Nico Vernieuwe has a long history in both telecommunications and displays. For 18 years he worked at Alcatel-Lucent, across both Europe and the USA, before moving to an eight-year employment at Barco. While there he was involved in several vertical markets, dealing with projectors, LCD displays, LED walls and image processing. For the last two years, Vernieuwe has worked as a general manager at TPV Technology, covering the Philips and AOC brands in Europe.
1. What do you consider the five most important market developments in the last five years?
Smartphone use in our daily life has become a leading trend. It is now one of the dominant electronic devices, giving us instant online access everywhere.
If you add the launch of the tablet to this, you’ll instantly notice that the way we access the online world has changed.
The rise of social media has also radically changed the way we communicate and interact, opening room for new technological developments, while cloud technology has made our data easily available from multiple platforms and locations. Of course, each technological field is characterised and has been driven by specific trends.
Looking purely at the display market, one of the most recent and important trends is the one towards increasing resolutions and larger screen sizes, which links with the exploration of new connectivity and interactivity options. This, combined with the form factor being constantly reduced, makes flatscreen technology one of the major drivers in the market.
2. What will be the five hot topics over the next five years?
Bringing the cloud to the large screen will raise major interest. People want to enjoy their experience not only separately, with their hand-held device, but also on larger screens in groups, or in their office with increased productivity and hassle-free connectivity. Interaction and communication are leading factors here. To facilitate that, platforms will have to be interconnected, and so will have to remove certain boundaries; and, of course, the market will continue merging mobile and stationary devices.
With that done, the interaction between people and their own devices will be an intriguing opportunity. Using speech and touch commands to navigate and control data will certainly be hot. New media and data are now appearing constantly, and people have to think of other ways to interact. Another topic that will continue to be important is the impact that we have on the environment and, basically, reducing the ecological footprint. I’m proud to say that we are excelling at this topic; one of our main objectives is reducing power consumption, improving production and packaging techniques and investing in the development of leading power saving solutions, such as Powersensor.
3. What are the five most interesting upcoming technology developments that you can see?
OLED technology and 4K+ resolutions are most certainly interesting developments. They will allow more diverse content to be enjoyed on bigger screens, which also have thinner designs and consume less power.
Touch technology and motion controlled interfaces have the potential to completely change the way we access information and interact with our devices. On the other hand, technologies such as Android will make displays more intelligent and add a lot of functionality. (Wireless) connection to the Internet and to other devices will become available for the mass market, allowing full integration of displays into the cloud.
4. What are five things you/your company stand for?
Taking pride in the huge heritage our long company history brings, we stand for sustainable growth in a leading market position, whilst making sure we are fast to market and flexible to react.
We develop our high-quality products to be designed around the end user, both for businesses and the consumer. We are also proud to be leading in bringing innovative products and technologies for our two brands, Philips and AOC, to the market, such as Ergosensor, 21:9 Ultrawide displays, MHL technology and Ambiglow.
5. What are the five most important things or people in your life?
My wife and kids are the most important people in my life, and seeing my kids now go their own way is at the same time a joy and a worry.
I have had the pleasure and opportunity to work and live in several countries around the globe and this multicultural and multinational experience is one of the things my family and I still cherish every day.
That’s why working in our company, with over 18 nationalities in our European headquarters in Amsterdam, and at the same time collaborating across the globe with our Asian colleagues, is really exciting.
Feeling every day that you can help to shape the future of your business is a fantastic experience.
Being originally from Belgium, it should be no surprise that good food is high on the list of important things!
