Is ViewSonic User>Driven?

ViewSonic is showing their new PJ258D ViewDock Projector at CES this week. It's mostly an ordinary example of the crop of increasingly affordable and portable LCD projectors. What's need about it is that it has an iPod dock built into it that allows you to easily project the TV shows and movies you download from iTunes, and even recharges the iPod at the same time.

I don't know whether ViewSonic involved customers and prospects in the project or just had a brainwave, but I predict we will see more integration between projectors and other products over time. In fact, I'm going to predict that - like digital cameras - projectors will eventually be built into other devices. Once they are small and cheap enough, I can see them being built into laptops, PDAs, iPods, game players, etc. as a way to get a large display from a small device.

This seems like the sort first-of-its-kind product that would be hard to come up with via customer research, at least by simply asking people what they want. Most customers don't have that sort of cross-product imagination. Perhaps ViewSonic asked lots of people about all the gadgets they used and what problems they had with them and discovered people like video iPods but the screens are too small and went from there. Perhaps ViewSonic engineers just thought it would be neat. Either way, I feel this product points the way for more products to come.

Picture and description:

http://www.pcmag.com/article2/0,1895,2079440,00.asp

Comments

[Bruce McCarthy]

What did I tell you?!

http://www.pcmag.com/article2/0,1895,2080442,00.asp