Well, here we are at the close of ISE Day Four. My feet hurt, and my new sneakers are definitely trashed.

But it has been a great show, and it broke all records. This morning, at the closing keynote, the director of the show announced that we had not just broken ISE attendance records, but the attendance records for ANY show in our industry, moving ISE into being the number one AV show in the world. And it breaks the records any other way you want to evaluate it, too: number of exhibitors, square feet and ruined sneakers.

The displacement of the InfoComm show in the U.S. as the number one show hurts a little, since I am from North America and have been attending the show since it was called Commtex, or in other words for nearly 30 years. But if I have to spend one week a year in Amsterdam from here on out, it won’t be the worst thing that ever happened to me. Goodness knows, I would rather travel here for a show than to Orlando, which in my opinion is the most loathsome place to attend a show I can think of. For more on this, see my column “The Small World of AV” on the blog.

Anyway, this morning’s keynote was by Dr. Michio Kaku, one of the top futurists in the world (if you judge by best-selling books and PBS and BBC specials) and it was both entertaining and thought provoking. Lots more about it on our website. I, personally, didn’t find any of it particularly profound, but it was certainly entertainingly presented.

Then I recorded an interview with Dr. Kevin Sanderson, Director of R&D at the NSG Group, a developer of specialized glass. Having been a photographer most of my life, I have a great appreciation of the role specialized glass has played in our industry. They were showing a number of glass formulations for our business, One was a glass that was anti-reflective (meaning that in most situations you can’t even tell it is there) and another was a really high quality transparent mirror glass that looks like a traditional mirror but transmits light from behind it, so that you can place a screen behind the mirror that completely disappears unless it is in use. Developers of digital mirror systems, some of which just look like the LCD screens that they really are, need to look at this glass.

Then, my most interesting podcast of the day was one I recorded with Annabelle Kayye, my assistant for the show. Like her father, our illustrious leader Gary Kayye, she is a social media devotee, and as many of my readers will know, I am not. Since there is a 30-year difference in our ages (yes, Annabelle is nine), we had a very insightful talk about the generational difference in the way we communicate. I walked away with a much better understanding of the “why” of social media. I didn’t change my mind, but I really appreciated her views on the subject, and on the difference in the way somebody who is 50 and somebody who is 20 (her real age) see the industry and the show.

I am off to record a closing podcast with Gary, and then to try to get a standby seat to get home. Four days is enough.