Last month, I wrote about how I don’t want to see another whiteboard advertised as THE solution for the classroom of the future. I stand by that, I still don’t like them, but I think I may have not been clear about one thing, the concept behind what they are trying to do makes sense. […]
If you’ve read my posts before, you’ll notice that I have rarely predicted the death of any particular technology or business model. Sure, I have my ideas on where the industry is heading or which technologies may ultimately win out in the end, but I never go so far as to say this is the […]
Those of you who know me know that I loathe most social media, especially Twitter. I feel that Twitter has done significant damage to our language, to the point that I now get email without punctuation or complete sentences. Our universities seem to have eliminated the essay in favor of the Tweet. I actually heard […]
Everyone who’s anyone in AV knows that 4K provides four times the resolution of 1080p. 1920×1080, commonly referred to as ‘Full HD’ was the industry’s high-resolution display platform for over a decade and has recently been usurped by 4K — which in ProAV-land is known as UHD, or 3840×2160 (or in DCI-world, 4096×2160) is, in […]
It doesn’t feel like that long ago that network connectivity in AV hardware was an idea more noted in the breach than in the observance. But times have changed. What started with lighting control and other automation hardware eventually migrated into mainstream AV products. Honestly, once you’ve got those features, there’s no going back. Luxuries […]
Integrate turned 10 yesterday when the halls opened at the new International Convention Centre Sydney in Darling Harbour. We have four reporters here covering the show both through extensive social media coverage (see @rAVePubs on Instagram and Twitter) as well as via a dedicated show microsite. In fact, we’ve already shot and posted over 150 […]
Every business owner in every company hopes, especially when they invent or pioneer something unique, that their competition will be good. Bad competition tends to shred an industry and can lead to its eventual demise. For example, I have many friends that own AV integration firms — they love the good competition and loathe the […]
There are quite a few conferences that focus on AV equipment. On the consumer side, there is CES, on the broadcast side there is NAB, then for residential AV there is CEDIA Expo and for commercial AV, we have InfoComm. The latest conference to focus on AV equipment, however, happened Friday, August 10th. The conference? DEFCON. […]
The corporate market continues to account for the largest segment of ProAV revenue. According to AVIXA’s Industry Outlook Trends and Analysis (IOTA), ProAV solutions for corporate office environments are expected to generate nearly $15 billion in revenue in the Americas in 2018. Growth is expected to be somewhat slower than the overall industry, at 1.5 […]
At my institution, we began putting our AV systems on the network over a dozen years ago. The advantages were simply amazing. In fact, we take so many of these for granted today, we forget some of them. For example, when was the last time you thought about how amazing it is that you can […]
This past week I was in Barcelona for ISE’s announcement that the show would move there icapitaln 2021 after 14 years in Amsterdam. We were under strict non-disclosure from telling anyone we had been invited there — we hadn’t been told what the announcement was, but it certainly wasn’t hard to guess — but then […]
Unlike EVERY other InfoComm awards program, we don’t let companies enter themselves AND we don’t take money to apply for awards. EVERY other InfoComm awards program is pay-for-play and are NOT to be believed. They aren’t real. They are, in fact, #FakeAwards Now, I am not saying rAVe’s Best of InfoComm 2018 Awards are perfect, […]
InfoComm 2018 is a month behind us, and over the last few weeks, people have been writing about the trends they saw at the show. We’ve seen blogs discussing increasing end-user attendance as well as several people’s lists of their favorite products or the ones they saw to be the most innovative or disruptive. There […]
I think that InfoComm 2018 may have been the signal to me that I have started to turn from a technology dreamer into a practical user of technology. This transition was realized as I toured around looking at the continual assortments of “collaborative” or digital whiteboards. For years and years I have been searching for […]
Integrated Systems Events, the producers of the Integrated Systems Europe exhibition, has announced that its 2021 edition will be held at Gran Via, part of the Fira de Barcelona exhibition complex in Spain on 2-5 February. The new venue will become the permanent location for the world’s largest AV and systems integration show. The decision to relocate the ISE exhibition comes after 18 months […]
As we talked about in my last post about learning how to program, object orientedness is the name of the game when it comes to writing scaleable code that’s easy to update. Break your code up into little chunks that you can reuse. Figure out how to do it once, and you should (hopefully) never […]
In my day job, I answer a lot of people’s questions about audiovisual and virtual reality technology. In fact, lately, that’s really all I seem to be doing. And to find those answers quickly, especially when it comes to determining things like part numbers and dimensions, I turn to the source that most people use: […]
Author and educator Stephen R. Covey, probably most well-known for his book “The 7 Habits of Highly Effective People,” often said in his presentations that: “Most People do not Listen with the intent to understand; they listen with the intent to reply.” Think about the last meeting you attended. I don’t care what the meeting […]
It’s here! You’ve been asking for it and we released it today. Each year, we produce a wrap-up video to give you a glimpse of the InfoComm show. Are you in it? Is your company highlighted? Check It! and watch here:
With the new branding, AVIXA appears to have picked up a new motto, one which many of us have seen on the various promotional items for sale in the AVIXA store at InfoComm: “Together, we can change the way people experience the world.” Those who know me I believe in language, and believe in having […]
Another InfoComm is now behind us. As we return to our everyday lives, we should look back and reflect on what we learned and experienced over the past week. For those of you who weren’t able to attend, this is a chance to share some of the lessons I found across the country in Las […]
I just finished up teaching CTS prep for Avixa during the three-day classes before the InfoComm show. Not only was this a fun and a rewarding experience… I also came away with a new challenge. Several of my fellow instructors encouraged me to step up my certification game and get both my CTS-D and my […]
In May, Bates College announced that we would be building a new science building over the next couple of years. Many of us on campus have been working on this project for over a year. As the building promises to be an amazing addition to the college, it also presented an interesting change as I […]
“Experience” has been the big word in the industry as of late, even beyond the big change in our trade organization’s name to “Avixa” — the Audiovisual and Integrated Experience Association. Is this a buzzword, or should this represent a change in the way we design, and even how we think? It shouldn’t, because user […]
We are excited to announce the winners of our 2018 Readers’ Choice Awards. Our awards are different than ANY other industry awards and the stats speak for themselves: We had over 92,000 voters for the final awards! The nominations for the awards came SOLELY from you – the AV community. We have a system that […]
Any good MBA student from the last decade can tell you about design thinking. It seemed to be one of the buzzwords of the business world for several years. But more than just in engineering and product design, it has started to leak into all areas of business. It can help determine strategy, it can […]
When I was a kid, “family television” meant television to be watched by the family, and not television about families rehearsing for their court date or climbing over each other’s bodies to get to the throne. No, “family television” meant “Mutual of Omaha’s Wild Kingdom,” hosted by noted zoologist Marlin Perkins. Each week, the show […]
We just covered one of the most creative manufacturer-based regional shows, ever. NEC Display’s UK office has been holding what they call the NEC Showcase for 10-year now and this year, rAVe was invited to cover the show with a dedicated microsite (just like we do at major shows like InfoComm, CEDIA, ISE, Integrate and […]
NEC UK’s creative team deserves a raise. The 2018 version of the NEC Showcase was themed “Your Day in Digital” and it basically showed how NEC (and its 40+ technology partners) can enhance the average workday. Starting with your Tube ride from home, stopping to grab coffee, arriving at the office and continuing through an average workday […]
AVIXA is going out of its way to say that its new Integrated Life @ InfoComm isn’t competitive to the industry’s defacto HomeAV show, CEDIA. But, I call bulls*t. First, look at this. That’s basically the what’s new at InfoComm page — letting everyone know what all the new things AVIXA added to the industry’s top […]
As a part of keeping up with global business trends and events, I subscribe to several on-line feeds from industry and economic publications. These feeds including the Financial Times, Bloomberg and so forth are a great way to get the highlights of activities around the world that may be impacting our little corner of the […]
Update: Just two days following the publication of this blog, Barco announced exactly what I suggested — they’ve integrated Overture into ClickShare! It will be shown at InfoComm. Click here to read more about the announcement. At least year’s ISE show in Amsterdam, Barco officially launched itself into a (potentially) competitive fight with the […]
