In This Edition:
• InfoComm 2008 continued
• The final count
• News from the show, part 2
• 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.

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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:

oNumbers 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 than 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…)

oMiniaturization –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.)

o3D – 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.)

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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.

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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