Joel Rollins’ Afternoon Observations of Day Three of ISE 2016

February 11, 2016 - BlogSquad, ISE News & Blogs,

lang-ise-0216 This afternoon, Annabelle and I had the opportunity (a rare one) to stop Amanda Beckner, vice president of learning at InfoComm, to talk about the direction being taken by InfoComm’s education department. Amanda is a person of rare energy and enthusiasm. I have at times in the past been critical of InfoComm’s educational department and direction, but the promotion of Amanda to vice president of learning is one of the best moves I have seen them make in a long time. We had a long talk about the way they are modernizing the association’s learning materials into a new learning content management system. I think this is worth watching, for those of you who have employees to train, as Amanda laid out for me their plans to make the association’s learning more accessible.

I also recorded an audio podcast with Bob Snyder of rAVe Europe, who after publishing in the audiovisual industry in Europe for a number of decades, is a true authority on the market. We discussed the growth of the show, and the fact that we have already broken last year’s attendance with 65,000 unique attendees-and the show still has another day to go. Gary and I talked in a podcast last week about a predicted number of 68,000, and I believe we may achieve that number.

We also stopped by the Lang AG stand, with what has to be the most magnificent set up of a large LED screen system (8K by 4K). For those of you who have followed my reports from the show for the last couple of years, you will know that I have a great deal of admiration for the crew at Lang and their always-interesting exhibit.

Then, I had a chance to speak with Jentry Wittkamper of Draper Screen, who is the company’s export sales manager. He has been exhibiting at ISE since its very early days, and we had an opportunity to discuss the differences between the U.S. show and ISE, as well as the general direction of the European market.