By Megan Hayes

What’s a nice girl like me doing in a place like this?

During the week of May 19-23, the CEA Technology & Standards department was in Nashville, TN for our annual Spring Forum. The week was filled with meetings of engineers to develop technical standards  for consumer electronics products. Sound like fun? Probably not, but I can promise you that there’s more than engineering going on!

First, let’s get some of the geeky techy stuff out of the way. During this week, our committees accomplished the following:

· Authorized two new discovery groups to explore the need for standards work in portable and handheld devices and 3D video. These groups will likely meet later in 2008, perhaps during the Fall Technology & Standards Forum.

· Voted to approve three standards. These votes represent lots of time and effort from our member company representatives and should be published soon. Stay tuned!

· Data Over Component Video Interface (CEA-805-D): This standard describes how to transmit data over the analog component video interfaces (CVI) described in CEA-770.2-C and CEA-770.3-D, and it covers all CE devices carrying data on the CVI vertical blanking interval (VBI).

· DTV Closed Captioning (CEA-708-D): This standard is intended to be a definition of DTV closed captioning and includes a description of the transport method, data packets and structures, how DTVCC information is to be processed and list of minimum implementation recommendations.

· Remote User Interface for UPnP™ Devices (CEA-2014-A): This standard defines the necessary mechanisms to allow a user interface to be remotely displayed on and controlled by devices or control points other than the one hosting the UPnP logic. The basic operations are based on the UPnP Device Architechture.

  After all that work, what’s a girl to do? Check out Nashville, that’s what! The CEA staff and member company representatives have more talent than I ever suspected. There was someone from Microsoft seen singing at a piano bar, one CEA staffer taking line dancing lessons and others karaoke-ing. But by far my favorite part was seeing aspiring country music stars singing live at Tootsie’s! After the long hours of technical meetings, having some time to explore the nightlife of Nashville surely made the trip worthwhile and memorable for everyone involved.

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This entry was posted on Monday, June 16th, 2008 at 3:02 pm and is filed under CEA Events, Connectivity, Technology Standards. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.