November 19, 2009 6:00 - 7:00 p.m.

Speaker: Geoff Walker, Product Marketing Manager, NextWindow

Title:  LCD In-Cell Touch

Abstract:   As the touch market has grown, the LCD manufacturers have become increasingly interested in participating in the market through integration of touch capability into LCDs. This technology, known as "LCD In-Cell", is a bit more complex than it seems at first glance. The LCD manufacturers are actually developing three different technologies (optical, contact-closure, and capacitive) and three different forms of integration (in-cell, on-cell, and out-cell). This seminar explores the characteristics, advantages, disadvantages and implications of all of these possibilities. Since all three of these technologies support multi-touch, the seminar begins with a definition & exploration of multi-touch as a foundation, as well as a very brief review of the touch market.

Speaker Background: Geoff Walker is the Product Marketing Manager at NextWindow, the leading supplier of optical touchscreens used in Windows-7 touch monitors and all-in-one touch computers. A mobile-computing industry pioneer, Geoff was an early employee at startup GRiD Systems, where he worked on the first laptop in 1982 and the first pen tablet in 1989. Geoff served as product architect and VP of Marketing at startup Fujitsu Personal Systems, where he architected all of Fujitsu’s pen tablet products from 1993-1999. Geoff was an early employee at startup Handspring, where he worked on the Visor Prism (Handspring's first color PDA) and the VisorPhone (the predecessor of the Treo smartphone). After Handspring, Geoff ran his own consulting firm (Walker Mobile, LLC) for seven years, focusing on touchscreens, mobile displays and mobile computers. During that time Geoff also served as the Guest Editor for Touch of SID's Information Display magazine (2007), the Associate Editor of the Veritas et Visus series of display-industry newsletters (2005-2007), and the Technology Editor of Pen Computing magazine (2001-2007). Most recently Geoff was the Global Director of Product Management and Business Development for Elo TouchSystems, a business unit of Tyco Electronics. Geoff holds BS-Electrical Engineering and BS-English degrees from the Polytechnic Institute of New York University (formerly the Polytechnic Institute of Brooklyn), and has completed the coursework for an MBA in Marketing from New York University’s Graduate School of Business.