Saturday night’s Goo Goo Dolls concert presented by Life|ware was packed to the hilt. The boys from Buffalo put on a hard-working, hard-rocking set. I realize that sentence made me sound like a DJ, but it really was a great show. All the tickets for the show we’re gone Saturday afternoon, and everyone who had one seemed to show up.

Read the rest of this entry »

Dealerscope identifies a trend at CEDIA they call “Technomenities” - home automation that links users to community-based services like dry cleaning, pet sitting, grocery delivery and more. Life|amenities is one of these exciting new solutions.

“Technomenities”: The Pleasure-Tronics Trend at CEDIA ‘07.

Scalability is one of those oddball technology terms I never really liked. It sounded like something you would attribute to Spiderman. Man, he’s got great scalability. What it boils down to, however, is pretty important - the ability for the same solution to be easily and gracefully implemented on a small level up and out through a huge integration.

It’s a task not as easy as it sounds, especially in custom electronics, which strives to bring a variety of great products from different manufacturers into one experience. You’re talking different protocols, different communication methods, different wiring and different ports. It’s tough enough to get these things to play well together, but then to massively expand on the scale of the project introduces a whole new range of challenges.

So while scalability itself is a spidey-sounding term, achieving it is, for many custom integrators ‘the holy grail.’ Which is to say that the ability for a solution to be flexible enough to accommodate a wide variety of devices and subsystems, yet scalable from small single-room jobs (think home theater) up through 20,000 square foot multi-dwelling estates is a huge win. It’s one configuration tool to learn, and one knowledge base that all employees can easily achieve and contribute with. More productive employees doing more jobs more quickly than ever before. What’s not to love?

Read the rest of this entry »

Life|ware shows quad recording Media Center with four CableCARDs

(EI) rolled out what it says is the first media center PC running four CableCARDs at the same time, and it proved to us that the whole thing actually works today at CEDIA 07. …It can record four HD channels while it’s streaming HD video to four Xbox 360 Elite boxes running the media center extender at the same time. And, it does all this without even breathing hard.

See the performance monitor shots in the gallery above: it’s hardly working, using just 57% of its processing power while feeding and recording all that video. It’s doing that using NVIDIA’s highest-end graphics card, the 8800GTS (that’s DVI-only, but easily converted to HDMI).

Scenes from the booth

Geek sandwich boards

Life|bus?

Goo Goo Dolls!