HiddenWires has always been very proactive in supporting industry events and we have agreements to be involved with over twenty seminars, conferences, awards and exhibitions during 2008. You can find details of these and other events on our events page.
One new event this year is the European Home Control Summit which will take place in Frankfurt, across from the Light+Building exhibition, in April. Organised by the Z-Wave Alliance, this will focus on Z-Wave wireless home control and will feature presentations from the likes of Merten, Horstmann Controls, and Danfoss. With research claiming that the European home control market is set to double, we can expect to see more from large companies such as these.
Also on the event front, our partnership with the Smart Home Show allows us to offer you free tickets if you register online using this link. The Smart Home Show takes place at the NEC, Birmingham in April and is part of part of the National Homebuilding & Renovating Show.
The last few weeks have seen more and more nails hammered into the HD DVD coffin. At a Blu-ray Disc Association press conference we were told that Blu-ray Disc movie sales across Europe had reached over two million units, representing a 79% share of the European high definition movie disc market. Retailers such as Woolworths have announced that they will only stock Blu-ray, Toshiba announced that it will discontinue developing, manufacturing and marketing HD DVD players and recorders, Universal Studios has stated that it will release Blu-ray titles, and Paramount Home Entertainment has stated that today (4th March) will mark the last titles it releases on the HD DVD format. So now that the packaged format war is over, what can you do with your HD DVD player? You could carry on using it to upscale your DVDs while you wait to see what happens in the packaged format vs download battle!
Our feature this month is Home Cinema, and is sponsored by RBH Sound. We have five articles covering RBH Sound MC-553 and WM-30IC home cinema speakers, developments in 3LCD projector technology, IPTV and whole home digital cinema, an explanation of aspect ratios, and an industry opinion piece on the trends in home cinema screens. In addition, Hans Weibel of Weibel Lift provides our guest commentary with his thoughts on turning a good idea into a successful business, plus we have a case study of a house in Kensington and Chelsea showing the use of EIB/KNX and CAT8. |