Back From Infocomm, Off To ISTE

Well Infocomm was so hectic I didn't even have time to blog! And what a tidal wave of information. Thousands of new A/V products were on display, and my days extended into nights each day I was there. A whole lot of projectors, digital signage, and interactive whiteboards especially. But there's hardly time to recover, as I'm here at the office just long enough to get some work done on these next two issues, and fly to Denver for ISTE 2010 this weekend.

My ISTE schedule is similarly swamped! Appointments with everything from video streaming, student information systems and interactive whiteboards to school Web site designers, curriculum software, projectors, and school computers. It should be another hectic time of information overload. But that's my job!

After this one, I hope to write some impressions from these shows and this incredibly frantic time of year for new product releases.

Infocomm 2010

Well I'm here in Las Vegas, it's the second day of Infocomm, and it feels like it's the second week! I spent all day yesterday meeting with companies ranging from videoconferencing provider PolyCom to Peerless mounts to SMART Technologies to projector makers Epson, Casio, Panasonic and Sanyo. And that was just the morning.

Attendance is up this year they say, about 15 percent to 32,000. Most of those are integrators and pro A/V installers, but of course nearly everyone here, exhibitors and installers, has K12 as a large part of their business. I've seen a lot of interactive whiteboards, including some really interesting new features like multitouch capability, smaller and more inexpensive components, and new user software.

Projectors are everywhere of course, and most of them are getting brighter, smaller and less expensive. Nearly all of them demonstrated some form of 3D capability, but admitted this technology is quite a bit ahead of application in K12. What they're all waiting for is the content. So... anyone who comes up with a good 3D program or application for K12 will have a lot of takers.

And there was some pretty wild teleconferencing technology, as you can see from the PolyCom demonstration I have pictured here. Really impressive stuff. More later!