlier this week — and in 2015, the company purchased Jupiter Systems.

For now, InFocus is still here.

Update:

InFocus released the following statement today:

“InFocus Corporation is pivoting its strategic business model which has resulted in a worldwide workforce reduction this week. The company will continue to offer support to channel customers for current and past generation InFocus products.” – Randy Arnold, President, InFocus Corp.

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