When planning and estimating, you have to deal with the unknown — this includes both the known-unknowns and the unknown-unknowns, so to speak. Everyone likes clear, concise answers, and at least initially, it’s not always possible for project managers to give them. During the development of the initial scope of a project, it’s difficult, maybe […]
AV marketing professionals spend countless hours pursuing more reader likes, more engagement, more content, more metrics and frankly more of the same in a never-ending hype cycle. Social media is merely another function where marketers are stuck in tactical due to feeling the pressure to produce something — anything — in order to somehow drive […]
Fear. Uncertainty. Doubt. We call this ‘FUD’ and it happens all the time for audio, video and lighting sales; one minute the sale looks like it’s about to close and seemingly the next moment FUD strikes and the deal is too often lost. FUD exists in every market within the AV industry, but perhaps it’s […]
Like most folks out there, I spent many years not understanding what UX (User eXperience) was and, more importantly, what the difference between UI (User Interface) and UX was. Over time I came to realize that what was being commonly delivered as a UI in the AV world did not translate to good customer experience. […]
Last month I wrote about how I thought that accessibility would be a big topic in AV during 2020. A big reason we will hear more about this is a lawsuit that Harvard recently settled with the National Association of the Deaf. In the settlement, Harvard agreed to provide captioning for all new content placed […]
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 […]
There’s a saying that I regularly remind myself with. It goes, “If it makes you money, it’s a business. If it costs you money, it’s a hobby.” And while in order to be a business you need to have products and services that people want, it’s no less necessary, more so perhaps, that you get […]
As we turn the page on the 2010s, there’s a great deal of speculation about what this new decade will bring. Of course, nobody really knows what the future holds, but I’ve thought a lot about what’s ahead for the AV industry. One segment I find particularly interesting is the automotive space. At the CES […]
By: Morgan Alley Account Manager, Almo Professional A/V We millennials sure love to ruin everything, don’t we? First, we came in with participation trophies, we moved on to tank the economy and now we have come for sports! *Queue diabolical laughter* According to this Reuter’s article, global esports revenues will rise above one billion dollars by […]
In my biweekly blog series, I am highlighting some of the incredible people who work for the Audio Video Industry. In this post, we are profiling Zvonimir Prokic. Here is his brief introduction. Zvonimir Prokic is the Head of Programming at Platinum Vision LLC, U.A.E. 1. Describe your journey in the AV industry? How did […]
Each level of the classic Mario game would end with our hero having battled through hoards of foes to rescue his beloved, only to be greeted with the now-familiar message that his princess is in another castle. The inherent sexism of the princess-rescue trope aside, this is what I think when I look at the […]
At the turn of every year, I often think of blogging about the big stories or products of the past year, or the promising products of the coming year. I have never written about my resolution for the new year, as they are often personal and not business- or AV-related. However, this year is different. […]
Understanding the complex relationships between the inside perceptions of your organization and its culture and the equally vital external perceptions of those same elements is the key to empowering long-term strategic growth and expansion. If you do not have a good reference for both aspects of this crucial data, it’s impossible to develop a plan […]
A couple months ago, I saw a post from Liberty AV on social media. It showed a picture of a device that seemed to wirelessly share a laptop to a larger display. There are a lot of devices that allow someone to share their screen wirelessly to a display — Barco ClickShare, Crestron Air Media, […]
Happy New Year, friends. I’ve been too absent from these spaces as I’ve left one job, settled into a new one and let the rhythms of life get in the way. Let’s take it as a New Year’s resolution that I’ll be back, with more to share. As we’re talking about resolutions, we’ll start with […]
One of my favorite aphorisms says that “every solution has two problems.” This understanding applies to all things. We moved into a new home in a new neighborhood. It’s right on the edge of the city. At least for now, until the fields south of here get developed too. A consequence of this being a […]
Collaboration had to be one of the most-used buzzwords of the last half decade. It’s been used to describe everything from wireless screen sharing to interactive flat panels to teleconferencing to cloud-based file sharing apps. Marketers LOVE to slap “collaboration” on their boxes and press releases. I even heard a story about a sales rep slapping […]
In April I wrote a blog about HETMA, a new association formed by Joe Way and BC Hatchett. Check out the blog to understand more about the association and why it was formed. In this blog, I want to draw your attention to the first-ever virtual conference that HETMA hosted December 9-11, 2019. By all […]
CES 2020 kicked off with some exciting announcements from LG. Last year we were all blown away by LG’s incredible OLED roll-up screens, so this year LG are taking it one step further with a roll-down version that extends from the ceiling, similar to a motorized projection screen. LG also announced all-new gaming displays and […]
The house of worship (HoW) market easily exceeds $1 billion (U.S.) in sales each year for audiovisual systems and gear. Yet, the market continues to be one with a mere handful of vendors effectively targeting and selling consistently into this underserved vertical space for the AV industry. With over six years of historical precedent and […]
In my biweekly blog series, I am highlighting some of the incredible people who work for the Audio Video Industry. In this post, we are profiling Ellen Simich. Here is her brief introduction. Ellen Simich, CTS, is Senior Director, Project Management at Prysm Inc 1.Describe your journey in the AV industry? How did it start? […]
2019 was like no other year I can recall. While the AV-economy experienced explosive growth, at the same time, a few big brands nearly disappeared, namely InFocus and Polycom. How can the Kleenex of projectors, InFocus, literally divest themselves of projectors? Well, it happened and, that happened to be our biggest story of 2019. In […]
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 […]
Zoom, Zoom, Zoom. It’s not just a catchy Mazda slogan, but it’s also the tale of the last few projects I’ve worked on. In a world where we hear many that like to complain software and hardware companies are talking to customers directly and that the scourge of “good enough” is ruining our businesses, I […]
Anyone who has ever sat in on a project meeting with end users, purchasers, IT, corporate, architects (and all the other professionals likely to be at the table) knows that perspectives are often significantly distorted. How? They’re distorted by either too much or too little understanding of the technologies involved. In this hypothetical project meeting, […]
I hope everyone is having a great holiday season! It’s the day after Christmas, which means for many of us, yesterday was the culmination of a long build-up of anticipation. Planning family gatherings, curating the holiday meal menus, baking cookies, making fudge and braving the web and the local retailers to find that perfect gift […]
This is part four in a four-part series Christopher Gillespie has been writing about the relationship between end users and integrators, particularly with regards to corporations or educational institutions that have a large number of conference rooms. See part one, his introduction, here, part two on the AV bill of materials here and part three, […]
In the previous installment, we took an overview of estimating and examined some of the basic concepts. Building off of that, it’s time to dig in with a little more detail and provide some context about selecting which methods to apply when you need to develop an estimate. One estimation technique I didn’t go into […]
This is part three of a four-part series from Christopher Gillespie. Read his introduction here and his piece on the AV bill of materials here. Years ago, maintaining and reporting on the inventory was a matter of many spreadsheets, maybe a home-baked database, perhaps it was some hybrid, or maybe it was Crestron Fusion or […]
By Scott Walker Principal, Waveguide LLC There it is. I’m putting it out there. I’ve thought about this a lot and from my vantage point, having spent the past 30 years of my life as an AV design consultant, I believe there’s no other single individual who has had a greater impact on the lives […]
By David Danto Director of UC Strategy and Research, Poly Turning the page into a new decade gives us the opportunity to put our past into perspective and predict where we’re going. In the world of unified communications and collaboration, this exercise reveals a space that is eliminating most of the poor experiences and exploding […]
Remember when Polycom and Cisco were always mentioned in the same sentence? Seems like a long, long time ago in a galaxy far, far away, huh? Do you remember when we were all saying, “Why don’t Polycom and Cisco just make their stuff interoperable?” Well, that was what led to their ultimate demise — in […]
