A&B Sound gossip that likely no one cares about

Just got this in my inbox from one of my now ex-inside sources.

Haha it was A&B indeed. The head of software at Head
Office quit on the weekend, a ton of new releases aren't even ordered from the
vendors...

Imagine a Tuesday without new releases. Considering that those orders for DVDs and CDs needed to be placed a couple of weeks ago at the latest, that's a real lesson in disgruntlement for you.

I imagine that the software buyer already had another job lined up, because it's not as if CEO Paul Girard is going to write them a letter of recommendation now.

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Quick & Dirty Industry Gossip: Visions Rolling In Loot

It had been brought to my attention that western canadian CE retailer Visions saw an increase in their top line revenue for fiscal 2006 of $50 million.

This of course comes as a complete surprise to any retail analyst who has ever been in one of their stores, which are often described as three steps below Best Buy and one step above XS Cargo for cleanliness, merchandising, and the absence of vacuum cleaners or dust cloths in their store expense budget.

No one at Visions' head office elected to comment, but the question remains, is this growth in their business due to their business plan, the impact of the prairie oil boom on disposable income, or are they gaining business at the expense of a competitor?

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Kutaragi, Father Of Playstation Bids Sayonara

I totally called this last September, by the way.
LDPO: Dealbreaker.com Rakes Sony Over The Coals

I think that for a division head at Sony Corp to come right out say, essentially "We're screwed" is monumental. Don't be surprised to see Mr. Kutaragi fall on his sword, at least metaphorically, over the whole Playstation3 disaster.

And so Ken Kutaragi joins notable luminaries, such as myself, as ex-Sony.
C-Net: Sony says sayonara to father of PlayStation


The "PlayStation 3 has been a huge disappointment, No. 3 out of three in terms of console sales," said Rob Enderle, principal analyst at the Enderle Group. "It's been a huge embarrassment for the firm, and a huge hole that money has been pouring into."



Console sales in March Number of next-generation video game consoles sold in March in the U.S.
Nintendo Wii
259,000
Xbox 360
199,000
PlayStation 3
130,000
Source: NPD Group



Enderle said despite Kutaragi's massive success with previous iterations of the PlayStation, he probably couldn't survive the very public drubbing the PS3 has gotten in the market so far.
"When you go from superstar to walking disaster, there are few executives that can survive that," Enderle said. "You're only as good as your last financial report, and while he was given some leeway (with the PS3) there were obviously some huge mistakes."



On the bright side, Sony no longer expects senior execs to "atone" for bringing shame upon the brand.


Then again, given the generally rough year they've had, with batteries, PS3, and whatnot, maybe Sony could use some fresh faces and new ideas.

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Sheryl Crow Calls For Unilateral Reductions On Toilet Paper

In case any of you were still in the dark about how far out of touch the left coast's limosine liberalism movement was, there's today's adorable proclaimation from entertainer Sheryl Crow:

BBC: Crow calls for limit on loo paper

Singer Sheryl Crow has said a ban on using too much toilet paper should be introduced to help the environment.
Crow has suggested using "only one square per restroom visit, except, of course, on those pesky occasions where two to three could be required".



Easy for her to say. I mean, look at her!

I would expect that her eliminations are the size of rabbit pellets, and composed almost entirely of bran and undigested pine nuts.

Go visit the McDonalds in your local Wal-mart, take a good look at the patrons, and then tell me that her idea has any merit at all.

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A Straightforward Observation About the Google/Twitter Deal

Got this one sentence email in my inbox just now from one of my correspondants:

It just occurred to me to wonder, vis-a-vis Twitter, whether perhaps Google is now a major venture capitalist, insofar as it eagerly buys up tech companies freeing their entrepreneurs to go forth and multiply in additional directions.

That's one way of looking at it, and a refreshing change from the standard criticism that Google is turning into Microsoft: that they are out of good in-house ideas, so they're buying innovation from others.

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Best Comment On Yesterday's Blackberry Blackout

Yesterday's Blackberry Blackout affected me not at all. Of course, I have expressed my disdain for being constantly plugged in on several occassions. So it should come as no surprise that I greatly enjoyed Long or Short Capital.com's perspective on the whole event:

Long or Short Capital: RIMM Jobbed

If this continues, Blackberry users worldwide will be unable to:

• 
  affect the veneer of importance in public
• 
  take time off from vacation to stay addicted to work
• 
  ignore unwanted conversations at work-related social functions
• 
  pay complete inattention during investment meetings
• 
  achieve new high scores in Brickbreaker [ed note: 24k, bitches!]
• 
  ignore their girlfriends in the name of “last-minute requests from the PM”

Ha!

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Official Response from Monster

Here's an official statement in response to my earlier editorial about Monster's future and direction:

Hello Lee,

I had a very busy Christmas season but all is well. I hope you had a great Holiday Season as well. I appreciate your point of view and your candid comments (from someone that knows what they are talking about). Although the competition continues to grow and improve, Monster is still as strong as ever and we continue to grow market share in both Cable and Power in North America and the rest of the world market. Global sourcing continues to plague the CE industry but Monster is certainly aware of the challenges and is ready to tackle these challenges head on.

Monster has indeed expanded their product line to include products such as Playstation 3 and Xbox cables, Apple iPod accessories, MDesign furniture, THX Speakers, Handheld Contollers and Lighting and we will soon be releasing another flagship product EINSTEIN which will allow plug and play wireless home automation from anywhere. Monster also continues to grow in areas like CI, ProMI and Performance Car.

Monster has been the leader in Cable and Power technology for 28 years and we are continually improving our product and technology to provide our Dealers and Consumers with the best and easiest to sell products in the industry. Keep up the great work Lee and we will talk to you soon. I hope to be coming up to Edmonton in early March and visit everyone there.

Monsterous Regards,
Richard Webber
Canadian Regional Manager
Monster

I'm grateful to Richard for taking the time to articulate Monster's position and their vision.

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On the rocks, Monster trying to put the cable business behind them

Industry watchers will have noticed that Monster quietly dropped the word "Cable" from their name sometime in the last year. Over that time, they've been branching out into other CE goods: furniture, remote controls and iPod accessories, of course.

The reason is fairly obvious: our industry is careening towards a largely wireless world. As more and more of our equipment is networked, that means less cables to buy, or perhaps (one day) none at all. I visited the Monster campus in California three years ago when they were putting the finishing touches on their first line of furniture, and even then it was clear that Monster's future would not be dependent upon selling cables.

Monster is a company that has generated no small amount of ill-will in the industry and among niche consumers, due mostly to their resounding success. For the record, I've never been one of the player haters who criticize Monster. They did, after all, practically invent an entire aftermarket accessory category that many others have also profitted from. I haven't always agreed with their decisions or directions, but that's their perogative. Rather, I have always liked the brand, and felt that a lot of the ill will was simply jealosy and misplaced outrage: lots of CE vendors make expensive products, but not all of them get called out as "over-priced."

Here's some interesting data points to allow you armchair analysts to ponder Monster's future:

Over the last year, the emails I get from our local Monster rep have become increasingly focused on offering dealer discounts. Every month there is a "Clearance Event" and we are offered "One Time Only" deals on selected skus. For a brand that in the past always placed itself on a pedestal and sold itself on its inherent quality and value, this new approach to getting dealers to buy stuff is a bit disconcerting. In the past four months, the tone of the emails has gotten increasingly more frantic; ALL CAPS, lots of superlatives and hyperbole about how great the deals are, and the frequency of the emails has ramped up dramatically. Additionally, the breadth of the skus being offered at a discount has grown to encompass at least half of their catalogue. From the outside, this gives the impression that they are sitting on alarming amounts of inventory, and are feeling the heat.

The second point to consider is that as the number of competitors in the cable buisness has risen, more and more retailers have been seduced away from Monster, resulting in a declining dealer network. Monster officials wouldn't give me numbers even if I asked, but annecdotally it seems to be happening all over. Last week, struggling western retailer A&B Sound dropped Monster in favor of Ultralink. An anonymous source (aren't they always?) confided that Ultralink skus give them the same margin dollars at lower retail price points (what was that about Monster being overpriced?), which are more in line with the price sensitivity of the A&B shoppers who come to buy generic Chinese plasmas.

As the number of competitors has grown, Monster has been working very hard at differentiating their offerings and trying to increase their ability to compete in the marketplace. I have been watching their evolution with some interest. While their future remains in doubt, I hope they find the answers they need.

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Speaking of Home Depot

A source of mine in the heirarchy of Home Depot Canada reports that the rumors circulating internally regarding Bob Nardelli's resignation are both colorfully slanderous, and extremely consistent.

By "colorfully slanderous" I mean that I can't tell you what they told me.

And by "extremely consistent" I mean that the story is the same on every level of the Home Depot totem pole.

Very interesting...

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Another reason not to buy a Blu-ray player

CE Pro: Holographic Data Storage: Will It Top Blu-ray, HD DVD?

Forget about HD DVD and Blu-ray -- the next generation of high-definition recordable media is already here.
Holographic Data Storage (HDS) features 10x the capacity and speed of Blu-ray technology.
"By 2011 or 2012, HDS will replace high-definition DVD players," says Dick Barton, president of Displaytech, a manufacturer of chipsets called Spatial Light Modulators (SLM) used in HDS technology. "This is not an alternative to Blu-ray or HD DVD, but it is the next generation of technology."
HDS discs could start showing up in consumer electronics devices as early as 2010, according to Barton.
Besides the increased capacity, the primary difference between HDS and current DVD technology is in technology's "write head."
Today, data is written onto DVDs by a single laser, one bit at a time in a linear format. HDS technology puts the data into a "page format" that contains millions of bits of data and writes the entire "page" onto a disc. The data can be totally uncompressed high-def with no encoding artifacts, according to Barton.
An HDS disc has the same physical shape as today's DVDs. The technology is already in use in the professional market for video and data recording.

I know that the phrase "cure that has no disease" has been beaten to death. But honestly, why should consumers glom onto either HD-DVD or Blu-ray (which, so far, they haven't) when our industry dangles this high-tech carrot in front of them?

This announcement might beat Sony for sheer ludicrousness, even after their declaration that Playstation 4 is good to go in 2010, when they haven't even got their shit together with Playstation 3 yet!

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The Keyboard is Mightier than the Sword

Funny story, and I'm still not sure what it means.

Yesterday, I was on the phone with the territory rep for a supplier of ours. Purely conversationally, I asked him, "Hey, is [redacted] still the head of [redacted] in Canada?"

"Yep" he replied, then with panic in his voice "Wait, you're not going to blog about him are you?"

This totally caught me off guard. "No, I said."

Then as I got my balance back, asked "Why, what have you got?"

"Nuthin."

"Come on, you can't just drop that and leave me hanging!"

"Nope. I'm not saying anything. "

The conversation eventually drifted back to business, but I'm still baffled by his panic at the thought of me writing about his boss. I know the guy, and have met him on several occassions, and really don't have anything negative to say about him, nor have I ever heard a glimmering of anything.

Some people don't understand what Oscar Wilde said, which appears to now be The Paris Hilton Principle: The only thing worse than being talked about is not being talked about.

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Playstation Madness: It's gonna be a crummy weekend to work at Best Buy and Future Shop

Marketnews: Future Shop/Best Buy Gears Up for Gaming

Who would have thought that a new product could cause such mass consumer hysteria?

Who indeed? Certainly nobody who happened to work for Sony during the run-up to Playstation2's launch in the year 2000. *cough*

Future Shop and Best Buy are bringing out the troops to handle what will likely be their biggest product launches of the year. The night before each console’s respective launch date, the number of units to be available at that location will be posted on the store’s front doors. Each store location will have no fewer than 10 PS3 units; and between 15 and 60 Wiis. A limited amount of both will also be purchasable online at www.futureshop.ca.

On the day of reckoning, unlucky morning shift employees will arive two hours prior to store opening (8 a.m. on Friday for all locations; and varying from province to province on Sunday for the Wii) to distribute tickets to those in line on a first come, first serve basis.

As a veteran of more Boxing Day Gong Shows in the retail trenches than I care to admit to, I can imagine all too well the carnage that the management and staff at both banners will have to oversee.

One of my good friends, who is a senior executive with Future Shop confided in me that the stock situation for Friday was "grim." He went on to say "On Thursday, we will be running ads in all the major daily newspapers, explaining the situation, and asking for understanding and forbearance from our customers."

Oh my.

When I asked another contact who *cough* is a *cough* account manager for Sony Canada (really, I don't hold it against him) how bad it was going to be, his response (on condition of anonymity) was "Bad. Real bad. Thank God I'm not in that division!"

Well, I think that's enough schadenfreude for one night. I will continue to report on this story with glee regular updates.

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Newsflash: Playstation3 in short supply

TWICE: Dealers Dealing With Limited PS3 Supplies

You know, with a headline that awkward, the editors at TWICE must be flustered and irate. I'm guessing their kids are bugging them for a PS3.

New York – Retailers are as frustrated as their customers over Sony’s slim allocations of PlayStation 3 consoles, and are variously responding with resignation, launch promotions, or disregard.

The latter tack is being taken by Abt Electronics, which is choosing to ignore this Friday’s launch rather than disappoint customers. “We looked into buying truckloads through a distributor,” said president Mike Abt, who ultimately decided to pre-sell his limited allotment in July and pull any mention of PlayStation from ads. “We’re very disappointed in the allocations,” he said. “We’re not taking orders and we’re not talking about it”– an ironic twist, given that Sony’s largest-ever in-store shop will open within Abt’s showroom on the day PS3 debuts.

By contrast, Circuit City, which received about 5 percent of Sony’s initial 400,000-unit shipment or roughly 20,000 consoles according to Lehman Brothers analyst Alan Rifkin, is making the best of a tight situation. The company will hold midnight launch events at six stores in Chicago, Los Angeles, New York, Philadelphia, Richmond, Va., and Washington, D.C., featuring live radio coverage, T-shirt giveaways, and drawings for five free consoles at each location that will be open to the first 100 on line. (The New York store, on Manhattan’s Union Square, will open the drawing up to the first 750 in cue, and will give away 100 units.)

For everyone else it will be first-come, first-served at 8 a.m. on Friday, which Circuit City considers a fairer approach than pre-orders. “We have very limited supplies and won’t have enough for everybody,” said spokesman Jim Babb. To mitigate the pain, Circuit City indicated in circulars that it would have a minimum of 15 consoles per location, and stores will post their actual quantities the night before the launch. Those on line will receive vouchers at 6 a.m., while the rest must await additional shipments from Sony, which Lehman Brothers’ Rifkin pegs at about 600,000 more units for the U.S. market by year’s end.

Allocations are causing some retailers to adjust their PS3 promotions.Best Buy, which is heralding the launch on the first three pages of its circular this week, will also hold midnight openings at select stores Thursday night. Staffers will begin handing out vouchers at 11 p.m., and recipients will have until 1 a.m. to make their purchases. The balance of stores will open at 8 a.m. on Friday, with vouchers to be distributed an hour earlier.

Best Buy indicated a minimum of 20 consoles per store, reflecting an allocation of 15 percent of shipments or 60,000 units according to Rifkin, the most for any retailer he said.

Other dealers will make due with less. Michael Perlman, president/CEO of BrandsMart U.S.A., who will also sell the systems on a first-come, first-served basis, expects to blow through his 600 pieces in minutes. “That’s not a lot of consoles for eight stores,” he said. “But the second round’s not far behind.”

What's interesting is how the allocations quoted in the article go along with the numbers in last night's editorial that I, quite frankly, made up off the top of my head. Wal-mart, of course, isn't talking. However, I would be willing to wager that their share of the PS3 pie is about 25%, plus or minus a point or two.

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US Air and Delta getting into bed together

Bloomberg: US Airways Proposes $8 Billion Delta Air Takeover

Nov. 15 (Bloomberg) -- US Airways Group Inc. made an $8 billion offer for bankrupt Delta Air Lines Inc. in a transaction that would create the world's largest airline. US Airways disclosed its bid today after Delta Chief Executive Officer Gerald Grinstein last month declined to enter into talks. Delta's creditors would get $4 billion in cash and $4 billion in stock in US Airways, formed 14 months ago by exiting bankruptcy in a merger with America West Holdings Corp. A merger would vault the combined company past AMR Corp.'s American Airlines as the world's biggest carrier, uniting the third-largest U.S. carrier, Delta, with seventh-biggest US Airways. The tie-up would take advantage of airlines' recovery from more than $40 billion in losses from 2001 through 2005. ``This would be a very sensible move, but fiendishly complicated,'' said Richard Aboulafia, vice president of Teal Group, a Fairfax, Virginia-based consultant. ``Complicated by issues of seniority, culture, fleet, route networks -- and that's just scratching the surface.''

Since I'm pressed for time, I'm just going to restate what I commented on Dealbreaker.com earlier:

So the plan is for USAir and Delta to merge so that two years from now they can plunge into bankruptcy together?

The airline business, in general, is a big black hole for public and private capital. Aside from farmers, nobody beats airline executives for pissing and moaning about a thousand factors beyond their control that inhibit their ability to make money. Inevitably, they wallow up to the government trough with their hands out.

I guarantee that if today some whiz kids invented safe, reliable teleporters just like on "Star Trek" and revolutionized the world with inexpensive, instananeous transit of passengers and cargo, the very next day the airlines would be lobbying the U.S. Congress for tax breaks, and a big fat bailout package to stay afloat in the face of this new threat to their status quo.

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Broadband over Powerlines gets a boost

TechWeb: FCC Endorses Broadband over Powerline
The Federal Communications Commission on Friday gave a big boost to Broadband over Powerline (BPL), classifying the technology as an "information service."
The declaration places BPL-enabled access services on equal footing with cable modem and DSL Internet access services. The FCC has campaigned for BPL approval for years, although ham radio operators have long complained that BPL would interfere with its service.

Remember, back in the dawn of the internet (when people still called it "the Web"), there was a brief flurry of media foorah about high speed internet via your home's power outlets? It was sensationalistic at the time because there was basically no such thing as "high speed" for the average user. Regardless, after a few excited articles in magazines and newspapers, things quieted down, and we didn't really hear a peep about this for some time.

Well, it's back, and it appears to be on its way to becoming a reality.

I suppose that in an era where the phone company is offering television, and the cable company is offering phone service, and everyone is offering internet access, it only makes sense for the electric company to offer broadband.

More to come, I imagine.

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Authorities seek to tax online worlds

Yahoo News

Users of online worlds such as Second Life and World of
Warcraft transact millions of dollars worth of virtual goods and services every
day, and these virtual economies are beginning to draw the attention of
real-world authorities.
"Right now we're at the preliminary stages of looking
at the issue and what kind of public policy questions virtual economies raise --
taxes, barter exchanges, property and wealth," said Dan Miller, senior economist
for the Joint Economic Committee of the U.S. Congress.
"You could argue that
to a certain degree the law has fallen (behind) because you can have a virtual
asset and virtual capital gains, but there's no mechanism by which you're taxed
on this stuff," he told Reuters in a telephone interview.

So if you have virtual capital gains, do you have to pay virtual taxes? Will virtual tax dollars go towards the development of virtual infrastructure and virtual social services?

All snarkiness aside, what brings this issue to a boil is how virtual wealth is transformed into actual wealth:

Second Life, for example, was specifically designed by San
Francisco-based Linden Lab to have a free-flowing market economy. Its internal
currency, the Linden dollar, can be converted into U.S. dollars through an open
currency exchange, making it effectively "real" money.

It's a Well-Known-Fact that enterprising individuals are selling Runescape players virtual currency in exchange for real currency. A quick googling of "runescape gold farmers" uncovers an industry in which people generate virtual revenue in-game and sell it (on Ebay and elsewhere) for real cash. I assume the same virtual-capital generating enterprises exist for World of Warcraft, the Sims, etc but I can't be bothered to google it.

Virtual economies are even garnering semi-academic attention. Exhibit A is this essay by a University of Florida undergraduate on the in-game and out-of-game economics of World of Warcraft.

I find all this trippy as hell, and the trippiness is compounded by advertising that sells Get-Rich-Quick-Guides to becoming a "virtual billionaire." I understand the market for financial well-being and self-improvement books and courses that focus on the real world. I can dig why someone would pay twenty bucks for a book by Suze Orman or T Harv Ekar to improve their real financial situation. But the idea that someone would pay money to improve their financial situation in a fantasy role-playing game blows my mind.

Reading down to the bottom of the Yahoo article, I'm not sure which factoid is more surreal: that a policy paper is being drafted on how tax leigislation should deal with virtual wealth, or that Reuters is opening a virtual Second Life bureau to report on "virtual news."

"Virtual News?" I need to go have a lie-down.

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Africa Turns to Pumpkins to Power Mobile Telecom

Yahoo! News

Palm and pumpkin seed oil could soon be generating
electricity to help power mobile phone networks across Africa under a plan to
replace fossil fuels with sustainable biofuels made from crops grown by local
farmers.
Swedish telecoms networks group Ericsson and South African cellphone
operator MTN said on Wednesday they want to start replacing diesel with biofuels
in electricity generating stations powering mobile phone base stations in rural
Africa.

Well I thought this was a cool factoid. To be honest, I'm trying to tie this in with Hallowe'en, and work an "It's the Great Pumpkin, Charlie Brown!" joke in, but I've got nothing...

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à la recherche du temps perdu

This week, I was giving some advice to a friend. She and her partner have been trying to collect from a reseller who has been delinquent on his account for over a year. The issue had been on the backburner for them because it was a small invoice, and they’ve been too busy with their real customers to follow up. This week, they finally received payment, along with a condescending note claiming that half of the goods suffered shipping damage, and that the reseller undertook it upon himself to pay for advertising to support sales of her product. The bottom line was that the reseller insinuated that she owed him money. No damaged report with the shipping company, no photos of damaged boxes, no evidence, and most importantly no explanation of why he dodged their phone calls and emails for a full year.

Regardless, all of this is beside the point, except as the lead in to a funny story an acquaintance of mine once told me. He used to work as a national account rep for Admiral appliances way back when, and one day he paid a surprise visit to the head office/distribution center of a well-known Canadian home furnishings retailer. He walked in via the loading dock entrance around the back, and since he was wearing a suit and tie, the workers assumed he was a head office guy, and ignored him as he poked around their operation.

Well, at the same time that he was nosing around, a truck loaded with Admiral washers and dryers came in and the workers started receiving them. My friend noticed that the foreman was marking two out of every three cartons with a giant “X” in black magic marker, and then scribbling notes on a clipboard. So he sidles over and says “Receiving washers, eh?”
“Yeah.” Says the foreman.
“So, what’s with the X’s you’re marking on those units?” He asked.
“I’m reporting them as dented in shipping, with hidden damage.” Responded the foreman, “I give this report to the buyer, and then Admiral will send him a rebate to compensate us.”
“I see.”
“Yeah, it’s free money. Pretty smart, really.”

Needless to say, Admiral’s relationship with that retail chain ended later that day.

If any of you have fond remembrances of shady dealings or sly business partners, send them to me to publish here. I promise to omit names to protect the guilty.

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Dealbreaker.com rakes Sony over the coals

Dealbreaker's Opening Bell

See, it's not just me!

Sony
Cuts PS3 Price by 20 Percent as Japan Users Balk (Bloomberg)One of the only areas that Microsoft is really kicking ass in
these days is in videogames, with their XBOX 360. And even in that division the
company's losing money, so kicking ass probably should've been in quotes. And
it's really not even that it's kicking ass or doing that well; it just happens
to be lucky that it's going against Sony, one of the most inept technology
companies around. The number of formats/standards battles that the company has
come out on the losing side of is just staggering. Already, Sony is being forced
to cut prices on the PS3 (due out.... sometime) so that it can compete.
Meanwhile, everyday, serious gamers are forced to wait it out, while many bight
the bullet and buy an XBOX. It's always great in business to have lousy
competition.

There's really nothing else I can add to this. Japan might get 100,000 units at launch time, maybe. Initial global shipments have been slashed from 2 million to 400K, the launch is now going to miss Christmas, and even the head of Sony's game division is expressing defeatist sentiments, which given the insular and mandarin culture of the senior Sony execs is downright shocking:

After a recall involving millions of Sony-made personal
computer batteries and yet another delay for the PlayStation 3 game console,
even one of Sony's top executives is questioning whether the company is on the
right track.
"If you asked me if Sony's strength in hardware was in decline,
right now I guess I would have to say that might be true," game unit head Ken
Kutaragi said after Sony pushed back the PS3's European launch by four months to
March.

I think that for a division head at Sony Corp to come right out say, essentially "We're screwed" is monumental. Don't be surprised to see Mr. Kutaragi fall on his sword, at least metaphorically, over the whole Playstation3 disaster.

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Expo Roundup: Notes and Impressions from my trip to Denver for CEDIA Expo

All right, I admit that it took me a while, but between work, family, training, and my book project, I've got a lot going on every day.

Denver, Colorado is a fantastic city. If you haven’t been, you really must visit. Lots to see, lots to do, great restaurants and bars, and a really hip, funky downtown core. But you’re not here for a travelogue, you want to know about what I saw on the trade show floor at CEDIA Expo. So here’s some key takeaways that I can reveal that don't give away any of our firm's strategic plans:

• The new Panasonic PT-AX100 LCD projector looks fantastic. It’s especially remarkable for a projector that retails for under $4000.

• I underwent training on the Kaleidescape music and video server system. If you don’t know what Kaleidescape can do for your home entertainment system, check out their site, and you will be blown away.

• Totem Acoustic has a fantastic new architectural built-in speaker, the Inner Spirit™ . The demonstration Totem owner Vince Bruzzese gave me was tremendous. The loudspeaker delivers the same order of performance as their famous Model 1 monitor, only from an in-wall speaker. Outstanding.

• Regarding the whole Blu-ray vs. HD-DVD fracas, my professional opinion is this: it is way too early to declare a winner. Over the course of the week, I sat through endless demonstrations of both formats. Honestly, Pioneer put on the only impressive Blu-ray demo. Demonstrations by Sony and others didn’t look qualitatively better than what we’re already getting from 720p or 1080i broadcast or even *gasp* 480p standard DVD. The HD-DVD demonstration put on by the consortium was mostly breathtaking, but some of the movie trailers were ho-hum. The problem is that because both formats are so new, the engineers doing the film transfers aren’t necessarily virtuosos with their equipment. We saw the same thing with the dawn of DVD way back when: some early releases looked great, others looked awful, mostly because the people in the transfer studio hadn’t dialed in to DVD’s potential. I expect the quality of releases in both formats to improve dramatically over the next six months. However, whether or not consumers take notice and actually start buying either remains to be seen.

• One of the high points of CEDIA for me was sitting through a demo of a $100K home cinema system. The primary vendor had selected a Samsung BP-D1000 Blu-ray player to showcase the system’s projector and surround processing. The Samsung crapped out five times during the demo, going to a black screen for 3-5 seconds each time while the soundtrack continued playing. That further reinforced my anti-Samsung bias that I’ve gained from bitter experience.

• Vertical Integration Group is a software company with applications that provide automation solutions for luxury condominium high rises. Their stuff is impressive as hell, and worth looking at if you are working with a developer doing condos in the one million dollar and up market.

• Chief offers the most comprehensive selection of projector and flat-panel tv mounting solutions that I saw at Expo, including not only brackets but motorized lifts. Great stuff.

• Velodyne's SubContractor™ Series Subwoofers provide multiple solutions for in-wall, in-floor, and built-into-cabinetry subwoofers. It's nice to see a built-in sub that will deliver massive kaboom without shaking the crap out of your drywall.

It's been a long week, and the notes in my PDA aren't nearly as complete as they seemed while on the show floor. When more observations come to me, I will post them here.

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