Moving to strengthen the long-term R&D and product development programs for its ELAN, NILES, Xantech, Sunfire, and ATON brands, The AVC Group has announced the appointment of Jim Hardiman to the position of vice president of engineering, effective January 3, 2011.
Hardiman will report directly to Mark Terry, president of The AVC Group, and will be based at the company’s Carlsbad, California corporate headquarters.
“Jim Hardiman brings more than 35 years of proven innovation and standards-setting thinking to his new position at The AVC Group,” Terry states. “A world-renowned technologist, Jim’s work over the years has advanced the state-of-the-art in countless product categories.
“As our new vice president of engineering, he will play a critical role in developing and deploying new technologies throughout each of our brands, resulting in a new generation of system solutions that offer clearly defined value propositions to our dealers and consumers.”
Hardiman comes to The AVC Group from Harman International, where he served as vice president of engineering for the Harman Specialty Group from 2005 until 2008, and then as vice president, Consumer Global Engineering, for Harman International – Consumer Group.
Prior to that, from 2000 until 2005, he served as vice president of hardware engineering at ThinkEngine Networks, a manufacturer of cost-effective, scalable carrier-class NEBS3 compliant Network Media Servers with intelligent switching and speech recognition.
He has also served as director of advanced development from at Media 100 and held engineering and product development positions at Data Translation, Digital Television Imagery, Integral Data Systems, and Data General.
An active member of AES, AVB, China Professionals, and the HDTV Group, among others, Hardiman is the recipient of three U.S. patents in the area of video compression and decompression and a 2000 Emmy for Television Sciences awarded by the National Academy of Television Arts and Sciences for the pioneering development of full motion broadcast quality PC video and compression plug-in cards utilized in the manufacture of non-linear editing systems or video servers.
Bob Farinelli, who had served as chief technical officer of The AVC Group and, previously, as president of ELAN Home Systems, is retiring but will remain with the group as a consultant.
