I think Gary Severson of Walmart said it best. Sitting down with Consumer Electronics Association’s Gary Shapiro at the organization’s annual CEO Summit last week in Dana Point, Calif., like a showbiz type from a prior generation, he quipped, “How do I follow him?” Laughter followed.

The “him” in this case is David Pogue, New York Times technology columnist, blogger, prolific author of some of the more popular “For Dummies” books, former musical conductor and wanna-be Broadway composer (yeah, really) ... and genuine ham. I mean that in a showbiz way, which is a compliment.

Well, the DTV transition deadline came and went and things seemed to work out smoothly.

Click here for executive editor Greg Tarr’s roundup of how things ended up when broadcast TV went from analog to digital.

I’m not going to say, “I told you so,” or even gloat since I never wanted the deadline to be moved. Let’s just say the relative smoothness of the transition is a blessing.

In the past few days I kept on thinking that this digital decade started with the Y2K scare that didn’t amount to anything and ends with the smooth DTV conversion.

Finally, no fooling around, this time we mean it — June 12 is it, the deadline for the digital TV transition.

That’s the message from President Obama, who moved the deadline from Feb. 17 to this week. The president issued a statement last Thursday that there won’t be any further delays and that everyone who hasn’t prepared for the transition will lose their over-the-air access to television.

But there are still complaints that many “vulnerable communities,” as the president described them — lower-income families, t...Read More

Where were you on June 4, 1989?

I was in Tiananmen Square in Beijing during the pro-democracy protests that eventually resulted in the deaths of hundreds of protesters by Chinese troops.

Well, not really. But I felt like I was thanks to technologies developed by the consumer electronics industry.

I was in my hotel room in Chicago on the eve of the Summer Consumer Electronics Show and saw and heard the story unfold half a world away.

That’s h...Read More

In our May 18 print edition I used the term “Good Riddance” in the headline for my column, and it was accurate. I wrote about 2008. But that was last year.

This column is about 2009 and it’s a different story. Things have begun to turn around in CE.

How do I know? Well it’s rare that you get to talk to a good selection of distributors, PRO Group retailers and vendors attending PRO’s event in a short period of time, but this reporter had that opportunity in May.

What’s even rarer is that the industry’s three key constituencies all agree on something: Business, by no mea...Read More

The annual PRO Group meeting is nothing if not a meeting of some of the top-level A/V manufacturing executives who are here to nail down orders, as well as take the temperature of the retail clients ... and vice-versa I may add.

This year’s event was no exception. One new wrinkle was that vendors took more time to candidly volunteer views about the state of the CE industry than usual.

While we’ll have an exclusive special report on their views of the current CE market, here are some of the issues they addressed:

It is a little disconcerting to see jet skis being pulled around a freeway near Las Vegas.

But when you ignore new aspects to an area you visit two or three times a year, that’s what happens. I never realized you could jet ski at a place I never really heard of before ... Lake Las Vegas.

A man-made lake was built there, and condos and resorts followed — one of the resorts being the Ritz Carlton

Our managing editor John Laposky passed along a story from Inc. Magazine called “Why Circuit City Failed, and Why B&H Thrives” by Joel Spolsky.

The piece is a detailed story of how B&H Photo, a one-store operation located on Manhattan’s West Side that opened in the early 1970s and has a thriving online business at www.bhphotovideo.com, has a strong sales and service ethic as well as plenty of product selection.

Spolsky’s...Read More

A politician who can not only talk about technology but understand new media is a rarity. That he can also give advice to CE execs on how they can use his tactics to get more engaged with customers and employees is almost unheard of at the many Consumer Electronics Association (CEA) meetings I’ve attended over the years.

But that’s what I just witnessed at lunch today at the CEA Washington Forum where David Plouffe, campaign

Systemax, the company that operates Tiger Direct’s online and brick-and-mortar stores — which last year cut a deal to acquire the brand, trademarks and e-commerce business of CompUSA, as well as 16 former CompUSA storefronts — is on the prowl again.

When Circuit City announced the intention to auction off its brand, I’m sure I wasn’t the only one who said, "Why?"

Maybe people in the industry are too close to the situation, but many have to think that the Circuit City name would be far too damaged to make it a worthwhile investment for anyone. But Circuit’s going out of business sale was, by all accounts, successful, so who knows?

There is a tradition in consumer electronics of reviving old brands with...Read More