Latest headlines: Christopher Jaynes on the value of pre-meeting chatter, Jim Nista on making digital signage content more memorable, plus news from Mackie, QSC, Steinberg and more
October 8, 2019 | Volume: 5 | Issue: 19
A decent amount of my work week is spent on Zoom calls with client teams. I usually try to hop on the call about five minutes early to welcome each attendee to the meeting and to catch up on what is new in their personal and professional lives. This is called pre-meeting chatter and Christopher Jaynes agues that it is more important than you think in his most recent column “The Ripple Effect.” I definitely recommend reading his column — I think you will be quite impressed by how this scales to the industry’s work in collaboration spaces and virtual meetings.
Scott Tiner also invites integrators to a dialogue surrounding their business with the higher education market. One statement stood out to me: “Think of it this way. If the cash registers at Wal-Mart stopped working, what would happen with the business? You couldn’t just roll your eyes and say, ‘Well, they don’t really need technology to do that, they could do it by hand.’ In fact, they can’t still just do it by hand; just like today, much teaching CAN’T be done without technology. So the primary thing to understand about our business is that there is zero tolerance for extended downtime. When something goes wrong, it must be corrected in minutes.”
Individual interactions for users with AV installs can’t be aggregated and then analyzed. An individual interaction has to be analyzed on its own — if a user can’t do what they need to do enabled by technology, there is work to be done.
The science of meetings is fascinating. How do we best communicate with one another when we find ourselves sitting across from each other in a conference room? How do we solve problems, build confidence in one another, share? It’s an interesting area of our lives to explore — particularly because the workday is composed of a series of meetings where (I hope) we’re trying to have meaningful impact.
For digital signage, everything about your content, including design, motion and messaging all go into making a memorable experience for your viewers. There’s no one right set of rules, since digital signage is used for everything from interactive wayfinding to menu boards, design guidelines vary.
Creating memorable content for digital signage borrows best practices from other forms of out of home advertising and traditional signage. Taken together, there are guidelines that apply to most signs to help your content stand out and provide a more memorable experience for your viewers.
True holography, where a 3D image is produced in mid-air, has made slight progress as laser technology has progressed, but these still require some kind of steam, smoke, gas, volume, etc. and they're either very small or monochromatic. The best example of one I saw was at SIGGRAPH funnily enough, but the images were simple and tiny. Despite all the potential opportunities new technology may have to offer, I am near certain the pursuit of holography is on life support. Why? AR.
As long as I have been writing columns for rAVe ED, my aim has been to help integrators understand where they can provide value to the higher education market. The business has changed so drastically over the years, that the value propositions of ten years ago no longer exist. I write about this because I realize we all live in the same economic environment and rely on each other. Yes, we in education NEED integrators, designers, programmers and installers. We just don’t need them the same way that we used to. I want the people running these firms to make money, thrive and stay in business. If they are not doing so, then none of us can.