SAN FRANCISCO — A grandson and a great-grandson, longtime colleagues and some honorees themselves accepted the accolades of the Consumer Electronics Association (CEA) as it inducted the 2012 CE Hall of Fame class at its recent Industry Forum, held at the Westin St. Francis Hotel.
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
• Byung-Chull Lee: founder of Samsung Electronics
Many of the comments from the award winners, colleagues and family members were heartfelt.
Briskman, the co-founder of SiriusXM Radio, said in his acceptance speech: “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 acknowledging that he has attended every International CES since 1971 and finally “met Jack Wayman [founder of CES] tonight.” Dybdahl thanked pioneers like “Kloss, John Banner of B&W Loudspeakers, Paul Klipsch, Tweeten of Magnolia Hi Fi, who I called 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 has to give was “my wife Roberta, who was [Englebart’s] secretary back then.”
K.M. Koo, the great-grandson of LG founder In Hwoi Koo and a current LG employee, said the company has a “long legacy of greatness,” creating up to 60 companies under the LG umbrella. He added that he is happy that his “innovative leadership” has been honored by CEA.
Guy Finley is the executive director of the Media & Entertainment Services Alliance, grandson of honoree Larry Finley, and head of the same organization. He said, “Entertainment matters … It is the driving force for all new technology.” He described his grandfather as the “Zelig of the CE industry” by matching entertainment with CE technology.
Accepting for Charlie Ergen, cofounder of Dish/Echostar, was president/ CEO of Dish, Joe Clayton. Clayton, a former RCA executive who introduced what is now DirecTV, said, “Charlie was an RCA satellite distributor [back in the mid-1990s] … so I am happy to accept on his behalf.”
He 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 is complete.”
