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A View From The Road – Volume 2, Number 3a
Observations on technology trends from the latest conferences
and seminars.
July 6, 2008
In This Edition:
• InfoComm 2008 continued:
• The final count
• News from the show, part two
• NXT-who?
• Next Stop, The Wainhouse Research
Summit
As promised in my last “View
From The Road,” here is additional information from this year’s enormous
InfoComm exhibition.
InfoComm 08 is
officially being called the largest Pro AV tradeshow in history, with a
reported 34,678 attendees and 988 exhibitors. These numbers represent just about a 10%
and 15% respective increase over last years record figures. I think our industry is doing something
right.
~~~~~~
Below are just a
few more interesting InfoComm items / comments I left off the last report. As always, these are not necessarily
picked-up and / or analyzed by the mainstream coverage.
This was the first
InfoComm for the now merged AVI-SPL company. Our industry has seen a number of failed
mega-mergers in the past, so all eyes are on Tampa to see how the newly combined firm
will do. (Of course, with none of
the past deals having the savvy of Marty Schaffel
at the helm, there is likely no comparison.) Right on the heels of that April deal
though, it was announced at the show that the US integrator The Whitlock
Group and the UK integrator Impact have formed a “global alliance” for
seamless services on both sides of the pond. If this trend of mergers continues one
has to keep a very skeptical eye at firms rushing into the fray. It will be important to fully evaluate
any new combinations to determine if the merged entities truly offer added
value, or if it’s just a number of “me-too” deals to keep up with the
trend.
For some notable
new gear:
·
Crestron showed their new TPS-6X series of touch panels. Not very obvious at their display was the
fact that this new generation has amongst its other challenges the
difficult task of replacing the ubiquitous model 1700 RF wireless panel,
heavily used in the industry. A
whole bunch of programmers and end-user firms had better start revising
their programming templates.
·
Projection, projection, projection – There were a number of
remarkable trends in projection technology at this show. These included:
o
Numbers game – a lot of press around the
“3LCD consortium” of business that use…well three LCDs
in their projectors. See www.3lcd.com. Also, a new four LCD engine by Sanyo
(adding yellow to red, blue and green), in theory adding 20% more shades of
colors that can be done with three.
(Sorry, I can’t help thinking about how Spinal Tap’s volume
goes to eleven…and when Sanyo brought out the violinist / dancers in
spandex I just knew the 20% better had to be true…)
o
Miniaturization –next year look for a bunch
of ultra-portable projectors (“Pico engines”), in sizes from a cell phone
to a paperback book and lumen ratings of only up to 15.
(Nifty gadgets, but I
wasn’t the only one trying to figure out the value of something that dark.)
o
3D – there were a few
displays, projectors and screens (Texas Instruments, Projectiondesign,
Da-Lite, Phillips and others) which could easily
make one believe that true 3D images with no special eyewear are much
closer to a commercial reality than one would have thought.
~~~~~~
Finally, a few
comments about the NXTcomm conference that was
co-located with InfoComm this year, and will be again in two years…
Um… Well…
(Does anyone have a few comments?)
No, really, if you
do have a few please let me know cause I sure don’t. No one I ran into did either. None of the InfoComm attendees I spoke
with got to see any of it. A few
folks told me they tried to make it over on Thursday but all they saw was
the hall being packed-up. (Note to
organizers – if you co-locate with another conference for a number of days,
please try to make the shows overlap at the end. Simple logic dictates that people won’t
go to the “other” one till they’ve seen the one they came for. No one that came for InfoComm saw a bit
of the other show in this case.)
~~~~~~
Read
the first half of this article
~~~~~~
My next View From
the Road will be a report on the Wainhouse Research Collaboration Summit
taking place in Boston
July 16th to 18th. Visit www.wainhouse.com
for more information, or better yet, go to Boston and join us.
------------------------------------
A View From The Road is written by
David Danto and contains solely his own, personal opinions. David has spent
30 years in the audio visual and broadcasting industries. He has designed
facilities for firms such as AT&T, Bloomberg LP, FNN, Morgan Stanley,
NYU and Lehman Brothers. He has just joined JPMorgan Chase & Company
and is the IMCCA’s Director of Emerging
Technology. Email David at David.Danto.IMCCA@Danto.com
About the IMCCA
The Interactive
Multimedia & Collaborative Communications Alliance (IMCCA) is a
not-for-profit user application and industry focused association with
membership comprised of service and product providers, consultants, and
users. Members benefit from the understanding and the use of various
interactive and collaborative communications technologies in their
professional and everyday lives.
For further information please contact Carol Zelkin, IMCCA Executive
Director, at 516-818- 8184 or czelkin@imcca.org. Visit the IMCCA web site
at www.imcca.org
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