Have you seen the movie “Groundhog Day”? You know, the one where Bill Murray is forced to repeat one day over and over? Well, here it is a quarter past Groundhog’s Day 2021, and I don’t think any of us expected that we’d still be conducting our lives — business and otherwise — online. But […]

Time marches on, but not fast enough. Our industry has been adept in helping clients transition from live events to virtual events, thereby keeping us all in business to some degree. However, some types of events — training, demos, straightforward business meetings — may never return to the live stage. Videoconferencing offers all the efficiency […]

Well, change continues apace. I am a bit late in getting this article to rAVe, mostly because I am involved in my first national show since the coronavirus crisis began. And, believe me, things have changed. Now, a lot of people have predicted the decline of the rental and staging portion of the industry due […]

Last week, I wrote a column that basically asserted that things had changed. Well, things have changed since then, too. In that time, many parts of the country have gone from “social distancing” to full lockdown, including my own state. So the message from my last column, which was essentially to get out there and […]

A couple of months ago, I wrote an article that talked about protecting your staff from the current epidemic. A lot has changed. Obviously, the virus becoming a worldwide pandemic has thrown the industry into a tailspin. As an industry, we have spent a lot of time in the tailspin condition, as we are an […]

For a long time now, I have advocated the use of commonly available online tools to organize a rental and staging operation. Personally, I have long loved an SaaS application called BaseCamp, but there are many available tools like this one that enable us to organize our projects without having to invest a fortune in […]

There is an old saw about the Chinese character for crisis being a combination of the characters for danger and opportunity. Friends who speak Mandarin tell me that this is not true, but it is so convenient that I wanted to use it here. Please consider it quoted. Linguistic folklore or not, I believe that […]

If you are one of my readers (thank you) or if you are one of the many people in the rental industry that I am constantly calling for advice, you know that I have spent most of the last 18 months designing and implementing an “experience center” for a global manufacturer. The experience center type […]

Around 25 years ago, there was a popular video game called “Search for the King.” It featured an unlikely hero, the head of an internal corporate AV department, who quit his job and went off on a pilgrimage in search of Elvis. The game had an interesting animated opening, in which the CEO derisively summoned […]

Ah, September. Back to school, and, for many of my clients who are coming home from the Hamptons, back to work. For AV rental companies, in most parts of the country, business will be picking up again as their clients return to meetings. And for many of us it will be time to plan for […]

For some time now, I have meant to do an article about sales and marketing for rental and staging, how they are different from the rest of our industry, how they are the same and how they are changing. I was not sure when I would put this on my schedule, but this week I […]

If you read our industry press at all (and I hope you do) you will note large numbers of articles on two subjects: 1. The “Huddle Room” and 2. Drones When two subjects like these fascinate an industry, it is almost inevitable that they combine in some way. (I consider this the “you got peanut […]

Last month, I spent some time in this column standing on one of my traditional soapboxes, namely that the AV rental and staging company has come to a point in the history of our industry where it becomes necessary to do some reinvention of our products and services. In my usual roundabout way, I came […]

For many years, the joke in the rental and staging industry has been that we exist as the unpaid (and uncredited) research and development arm of the manufacturers that we buy from. Often, we are the first buyers of new technologies for a number of reasons. First, because of the technological pressure to stay ahead […]

OK, for the last two months I have taken a very tongue-in-cheek look at the idea of artificial intelligence and robotics in the AV industry. I got a number of interesting emails from that column, from a criticism of my “union dues” joke to a number of serious thoughts about what A.I. would do to […]

Last month, we talked about AI and robotics, how they were affecting our current electronics world and how they could affect the future of the audiovisual industry. Elon Musk recently pointed out that AI could take over the world, producing an unkillable AI global dictator and could literally spell the end of our species. He […]

I am fairly involved in the worlds of virtual reality, robotics and artificial intelligence and have a strong interest in how they will alter the future of our industry. Our equipment is already being built in robotic factories, using artificial intelligence. But before we push ahead into a future where our “help” is robotic instead […]

Well, here we are again. The holidays are upon us, so it is time to pour a glass of, well, whatever a sales rep sent me for the holidays and summon my internal psychic. Each year at this time I write a final column for the year, summing up what I think the year has […]

Last month, we discussed the Oculus Connect Developers Convention, a meeting I had recently attended in virtual reality. This month, I thought we would address the effectiveness of meeting in virtual reality. First, let’s discuss the event itself, which was the annual conference for Oculus virtual reality developers. For those of you who have been […]

Last week, I attended Oculus Connect, the conference for Facebook/Oculus virtual reality developers. It was one of the best glimpses I have yet seen into the uses of a new technology that will change the way we do business in industries with events or communication and collaboration with remote people (rental and staging, collaboration, education, […]

Like many of you who are in the electronics business, I am an Amazon Prime subscriber. I’m somebody who has always searched through multiple stores to find the particular model of what it was I needed. Amazon now saves me lots of time, gets me the exact model I wanted and has it here the […]

Those of you who know me know that I loathe most social media, especially Twitter. I feel that Twitter has done significant damage to our language, to the point that I now get email without punctuation or complete sentences. Our universities seem to have eliminated the essay in favor of the Tweet. I actually heard […]

On this special edition of Rants and rAVes, Joel Rollins is joined by Jim Nista and Jay Saret of Almo Corporation talk about Almo’s recent acquisition of Insteo. Listen to this podcast for all the details! Podcast: Play in new window | DownloadSubscribe: RSS

This week, I was really excited to see a new documentary, “Love Notes to Newton.” I was a die-hard fan of the very early and much-maligned Apple Personal Digital Assistant. I still have three different models of the Newton, all of which still work. The Newton was a groundbreaking product, unfortunately maybe too far ahead […]

In my day job, I answer a lot of people’s questions about audiovisual and virtual reality technology. In fact, lately, that’s really all I seem to be doing. And to find those answers quickly, especially when it comes to determining things like part numbers and dimensions, I turn to the source that most people use: […]

Editor’s note: Joel didn’t write the title of this column. I have always laughed at marketing “buzz terms” as used in our industry. In fact, I once devoted an entire column to them (Buzzards in the AV Industry, July 2010). Except today, I am going to use one myself: Breathtaking. It is simply the only term […]

There is an enormous amount of great new technology here this year. And you can choose to get it from fewer and fewer companies all the time. One of the things that I have commented on in rAVe for several years is the difference between the way the AV market works in North America and […]

I arrived at the show this morning on the first bus at 6 a.m. thinking that I could beat the lines at the Starbucks here at the Las Vegas Convention Center. Boy, was I wrong. There were 200 people in line for coffee when I got here, and I am not a patient man, particularly […]

When I was a kid, “family television” meant television to be watched by the family, and not television about families rehearsing for their court date or climbing over each other’s bodies to get to the throne. No, “family television” meant “Mutual of Omaha’s Wild Kingdom,” hosted by noted zoologist Marlin Perkins. Each week, the show […]

In politics and economics, a Potemkin village is any construction built solely to deceive others into thinking that something is better than it really is. The term comes from stories of a fake portable village built solely to impress Russian Empress Catherine II (Catherine the Great) by Grigory Potemkin; the structures would be disassembled after […]

Last month, we talked about AVaaS, (Audio Visual as a Service) and how it relates to the future of the rental and staging segment of our industry. My basic premise was that the current wave of cloud-based digital offerings has distorted our definition of the word “service,” much as social media has distorted our definition […]

Over the last year or two, I have been reading with increasing frequency about AVaaS, or “Audio Visual as a Service.” In particular, I’ve been paying a lot of attention to the writings of my friend Gary Kayye. Gary is one of the best I have ever met at analyzing a product in our industry […]