The finalists for the European IT Excellence Awards - the leading pan-European awards event for IT and Telecoms channels - were announced this week by IT Europa. A total of 51 companies from 16 countries have made the finals. The winners will be announced at the European IT Excellence 2010 Awards Dinner at The Tower Hotel, London on 25 February 2010.

Harris Corporation chairman, president and chief executive officer Howard Lance will be a keynote speaker at the 2010 NAB Show in Las Vegas. In a morning session titled ‘Dual utilisation of broadcast technology for industry and government' on Wednesday 14 April, Lance will discuss how the integration of government and commercial technologies can create ‘cross-over' applications that benefit both sectors.

Technicolor, formerly Thomson, has reached the milestone of delivering 100 million digital set-top boxes over multi networks since it entered the market in 1994.

Over the past 12 months, NETIA has increased its presence in Africa and the Middle East, where new and existing customers have demonstrated their confidence in the company's solutions and contributed to its 16% growth over the course of 2009. NETIA's success in Africa and the Middle East is reflected through a series of sizeable projects in Saudi Arabia, Algeria, Morocco, Tunisia, Egypt, and Ethiopia.

Linear Acoustic is continuing its expansion into Asia with the opening of its new regional office in Beijing, China. In addition, Linear Acoustic has also expanded its commitment to its customers in the region with the hiring of Daniel Wang (Wang Zherun) as director of business development, Asia.

Sky Racing in Australia has chosen OmniBus iTX for the multi-platform transmission of four television channels, one online and two mobile TV channels.

Sky's iTX installation is configured with the iTX GFX real-time 3D graphics module, chosen for the television channels, to allow the generation of dynamic live 3D graphics being fed from multiple data sources in coverage for a variety of programming, including racing.

NAB has announced that the finale of the 2009 48 Hour Film Project (48HFP) will take place during the upcoming NAB Show, 10-15 April in Las Vegas.

Titled Filmapalooza, the three-day event will honour the winning films submitted by 48HFP participants in 2009. The competition, established in 2001, promotes filmmaking and creativity by providing filmmakers with a character, prop and line of dialogue and giving them two days to write, shoot and edit their film.

Argosy, supplier of HD broadcast, cables and studio infrastructure products, has provided a range of its infrastructure products to Dishtv, the largest pay TV DTH platform in India. This installation forms part of an ongoing programme by Dishtv to expand to its facilities at its playout centre in Noida.

Snell has announced that Argentina's PromTV and Barcelona-based systems integrator Unitecnic, both part of the Mediapro Group, have upgraded the PromTV studios and playout centre with a full range of Snell products to enable the Argentinean launch of ESPN HD.

Omneon Inc. has been selected to provide storage, processing, and a high-speed content distribution platform to support NBC's live HD production workflow and to streamline delivery of all Internet and VOD content during the network's coverage of the XXI Olympic Winter Games in Vancouver, British Columbia, 12-28 February 2010.

The announcement was made this week by David Mazza, senior vice president, engineering, NBC Olympics and Geoff Stedman, senior vice president of marketing and business development, Omneon.