Last week was an eventful one for Zoom. In less than twenty-four hours, we had: The revelation of multiple security vulnerabilities in the popular Zoom conferencing software A [now updated] defensive statement by Zoom, dismissing concerns related to same Public outcry A reversal of course and introduction of an immediate patch for one vulnerability and […]
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 […]
By now, you’ve probably heard the news that Rashid Skaf-led Biamp is buying Audioprof Group International, which is the parent company of Community Loudspeakers (based in Philadelphia) and Apart Audio (based in Antwerp, Belgium) from 3d Investors of Gent, Belgium. Bruce Howze founded the company in 1968, which was first named Community Light and Sound. […]
The AV/IT industry has a problem, one of its own making and one that is getting worse by the micro-second. There are just too many conflicting and confusing “standards” and best practices. Between those created by trade groups, those developed by technical associations or technology consortia (worse yet as these tend to be proprietary) and […]
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 […]
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 […]
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, […]
Extron just introduced the DMP 128 FlexPlus series of compact Dante Digital Matrix Processors, featuring twelve FlexInput channels with full DSP, including AEC and Dante connectivity, in only a half rack space. With a mix matrix, a USB audio interface and analog compatibility, the DMP 128 FlexPlus provides the ability to easily connect and route […]
From Friday’s AVIXA Foundation Career Day, welcoming students to the show, to the more than 40 percent of registered attendees under the age of 40, InfoComm 2019, June 8-14 in Orlando, continued to draw the next generation of audiovisual professionals, as well as a broad cross-section of engaged AV customers from higher education, hospitality, retail […]
Semtech Corporation today announced its new AVX chipset series — basically, think HDBaseT or, we guess, what everyone wishes HDBaseT was — a consistent and standard “send” and “receive” platform where all the participants worked together. Semtech, with AVX, simultaneously transmits uncompressed-quality 4K-video, multi-channel audio, Gigabit Ethernet, USB and other control signals over CatX or […]
Video games have long been considered by “adults” to be a way for “children” to waste their time. However, over the past several years, as games have become more interactive and team based, they have become more mainstream. Today, watching others play video games is also a popular activity. According to Wikipedia, the 2017 League […]
We are excited to announce the winners of our 2019 Readers’ Choice Awards. Our awards are different than ANY other industry awards and the stats speak for themselves: We had over 88,000 votes for the final awards! The nominations for the awards came SOLELY from you — the AV community. We have a system […]
For all of the massive technology improvements and innovations within the AV industry, there is irony in the faster obsolescence of digital equipment compared to the analog age of AV, leaving customers vulnerable to unexpected end-of-life notifications of planned obsolescence at the discretion of the manufacturer and reducing the life-span of digital AV gear. In […]
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 […]
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 […]
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. […]
One of my guilty pleasures is organization consultant Marie Kondo’s Netflix show, Tidying Up. Even those who’ve not seen her know of her, have seen the jokes about discarding those things that don’t “spark joy,” and have heard something about her growing influence. As I make my return to the design consulting world and leave […]
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 […]
SnapAV and Control4 Corporation today announced that they have entered into a “merger” agreement whereby SnapAV will acquire Control4 in an all-cash transaction for $23.91 per share in cash, representing an aggregate value of approximately $680 million. The Control4 stock last traded $17.12 per share so the shareholders are likely to take this buyout. Although […]
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 […]
In a previous column, “Signal to Noise,” I discussed the ever-increasing amount of marketing communications besieging our end-users/customers. And while that trend in and of itself has a multifaceted impact on the industry, there is an underlying issue that has a much, much, much larger potential impact and is truly the dark side of the […]
By Erik Indresøvde AV Target Network configuration is a key consideration when deploying AV over IP, so if you’re in the AV industry, you should probably familiarize yourself with the terms “Multicast“and “IGMP” sooner rather than later. Multicast is basically a group communication where a single stream of data is addressed to a group of […]
In two previous columns on the regular rAVe Blogsquad feed, I explored the issues surrounding both manufacturer communications and the increasing perceived problem of direct sales by manufacturers and suppliers to end users, essentially going around the establish dealer/integrator/retail distribution structure. However, there is another side to this story, one that is often being treated […]
It’s that time of year again! We are now accepting nominations for the 8th Annual Readers’ Choice Awards and we need you (our readers) to tell us who you think the best of the best is in the AV industry. In case you didn’t know every year at InfoComm we give out our annual rAVe Readers’ […]
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 […]
