In This Edition:
• InfoComm 2008
• IMCCA “Unified Collaborative Conferencing Pavilion”
• Leveraging end-users for convergence
• “I’ll know it when I see it”
• Other news from the show, part one

One year shy of its 70th anniversary, InfoComm International’s 2008 exhibition and conference just wrapped-up here in Las Vegas. Most of the exhibitors and attendees I spoke with had the same experience of the show that I did – this was the biggest and busiest conference InfoComm has ever done. Final attendance figures were not tallied yet, but I heard the number of attendees was around the 35,000. Especially in light of the size and scope, kudos need to go out to Executive Director Randal Lemke and the rest of the InfoComm team for the tremendous job they did organizing the exhibits on the show floor. With a very small number of large vendor exceptions, the exhibitors were grouped into logical areas for their space. This is just the kind of organization that technology conference attendees have been asking for for years. There were pavilions for audio, lighting and staging, digital signage, and the IMCCA’s very own unified collaborative conferencing pavilion. Never before have this many competing telepresence and conferencing systems been shown, fully functioning, side-by-side, right on the floor of a conference center. This was a remarkable achievement in logistics, connectivity and coordination, and proved to be one of the most popular spots on the show floor.

This year’s pre show “Manufacturer’s Forum” featured senior executives from Christie Digital, Harmon Pro, Crestron, Polycom and Scala discussing many interesting and complex topics. There was general agreement around a number of ideas:

• EMEA and Asia are the hotspots for growth in the industry right now, especially in light of the current US economy.
• Our industry is beginning to focus more on the creativity our solutions providers can deliver as opposed to just the technology.
• Video based communications is definitely “mainstream” at this point, with digital delivery and connectivity becoming the norm.

Yours truly raised a question regarding the pressure on end users to facilitate the kind of interoperability that successful AV installations require. The panelists felt that this was too much to expect of the end users, and that manufacturers should do a better job of working together. However, when it was pointed out that some of these manufacturers are not from the traditional AV industry, but rather the IT industry, the opinion quickly changed to one of reliance on these end users to bring their leverage and buying power to the market on behalf of the AV industry – asking companies like Microsoft and Cisco to “play nice” with AV companies. I hope we can come up with a formal process to organize and exert this leverage more effectively than has been done to date.

One of the traditional IT manufacturers did step-up at this years show, as much to their credit, Cisco chose to participate in InfoComm and the IMCCA’s first annual “Telepresence@infocomm” full day seminar. The event was also a tremendous success, with the many in attendance able to hear from and speak with the manufacturers and service providers in the telepresence space. In addition, actual telepresence end users presented case studies regarding their deployments and usage. The last part of the day was a rousing open forum to try to get some definition around the telepresence vs. videoconferencing confusion. The general agreement of the more than 20 experts that participated in the discussions was that Telepresence is truly a marketing term that refers to the experience more than the technology involved – meaning the results are greater than the sum total of all the parts. Rob Arnold, The CTO of Telanetix, appearing on the “ask the experts” panel, was a particularly vocal advocate of looking past the expensive equipment being suggested by most of the manufacturers in the space, and using the end-user’s experience as the guideline. Whatever Telepresence truly means, it is now a defining term for the industry and one we’re stuck with. Or, as one of our end-users put it, “I may not be able to define it, but I know it when I see it.” The IMCCA (with much thanks to York Telecom) was able to capture most of the event on video for use in a webcast of excerpts to be shown in the future.

This session was only one of the more than 350 educational opportunities that InfoComm and its partners presented. While many of these were widely attended and appreciated, and as much as I like to keep these conference reports positive wherever possible, I do have to comment about how personally embarrassed I was about the quality of the AV support present at many of them (at least the ones I participated in.) With layouts set wrong, wireless microphones failing more often than working and no organization around the provision of PCs in the session rooms, I felt like the in-house Las Vegas Convention Center AV staff should have been attending the sessions, not helping facilitate them. Shame on our industry - the clear experts in the space - for putting up with the obviously amateurish effort. We owe our session attendees an apology and our gratitude for putting up with and looking past the problems.

There were a number of interesting stories at this year’s show that may be overlooked in the traditional event coverage. Here are just a few of them in the conferencing space:

• Polycom formally exposed its new “VC2” marketing campaign to the attendees. Their literature said VC2, “transforms traditional video conferencing into visual communication. With VC2, video is a pervasive component of enterprise communication - on desktops, in meeting rooms, [and] on mobile devices.” It was really great to see Polycom showing that they “get-it” in a way that arguably may have been missing from them in the past. With good ideas, good products, good people and good marketing their VC2 initiative was a great step for them.

• Tandberg, also positioning themselves for the future, showed both their new 1080P “telepresence engine” and a new, SIP only, desktop video phone coming early next year.

• Teliris showed what they believe to be the next step in immersive telepresence, their InterACT Touch Table and Touch Wall. This is a display built into a room’s table or wall that uses a human touch interface to share documents and collaborate with other participants in a conference. (While this is a vast oversimplification, think IPhone with half the surface in one city and half in another.) There was debate amongst those who experienced it if it truly is the next step in telepresence, but there was no debate that it was extremely impressive and innovative.

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With too much at this conference to cover in just one “view from the road”, we will send out a second edition and/or an additional newsletter with more details from InfoComm in the very near future.
To be continued……

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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.TPWorld@Danto.com