Well I haven't posted a blog entry in a while, as things have been pretty hectic lately. Last week had me at InfoComm/EduComm, while working on the August issue, and in a few days I'm off to NECC.
InfoComm was great, very busy and large, not too much of an indication of our Great Recession, though attendance was down slightly. About half a million products are competing for your attention, but I had some great meetings with Sharp, Hitachi, Extron, and Canon, just to name a few. Projectors were everywhere! A couple things stood out. First, I saw more and more 3D content on the show floor, due in large part to Texas Instruments' DLP, which boasts 3D capabilities in their projector chip. So a number of manufacturers had their own projector and basket of glasses. Funny though, they all essentially had the same demo images on display. Why? Because there isn't any content developed for it yet. Which is what I said in my conversations, this is a pretty neat innovation, but to be of any use in schools, you need the curricular content to back it up.
Also, I saw this CLASSPAC product advertised everywhere. This is a pretty unique one that stood out to me for two reasons: it's actually a package developed by a partnership of six different manufacturers, and it demonstrates a new trend in ed. tech: connections. The CLASSPAC is made up of classroom audio speakers, a screen, projector mount, connections and a control interface. I saw a number of companies with their own control systems for operating classroom technology, Calypso Systems and Extron among them. This trend makes sense as an increasing amount of technology is entering schools, operating all of them simply is harder and harder. Who wants six different power buttons, plugging in and unplugging components, walking across the room to turn the lights off and then back on, etc.? Infrastructure products supporting all of these components is therefore becoming more important.
More on what I saw later!
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