IMS receives Crystal Cabin Award for RAVE™ ‘seat-centric’ IFE system
Revolutionary system that stores content at the seat wins in the all-important ‘Entertainment and Communication’ category as it announces three additional airline customers for RAVE™
| Hamburg, Germany | [4-5-11] | The IMS Company’s “seat-centric” RAVE™ inflight entertainment system was the winner of the Crystal Cabin Award in the all-important “Entertainment and Communication” category at the awards ceremony in Hamburg, Germany’s prestigious Atlantic Hotel before an audience of 180 invited guests.
The new Secretary of State at Hamburg’s Ministry of Economic and Labor Affairs, Dr Bern Egert, presented the trophy to Joseph Renton, CEO and founder of The IMS Company, along with vice president business development Larry Girard, and vice president sales and marketing Harry Gray.
Photo caption: Joseph Renton, CEO and founder of The IMS Company (center), Harry Gray, vice president sales and marketing (left), and Larry Girard, vice president business development (right) receive the Crystal Cabin Award for RAVE™ in Hamburg, Germany (Photo credit: Jan Brandes)
The April 5 awards ceremony followed the opening day of Aircraft Interiors Expo at the Hamburg Messe which saw seat-centric IFE as the hot topic of the show as airlines’ focus increasingly on products and services that are light in weight, low in cost, and high in reliability—criteria that were reflected by Crystal Cabin winners in other categories.
In the “Industrial Design/Interior Concept” category, Recaro Aircraft Seating GmbH & Co. KG won for its BL3520 seat whose principal characteristics are reduced weight, more passenger living space, and increased comfort. Recaro also won in the “Passenger Comfort” category for the Air New Zealand SkyCouch
In the “Material and Components” category, Lufthansa Technik’s Galley Light—described as “the world’s thinnest floor path marking system”—took the Award.
The Crystal Cabin Award further validated IMS’ concept of a seat-centric architecture, following the company’s AIX opening day announcements that Lufthansa German Airlines and Brussels Airlines had joined airberlin—announced just three weeks ago—and SriLankan Airlines, announced for the first time by IMS, in selecting the RAVE™ system. IMS may confirm the names of as many as six RAVE™ customers by the close of AIX here on April 7.
This Crystal Cabin Award for IMS has its roots in the 2007 Crystal Cabin Awards in which IMS’ “integrated portable” concept was a finalist. That concept saw IMS and American Airlines integrate a portable media player (PMP) into the seatback with the look and convenience of an embedded system, while maintaining all of the benefits of portability, including certification as a portable device under DO-160 rules.
The concept of storing all of the content, applications and playback functionality at the seat was the key to the high reliability factor of PMPs in IFE, and RAVE™ retained that characteristic as it migrated from stand-alone portables, to integrated portables, to fully-installed/embedded Seat Display Units (SDUs). The result is an IFE system that is independent of the System Control Unit (SCU) which has the sole task of downloading the content for the coming month in the background and providing an interface to the aircraft.
The IMS Company is the only IFE supplier actively offering portable entertainment solutions, “semi-embedded” (or integrated portable) solutions, and fully-embedded/installed IFE systems simultaneously. Having recently migrated from COTS-repurposed PMPs to purpose-built PMPs, IMS uses atomic elements between RAVE™ and its newest PMP product called EDGE, including common components, R&D and maintenance and repairs.
A total of 52 entries from ten countries were received by the Crystal Cabin Award Association in Hamburg, with 21 of them reaching the final round. The Crystal Cabin Award 2011 is supported by Airbus, the Aircraft Interiors Expo (Reed Exhibitions), Aircraft Interiors International Magazine, Assystem, Bishop GmbH, DIEHL Aerosystems Holding GmbH, FERCHAU AVIATION Division, HTG Media Hamburg, Jetliner Cabins, and SGS Germany GmbH.
About The IMS Company: Founded in 1996, The IMS Company is an entertainment and communications solutions provider in the travel industry, and a systems and software solutions provider to the air transport, aerospace and government markets. IMS Entertainment provides commercial airlines with embedded and portable entertainment systems, wireless communications solutions, and content management services.
IMS Engineering provides engineering services, software development, information architecture, workflow and cloud computing.
IMS Flight Deck produces Electronic Flight Bags and associated software applications for use on commercial and regional aircraft, and by individual pilots.
In 2007, 2008 and 2009, The IMS Company was named among the fastest-growing privately-held companies in technology-heavy Orange County California by the Orange County Business Journal.
About the Crystal Cabin Award
The Crystal Cabin Award is the only international prize for innovations in the field of aircraft cabins. A high-caliber judging panel made up of renowned academics, engineers, specialist journalists and airline and aircraft manufacturer representatives comes together under the slogan “Let your ideas take off” to honor innovative cabin concepts and products. The competition was launched by the Aviation Cluster Hamburg Metropolitan Region and is organized by the Crystal Cabin Award Association. The award, to date the only one of its kind, has been presented as part of the Aircraft Interiors Expo in Hamburg every year since 2007. The trophies have become a seal of quality, known and coveted around the world.
The IMS Company Press Contacts:
Harry Gray, vice president sales and marketing, telephone: +1.714.854.8633,
email: hgray@imsco-us.com
Michael Childers, LightStream Communications, telephone +1.816.569.4326,
email: lightstream@aol.com