From the company that brings you ShowTouch for iOS, Alcorn McBride launches Touch for iOS with iBeacons at InfoComm 2014.

This creates a new category of product/service that many integrators can sell as innovative and distinctly different. The white arrow in the photo points to the iBeacon…the enabling hardware.

First, you “plant” iBeacons across your facility (warehouse, campus, fairgrounds etc). iBeacons are inexpensive (about $35), tiny devices that require no external power source and which can be located anywhere throughout a fa Read more...

Canon Europa NV will acquire Denmark’s Milestone Systems A/S, provider of open platform video management software.

Milestone Systems earned the number one global market share position in the VMS category in 2013, recording 32% year-over-year USD revenue growth, according to IHS Technology.

This indicates the growing importance of software as the value-added core of a video solution: Milestone’s open platform architecture allows it to integrate with other systems and devices. Milestone says it has documented the accelerating use of network video surveillance for more than just security: interoperability with other business systems brings the technology to support operational improvements in areas such as production, logistics, warehousing, marketing and customer service, education and patient healthcare.

NASA proves laser beams can effectively transmit large amounts of data back to Earth from space. The OPALS project (Optical Payload for Lasercomm Science) beamed a 27-second "Hello, World!" video back to Earth for the first time.

The transmission lasted 148 seconds, but it took the system only 3.5 seconds (the connection reached a peak of 50 megabits per second) to send each copy of the video clip to the project's ground station at Table Mountain Observatory in California. It would've taken the space station's radio wave technologies 10 minutes to do what OPALS did in less than two.

In a bid to reduce energy consumptions across the EU the European Commission brings into force "ecodesign" regulations forcing PC vendors to adhere to minimum energy efficiency requirements.

Vendors selling PCs in the EU must also provide customers with energy-consumption information, including annual power usage and power demand in modes such as "sleep" and "off".

The regulation (specifically Commission Regulation no. 617.2013 implementing directive 2009/125/EC) was announced on June 2013, and comes in full force on 1 July 2014 before gradually becoming stricter by 2016 following review by end 2017.

It covers desktops, thin clients, workstations, mobile workstations, small-scale servers and servers in the EU, but not games consoles, docking stations, multi-node server and blade systems and components.