I’d never heard the term “double join” until a few months ago on a call with one of our board members, John Case, who is a great resource to talk with if you’re researching the world of video conferencing. John spent a long time at Microsoft building the Office 365 product family and now puts […]

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 […]

It’s dark, cramped and dry.  A single elevator slides more than 600 feet underground creaking to a stop to deliver a solitary visitor and their payload ⁠— a locked case carrying an original 35 mm print. What’s in that case? The original celluloid print of Star Wars? Something more modern like Christopher Nolan’s 35 mm […]

As part of my quest to better understand the UC/AV space – I’ve been reading a lot of research reports. This week I put two reports together to realize something pretty interesting: The professional video cable market is predicted to reach revenues of $2 billion by 2024. If you sell cable to the enterprise – […]

I participated in a unified communications panel at InfoComm about three years ago. It was a great panel with representation from companies like Cisco, Polycom, and (the now defunct) Tely Labs. I was the oddball of the bunch; promising the audience that a focus on software to improve proximate meetings was needed at least as […]

It’s national stress awareness month, so I thought I’d share one of the techniques I use at work to reduce stress for my readers. We’re a company that focuses on making your meetings something you can actually enjoy, and my own design team will talk about “de-stressing” opportunities in our own UI.  However, there are […]

One of my readers recently pointed out that universities are leading the charge when it comes to understanding the social impact of the technologies we build. I know this same reader was in the audience when I began to talk about how important privacy, security, and analytics will be as part of a “Future Workspace […]

I was fortunate enough to cross paths with the senior editor of a well-respected technology magazine while I was over in London last week.  It was a far-ranging discussion, but on the flight back, I continued to think about the question he’d put to me regarding software that enables collaboration when we are together and […]

My readers will know that I tend to focus on topics related to collaboration, user-interaction, and generally building products that help us work together. You may be surprised to learn that a significant amount of my time is spent thinking about security. As devices become increasingly attached to our enterprise networks – those same devices must be […]

I spent part of the weekend with some friends who are in the early stages of a new startup. While we don’t always talk shop, it’s inevitable that someone will open up about their latest challenges. The conversation we had ended up being interesting enough that I wanted to cover the topic with my readers. […]

No industry is immune to change, and this is even more true for technology-based economies whose life cycles can be measured in time spans as short as three months. If you’ve worked in the audiovisual (AV) industry in the past decade, you’ve witnessed a hardware-centric community transform itself into one driven by software and innovation. […]

Collaboration is so far past being a buzzword that it’s almost become kitschy. Nearly every booth at this past summer’s InfoComm show figured out a way to entwine the word collaboration in their messaging somewhere. But collaboration is truly important. It’s at the core of how the workplace is changing to accommodate modern work styles. […]

Productivity and engagement, collaboration, team cohesion – these are all topics that are important to a company’s success. These topics have come into focus as corporate enterprises look to adapt their culture to the ever-increasing millennial demographic. I’ve met with several Fortune 100 companies who understand that rigid company hierarchy, top-down management, and traditional meeting-driven culture […]

If you work in either the audiovisual (AV) or information technology (IT) sectors of our economy — you’ve probably heard the term ‘AV/IT convergence.’ It’s a term that gets overused and unless you’ve been installing cables on Mars, you’re probably as tired of hearing about it as I am. What AV/IT convergence really means, in short, […]

You may have noticed it has been a while since my last post. I’ve been busy holding onto my proverbial hat as the collaboration market has gone from rapid growth to full explosion. I’ve been spending my time trying to understand how technology-based collaboration should evolve as our customers envision the future of their workplaces. […]

A friend who works at a large content streaming company recently gave me a glimpse at a study that focused on the role of television in the household and wow – the results were quite shocking. I would argue the results will have significant impact on how displays are used in the enterprise as well […]

Probably like any other founder/CTO in a startup, my day consists of a huge variety of things — meeting with technology partners, going to on-site visits with customers, designing products, engineering, speaking at events… the list goes on. I’ve discovered that one of my “hidden” jobs is at least as important as these other things […]

I’ve started the New Year with a near constant tour of conference rooms, war rooms, classrooms, huddle spaces and other places where meetings of any kind are held. In the first three weeks of the year, I’ve visited four major cities and countless business and university campuses. I’ve been trying to gain a deeper understanding […]

The world of audiovisual technology and software has been an exciting place to be over the past several years. Anyone who has seen the transition from analog to digital, to IP-based everything, and now to software can attest to that. It’s been both volatile (anyone remember Tweeter? How about Kodak?) and profitable for the right […]

The tragic events on college campuses in recent weeks have led to some important meetings with my customers in higher-ed. We take customer feedback seriously and use it to inform our product development strategy, and right now, I am getting some interesting direction about an unintended but potentially very valuable use of our product. In […]

Wireless displays are one of the more exciting frontiers of technology. As little as three years ago, most of the world’s displays could only be accessed through a traditional video cable. Video transport standards and cables + adapters meant that the use-case model for displays hadn’t changed since the Xerox Star of the mid-1970s. One […]

Many AV resellers and integrators find themselves deploying suites of new technologies to support education.  Traditional AV gear like flat panels and speakers are being augmented with learning management software, lecture capture and wireless collaboration systems.  If you look at operational spending in education (where technology and AV is tracked) there has been a 26 […]

I know it’s been a while since my last post but I just got back from an Alpine climbing expedition in the Canadian Rockies. I would like to cover something I had plenty of time to think about while stuck in a tent on a glacier waiting for the weather to clear. It’s a topic […]

I was on the phone last night with a colleague (who prefers to remain nameless) from the computer networking world. He’s both a scientist and an engineer I respect, so when the conversation turned to the future of wireless media and the wireless network in general, I grabbed a pen. We discussed the implications of […]

Editor’s note: This column was printed just prior to InfoComm 2015 this year, but we thought you’d still find it interesting. See all of rAVe’s InfoComm 2015 coverage here. OK – InfoComm is just around the corner. Along with ISE, it’s the largest audiovisual tradeshow of the year. Anything related to display systems, room control, […]

I was in Manhattan last week and was asked to tour a space that represents the future of a Fortune-50 company. An entire floor in their downtown headquarters had been built to create a more open, collaborative, and technology supported workspace that they will begin to roll out worldwide this year. It was both beautiful […]

I have to admit that I’ve finally got involved in the start-up device craze and got hold of a device that measures and reports statistics related to my sleeping patterns. Congratulations to me — I now know that I sleep only 5-6 hours a night. Admittedly, I bought the device during our push to bring […]

I spent part of the morning untangling the mess of cables that slowly appears under my desk as I travel, unplug and plug my laptop, bring demo gear on the road, and re-plug the various devices that are part of my day. Modern office spaces have changed over the past several decades from the hyper-simple […]

Happy New Year! Technology gets off to a quick start at the CES show every year, and there is always plenty of marketing hype around “must have” personal technology toys. But the show can also be a bellwether for enterprise software, collaboration, and media tech that will impact the AV industry in the coming year. […]

I often take a look at where major grant funding is being spent as a way to keep tabs on major technology trends over the next five to 10 years. After all, when NSF or DARPA puts millions of dollars of taxpayers money to work, it’s a bit like watching the Vegas line for college […]

The Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences announced that this year’s Nobel Prize in Physics will go to the three inventors of the blue LED (light-emitting diode). If you work in the AV space, then you already know the importance that the LED has on display technology in general. But you may not realize how the […]

I was on the road with an AV reseller/partner recently who asked me what companies (excluding my own) I think are the most exciting in the AV space. My answer surprised her — NanoSys and 3M (she’d never heard of NanoSys and still viewed 3M through the lens of their legacy line of projectors). So […]