SID Pushes Display Week Off Two Months To August; Moves Down I-280 To San Jose

April 15, 2020 by Dave Haynes

The Society for Information Display (SID) has rescheduled its annual Display Week from June to August, and shifted the symposium, seminar and trade show from downtown San Francisco to the San Jose Convention Center, where it was run in 2019.

The revised schedule is Aug. 2-7.

“COVID-19 has had an unprecedented, unanticipated effect on all of our lives and on worldwide business,” says Dr. Helge Seetzen, president of SID. “We’ve rescheduled Display Week 2020 to help protect the health of our staff, exhibitors, attendees, and our global community; and to allow time for business operations to return to more normal functioning.”

Says SID:

Despite being rescheduled and relocated, Display Week 2020 will still take place in Silicon Valley, an epicenter of creativity, innovation and new technologies.

“We look forward to returning to San Jose, where last year Display Week 2019 provided an extraordinary experience for the entire ecosystem of the electronic display industry,” Seetzen added.

“Additionally, I’m excited to share that we’re unveiling new digital components for this important global gathering to adapt to our ever-changing environment and encourage wider participation both domestically and internationally,” he said.

The annual event promises to bring together the brightest minds worldwide in the display industry, providing insight into new display technologies in development, as well as affording a sneak peek at new products that will be hitting the shelves both in the US and internationally within the next few years.

Details about programming, exhibitors, speakers, educational sessions and other facets of the event will be forthcoming. The program will feature a significant online component to allow global participation if travel restrictions persist.

For more information about Display Week 2020, please visit http://www.displayweek.org/.

Display Week is a hard-core nerd show, and anyone who is not an engineer may struggle with some of what they see and hear. But those who go, as I did for the first time in 2019, will also get a good look at what’s coming in display tech – usually well before it turns up at consumer and AV trade shows.

DSCC also puts on some very good business conferences tied in with the event, and they’re presented at a level even morons like me can grasp.

I was not going in 2020 because the week butted up against InfoComm, but also because San Francisco hotel and air travel costs are ghastly. San Jose is nowhere near as cool as San Francisco, but it tends to be way cheaper to stay in.

Having noted all that, I wonder if August is wishful thinking, in terms of things being vaguely back to whatever the new normal might be. That area’s officials jumped early and wisely on the isolation thing, but even if spread rates are pretty low there by summer, you have to get there on airplanes and through airports in cities I can’t imagine will be fully OK by then.

DSE in September is an open question, and I can’t see a lot of people clamoring to go to New York this fall for digital signage week. The idea of going to Manhattan to mostly attend a succession of cocktail parties seems a little incongruous.

Time will tell. Stay well!