Recent News and Blogs
Loewe on Demo at Hulsta Furniture in CoventryHulsta is a brand that stands for quality engineering, hand crafted materials, and design which is beautiful in its simplicity. These qualities and the company's German heritage pose a striking similarity to the values of our premium TV brand, Loewe. Loewe too value technical and engineering quality alongside beautiful design and the ability to make their products your own. The synergy between technically diverse furniture and TV brands deserves to be celebrated, and so we have supplied a quartet of Loewe televisions to Hulsta at their new store at Leekes department store in Coventry. Hulsta Coventry is home to:
If you're in the market for some ultra high-quality furniture (or a Loewe TV!) just drop in and say hello to Chris, Dave or Ritu. |
RTI New Product AnnouncementsRemote Technologies Inc (RTI) has made some exciting announcements at Cedia Expo this week. Showing off near market-ready prototypes of the KX7 and KX2 wall-mount touch panels, Surf-IR tablet companion remote and updated RKM-1+ keypad would have been enough for many, but RTI didn't stop there. New product announcements have covered the T2-X remote, an update to the XP-8 processor, a new XP-4 with on-screen display capability, a table-mount version of the KX-7, updates to the AD-4 and AD-8 multiroom audio products, a new range of HDBaseT HDMI matrices and significant upgrades to the programming software. It will probably be some time before the newly announced products come to market, but the clear statement of progression and innovation assures us that we made the correct decision to specialise in RTI programming and development a number of years ago. |
Apple, Samsung, and the Cretinous Court CaseWe feel compelled to comment on the recent legal action by Apple against Samsung. Both companies have had a huge impact on the audio visual industry in different ways. Perhaps the case isn't directly relevant to AV, but it is most definitely relevant to the technology sector as a whole. The fact that this litigation centered around, frankly, trivial pieces of design rather than any significant plagiarism of technology and knowledge is worrying. Shouldn't Apple have bigger fish to fry? Ultimately, the patents Apple seeks to enforce relate to ideas that simply weren't theirs in the first place. Tablets have been around for years and in similar basic form factors to the iPad. Pinch-to-zoom has been around since the first multi-touch screens. Bouncing has been around since tennis balls, or perhaps jQuery. Perhaps these cases have been more about business than technology. Forcing the competition to re-engineer their products certainly wouldn't do Apple any harm. The publicity must be welcome too, given their distinct lack of innovation or even significant development in the last few years. The whole case sounds like a class room squabble over who chose the blue paint first - neither kid invented 'blue' and neither comes out of the fight looking any better for it. Whilst Samsung have lost (for the mean time) $1bn, Apple have lost a huge amount of credibility. Are their products truly so threatened by such trivial details? Why? Hopefully the ruling in the US will be overturned on appeal, or at the very least the amount of damages re-assessed. Regardless, we hope that Samsung continue to innovate and bring new technologies at great value to all. And we hope that Apple learn what 'innovation' actually is. |
