Kramer announced today that it has acquired 50 percent of WOW Vision, a Singapore-based manufacturer of wireless and collaboration products for the corporate, hospitality meeting spaces and education markets. Its products enable wireless connection to, and the sharing of, large screen displays from laptops and mobile devices, offering efficient two-way collaboration.

rAVe founder Gary Kayye says, “This investment into WOW Vision instantly puts Kramer into the wireless collaboration business head-on with Barco’s ClickShare and Christie’ Brio as well as with systems OEM systems from AMX and Crestron that are wireless room systems. This is a good investment for Kramer. The WOW Vision Collab8 is probably the most powerful systems-oriented wireless room system on the market. I suspect you’ll soon see smaller, easier-to-use versions come from this Kramer/WowVision marriage.”

Kramer will now be responsible for worldwide branding and distribution of Wow Vision’s products, though Wow Vision will continue to conceive and develop industry products.

Bill Mullin, president of Starin, WOW Vision’s current distributor says, “As the current WOW Vision distributor, Starin views this as a very positive move. This will validate WOW Vision’s advanced collaboration solution, Collab8,  by having a world-wide significant name in AV behind it. This will facilitate growth for development, as well as reaching market potential. What our current channel partners know as a true ahead-of the-curve platform will be assured of greater capabilities. Starin has an excellent relationship already with Kramer and there are talks with management for a highly coordinated and effective go-to-market that will help new and existing resellers reach greater income and profits with the tools to satisfy customers.”

Kramer will be launching its first two products as part of the new venture at InfoComm next month in Las Vegas — the Kramer VIA Collage and the Kramer VIA Connect.

The BYOD oriented Kramer VIA Collage can do all of the following:

• wirelessly allow up to six participants to show their screens on one display, with the possibility of using two displays and allowing up to twelve participants to be simultaneously displayed;
• allows collaboration from any mix of devices — PCs, Macs, tablets, smart phones and so forth;
• enables meeting participants to simultaneously create and edit a common document through their individual device;
• provides the ability for documents to be shared and saved instantaneously by all team participants utilizing the VIA Collage;
• through its interactive whiteboard function, offers multiple users the ability to annotate, edit or highlight any image on the screen via their touch enabled device;

The compact VIA Connect is a wireless presentation hub that provides quick and easy wireless connection to, and sharing of, a large screen device by several users. Multiple meeting participants can display their images, or at any time one individual presenter can easily choose to have their device be the only image displayed. As with the VIA Collage, the VIA Connect can accommodate any PC, Mac, iOS or Android device.

Kramer is here and WOWVision is here. More information on the VIA Connect and VIA Collage should be here on Kramer’s new products page soon.