While the first day of Display Week doesn’t officially start until today, those in the know—know to come to the SID show a couple of days early to catch the pre-show action. This year was no exception with an outstanding Monday Business Conference that produced some real buzz (OK tweets is more accurate…)

Steve Sechrist
Senior Analyst and Editor

Yes, SID has finally migrated into the 21st century thanks in part, to the hot-shot PR team from MCA Public Relations, (thanks Marie and Karen) that is running the Press relations for SID. They’re doing a fantastic job of keeping us "grey beards (grey heads)" abreast of the latest social networking apps—encouraging us to give the new medium a try. Here is a sampling of some Tweets generated from the show today, that you can access from your own twitter application by simply searching on "#sid2010".

First, an "RT" (shorthand for re-tweet) from Brier Dudley: A Sony company survey says that 38% of consumers will buy a 3DTV within a year, 67% say their next TV will be a 3DTV.

In the morning Business Conference Keynote from Sony’s president and COO Stan Glasgow, he repeated previous news of the company commitment to 3D content including programming deals with ESPN, CBS, IMAX, and Discovery Channel, plus PS3 Games (2-firmware upgrades coming) and their unique position as a "lens to the living room" 3D ecosystem powerhouse.

A tweet today from "vesparider" reports the touch screen market will be $13B by 2016, and that’s up from $4.3B today. This news came from the Jennifer Colegrove presentation in the afternoon session III on Touch Screens. She went on to report touch penetration in cell phones was 15.8% in 2008, grew to 25.7% in ‘09 and the company recently upgraded their forecast to 57% of touch penetration in cell phones by 2016.

Then I got into the twittering act, mostly inspired by those GenY PR guys… and went on-line, real-time with news that Vizio’s Ken Lowe, VP and co-founder of the company, predicted the "End of Television" in his Session II presentation dedicated to the "Evolving TV." Lowe thinks the traditional TV is going away and will be replaced by the "Entertainment Display."

He then went on to announce Vizio will launch a 22-inch connected LED based LCD TV with Internet streaming and sell for under $360—under the banner "the lower cost connected TV." To Lowe, the combination of LED lit TVs with Internet connection for content is the "combo-TV" of the future. His vision of the future 3DTV includes not a 240Hz display but rather a 480Hz system that achieves 3ms response time.

My final tweet of the day came when, in the Pocket and Embedded Projectors Session of the SID Business Conference, Microvision’s CEO Alexander Tokman made the comment that his company announced a 720p HD ready laser pico projector with 15 lumens of brightness. Turns out that this was not really a scoop at all, as the company published a 6:30 AM press release, announcing the same thing on Businesswire. So chalk one up for traditional media today.

And one more thing. I heard Tokman say "50 lumens" in his presentation and twittered that number, as the brightness spec, but the official press release says it’s only 15 lumens (a more realistic number given the state of the laser technology.) This goes to underscore a major weakness of the whole twittering process, as the tweet was picked up and repeated several times with the incorrect brightness spec.

But, with this warning fresh in the mind, we want to report still one more bit of SID 2010 twitter news, beyond the Biz Conference halls. DisplayWeek RT’d (is this a verb? just checking…) a "knightsnwalker" tweet stating that Samsung showcased a 19-inch transparent AMOLED display-along the same lines as the 14-inch (30%) transparent OLED shown at CES. This is precisely the kind of thing we came to see at SID, and beyond the twitter account, also found the story on Engadget.net citing etnews.co.kr as the news source. The details can be found by following the link at http://bit.ly/cVcxIF.

So go ahead and give this new medium a try… Take time to tweet some news from a session or two, if you are here at the show, to keep your friends and colleagues up to speed on the latest, up to the minute developments - as they happen. But don’t forget to leave room to include the characters "#sid2010" as they will be picked up by all who are monitoring the conference, hanging on your every post…