San Francisco – A grandson and a great-grandson, long-time colleagues and even some of the honorees themselves were on hand to accept the accolades of the Consumer Electronics Association (CEA) at the induction of the 2012 CE Hall of Fame class, held at the CEA Industry Forum Tuesday night.
The CE Hall of Fame, created in 2000, honors the leaders in the consumer technology industry who have shaped and advanced innovation.
Following are the 2012 members of the CE Hall of Fame, in alphabetical order:
Willard Boyle and George Smith, inventors of the charge-coupled device (CCD) at Bell Labs;
Robert Briskman, inventor of satellite radio;
Richard Citta, creator of the VSB digital TV transmission standard;
Bjorn Dybdahl, founder of consumer electronics retailer Bjorn’s;
Douglas Engelbart, inventor of the computer mouse and HTML;
Charlie Ergen, founder of satellite companies Echostar and Dish Network;
Larry Finley, founder of the International Tape Association (now the International Recording Media Association);
Fansy and Henry Harold Gregg, founders of consumer electronics retailer h. h. gregg;
In Hwoi Koo, founder of LG Corporation; and
Byung-Chull Lee, founder of Samsung Electronics.
Several of the award winners gave heartfelt acceptance speeches taking care to thank those who helped them succeed.
Briskman, the co-founder of Sirius XM Radio, said, “when you come up with an idea, you need teams of people to accomplish that. I am here representing members of that team.”
Citta, a digital TV pioneer who worked at Zenith, acknowledged the contributions of his colleagues at the company’s R&D department and discussed the challenges of the “Grand Alliance” to come up with the HDTV standard of today.
Dybdahl started by stating he has attended every CES since 1971 and finally “met Jack Wayman [founder of CES] tonight.” Dybdahl also thanked pioneers like Henry Kloss, John Banner of B&W Loudspeakers, Paul Klipsch, and Tweeten of Magnolia Hi-Fi. I would call these people saying “I don’t know anything,” and they called me back and gave me advice.”
Bob English, lead engineer for Doug Englebart, inventor of the computer mouse and father of hypermedia, said many of these developments “happened in the early 1960s” but the biggest thanks he had for Englebart was for “my wife Roberta, who was his secretary back then.”
K.M. Koo, the great-grandson of In Hwoi Koo, founder of LG, and a current LG employee, said the company has a “long legacy of greatness,” creating up to 60 companies under the LG umbrella, including LG Electronics, and he is happy that his innovative leadership has been honored by CEA.
Guy Finley, executive director of the Media & Entertainment Services Alliance, and grandson of honoree Larry Finley and head of the same organization said, “Entertainment matters … it is the driving force for all new technology.” He described his grandfather as the “Zelig of the CE industry” who met and worked with many of the 20th century’s entertainment giants, matching entertainment with CE technology.
Accepting for Charlie Ergen, co-founder of Dish/Echostar was the president/CEO of Dish, Joe Clayton who as an RCA executive introduced what is now DirecTV. “Charlie was an RCA satellite distributor [back in the mid-1990s] and I have known him for more than 20 years … so I am happy to accept on his behalf.”
Clayton said that with Ergen becoming a CE Hall of Fame member he joins “Eddy Hartenstein and Stan Hubbard, so now the trio of the developers of satellite TV in the Hall of Fame is complete.”
