BostonPocketPC

Sunday's Digital Life event at CES gave me a chance to meet with the folks at DisplayLink.   DisplayLink offers a device that allows you to connect your video monitor to your computer via USB.  They also have a device that enables your video monitor to be connected via wireless USB.  This opens the door to many useful applications like video monitor placement in recording studios.  Due to the quiet sound space needs of recording studios all the noisy equipment is stored in a equipment closet somewhere outside of the main work room.  Depending on the layout of the facilities this can become very expensive especially when it comes to video cables.  Instead of using costly cables to connect the monitor, keyboard and mouse you could connect all these devices via a USB hub.  I was told that standard USB cable lengths are supported and anything beyond that of the USB specifications would require powered hubs to regenerate the signal over longer runs.  Up to six DisplayLink units can be connected to one computer.  When connected DisplayLink will act as an additional display allowing you to drag whatever you need over to the new display just as if you had another video card installed.  DisplayLink also has a wireless USB docking station that will allow you to have a wireless presentation machine complete with audio, video and up to four USB connections.  DisplayLink is able to archive this by transmitting only changing video information, static objects (borders of programs, icons, etc) are only sent once and will only update when a change has taken place.    Coming soon will be a 7  inch screen that will have DisplayLink incorporated directly into the screen eliminating the outboard converting unit.  If you have this 7 inch display you could setup a digital  media frame that does more than just pictures.  This would also be handy for traveling as it would give you an additional display that's small enough to pack and big enough to use.  I was told that this is just the first of displays of this nature to hit the market, soon there will be larger sizes available.  Just imagine having a monitor where the only cables you need to connect are USB and power.  For custom home automation installations this could really allow installers to do some very impressive things.