I'm loosely patterning August's newsletter as a kind of homage to Neal Stephenson. If you don't know this author, he has set his stories in the midst of environmental issues in Boston Harbor, virtual reality in California, experimental theater in London, drumming circles in Seattle, and that's just a sample of three of his older books, before he seemed to cross out of science fiction and into fiction about information science. Well, thematically and geographically, this edition of the Enttec Newsletter can touch upon a few of those same concepts, although admittedly in a very different sense than this author did in some of my favorite novels. Let's start in the UK, for two stories.

Are you a LightFactory user? There's a website called lfutilities.co.uk . This site is run by Paul Reeves and hosts some very useful tools. We'll interview Paul and try to uncover what he's up to there. If you care to travel North a wee bit (high road or low, it matters not, for we're not headed to Loch Lomond) that's where db-audioware is, and they've delivered to us a new release of DMXIS which has some great new features , and a much expanded fixture library. Click here to read more about DMXIS 1.0.3

From the UK we journey to Seattle, and a story that's not about LightFactory yet, although it has promise of being worked into the mix in the future. For the time being, the ODE is a supporting character in this narrative which is set in Redmond, WA. A small company called Microsoft is headquartered there, and this is a story about how we partnered with them on something fun. It's kind of a long story that weaves together environmental issues, next-gen info-tech, virtual reality turned inside out, and just a dash of theatrical lighting coming to the rescue near the end. It's not a CyberPunk novella, but the topic of data centers and virtual reality do play a big role. Click here to read more and don't miss this story, it's "way cool."

Did you read the story about the W Hotel in Washington DC last month? Its lobby lighting is being controlled now by an E-Streamer, and the system integrators asked for a new feature on that product, Priority Groups, for which we were happy to oblige. To learn more about how it works click here.

I guess to round out my references, you'd need to know that I'm on the road at the moment, as I write this, and tomorrow will be stopping in Boston to preview some new products to our dealer there. (Wait for next month to hear about the products, we're almost ready to announce them.) But something else I'm showing off which I CAN tell you about is this. Playback Wing Firmware 1.4. It's a big improvement in how Art-Net mode handles page swaps. Click here to read more on that

Whether you share my taste in authors or not, I hope you'll find these five articles to your liking. It's really only coincidence that they seem to share backdrops with books like Zodiac, Snow Crash and The Diamond Age, although to some people reality is just a very complex kind of ink blot, and if you think that way it may portend just about anything.

See you in September...

Jeremy Kumin
Editor