Digital is fun. Digital is sexy. Digital is what gives us the tools to manipulate sound and video in ways which would have been impossible not too long ago. Today video switchers are digital. Audio mixing consoles are digital. Fancy speaker arrays and even mic arrays are digital. The world is so digital that it […]

There are many different ways of making the sale, all with their own pros and cons. The thing about how you close a sale, and this is where so many salespeople go wrong, is that it’s entirely dependent upon the context of each sale. How you ask for the sale depends on a whole bunch […]

Imagine this: As you walk away to take a break from an AV installation where you installed 20 cables, an HVAC tech takes a chainsaw to the bottom of the stud bay, cutting all the cables in one swift hack. From brand new to retrofits, I’ve (nearly) seen it all in the past 18 years […]

Recently Symetrix announced a strategic partnership with Attero Tech and Stewart Audio. In a significant development for users of Audinate’s Dante audio networking technology, the current release of SymNet Composer open architecture design software for Edge and Radius Dante network audio DSP’s natively integrates select Attero Tech and Stewart Audio products supporting their network discovery, […]

I wrote another blog about Microsoft and InfoComm that asked whether Microsoft’s presence really signaled that AV/IT convergence was finally here.  The comments and Twitter discussion quickly turned to speculation about what Microsoft may actually be showing on the show floor. The consensus there was that we all expect to see Lync, Skype (perhaps with […]

Inspired by the presence of Microsoft at InfoComm 2014, AVPhenom announced today that he will debut his new startup AV control and video switching brand at InfoComm June 17th in Las Vegas.  rAVe Publications secured an exclusive interview with AVPhenom to discuss this “game changing” announcement. rAVe:  “What is your new company called and how […]

This past week I was one of the luckiest workers in the world. Why? I was doing what I love and I was doing it for a living.  Life is good.  It helps that I am married to a perfect woman and that I love my wife and kids. It helps that I am a […]

By Premier Mounts As we all know, the industry is changing in front of our very eyes and one change that concerns us all is that many products have become more and more commoditized, and the result is eroding margins. Premier Mounts is directly addressing the changing nature of the market in order to serve […]

There has been much ado lately in the AV world about the appearance of Microsoft at InfoComm 2014. Most of that hype has been around the fact that they believe it means that AV/IT convergence is complete. I have my own thoughts on that subject which will be released shortly as an eBook download, but […]

Microsoft. The AV industry giants. The ever growing market of communications and collaboration. Digital signage and video walls. Interactive displays and whiteboards. Cloud and virtualization — strategic technologies enhancing enterprise collaboration, infrastructure and more. BYOD — the fastest growing trend in the enterprise today. The new market disrupters. And of course, the integrators and end […]

Greetings, friends and followers! My apologies for the various obligations (professional and personal), side-projects, and secret adventures which have kept me away from these pages for the past week. After a weekend off the grid at an undisclosed location I’m refreshed and ready to dive into all of the news in AV-land on this, the […]

How important is your brand name? Is your brand not merely well known, but well liked? In the House of Worship market, your brand is who the churches say you are. It is vital that you as manufacturers, systems integrators, consultants, rep firms, and dealers provide this unique vertical space with who you are, not […]

New solutions continue to enter the market at a rapid pace and if all were taken into consideration, it’s altogether possible that this series could go on for months. However, due to the fact that I’ve set it to end prior to InfoComm we are coming to the last few chapters. So far all companies […]

When you think of super-bright projector lines, you automatically think Christie, Barco, Digital Projection, Panasonic, NEC and maybe Sony sometimes, but it’s very unlikely you think EPSON. I sure didn’t. But, I was in sunny southern California recently and was invited over to the EPSON U.S. headquarters to check out the company’s 4000, Pro G […]

The other night it was Family Movie Night, and since it was my son’s turn to pick a movie he selected the Pixar film Bug’s Life. Watching Bug’s Life again after all these years was surreal for me for a couple of reasons. The first reason was that it was weird, retrospectively, to hear Hopper, […]

All these articles about AV news, new product announcements and acquisitions in the AV industry being released before InfoComm got me to thinking about company recognition. Then at a meeting the other day, one of our reps stood up and told us a story about his contact in a K-12 school who went up to […]

By now the people who don’t believe that vinyl is making a comeback are the ones who declare that in never left. That’s hardly news. What is news, and what I found very hard to believe is sources who declare that cassette tapes are making a comeback. What? I found that hard to believe. But […]

As homeowners increasingly desire TVs for their outdoor spaces and price points continue to drop, the outdoor TV market will continue to grow. This upward trend coupled with increasingly affordable technology has contributed to a recent explosion of outdoor TV sales and installations. There are plenty of outdoor TVs on the market, but they are […]

First, it billed itself as an eco-friendly room management system and then it was a simplified control system architecture. Now, three years after its USA debut and having never shipped a working system in America, ARRIVE Systems is back calling itself a “collaboration solution” — today’s buzzword for wireless room systems. Am I being too […]

This week my daughter and I have been working on our presentations for InfoComm. That’s right. This year we get to present together for the first time ever. Some of you met my daughter when she was about 8 or 9 when I first came into AV and now she is teaching in AV and […]

We all know how delicious a 7 layer dip can be.  Salsa and beans alone are OK, but when they are combined with 5 other ingredients they become a mouth-watering extravaganza!  (Yes, I have issues with food.) Adding layers is not only a good strategy for a party dip, but also for developing engaging, interactive content.  However when […]

I was recently told by a business owner and successful entrepreneur that he was not “a leader.” He admitted he knows technology and operations but lacked true leadership skills. His solution to this challenge was to hire outside to bring in “leaders” for their team. I can’t help but think about how sad that is […]

We’ve all heard the jaw-dropping stats about HDBaseT and how consumers won’t be able to get their hands on it fast enough, with experts such as Futuresource Consulting expecting the demand to quadruple in 2016. But our role in the AV industry is to educate consumers along the way on what their transition to HDBaseT […]

If you didn’t see my previous post, this is a retread of five blogs I wrote in 2011 about Sales Etiquette. I was inspired by Lee Distad’s recent blog on manners so I thought I’d share these lessons for anyone who may be able to get something out of them. Sales Etiquette I don’t know […]

I just saw a post on this site by Lee Distad on Why Good Manners Make a Difference. I liked Lee’s post as it questioned whether or not manners are going “out of style” so to speak.  I think we have come into an era where the entitlement attitude of the celebration generation may very […]

Summer is coming, and with it, new product releases. I’ve been lucky enough to get a few sneak peeks at new products due for release this InfoComm. I’ve not seen anything quite earth shattering or revolutionary as of yet, but a string of reminders as to how small, thoughtful decisions can create significant improvements. There […]

Words matter, both what you say, and how you say them, which is something that I’ve blogged about before. When your job centers around strengthening client relationships you become very conscious of how to best speak with your clients in a way that will do just that. Whether it’s delivering good news or bad, you […]

The FCC made waves last week with an announcement that it’s dropping its long-standing position on “net-neutrality” — the idea that all Internet traffic should be treated equally by Internet service providers. This is something with direct impact on an increasingly network-centric AV industry, and one about which several of my fellow AV bloggers have […]

OK, I’ll admit it, I’m a social media junkie. Without social media, I’m not sure I’d have even been doing such a series in the first place — I’ve gotten a very good idea of what the companies involved in this bring to the table either through certain individuals or collectively. And this company is […]

It’s trade-show season, in full swing. With one of the biggies behind (NAB), and other biggies coming soon, are you open to hearing from your users and incorporating their feedback into your new products BEFORE you launch them? Every vertical market has overlap in how they use your products, but there’s enough differentiation in vertical […]

By Ron DeVoe Principal, Successful Sales Consulting InfoComm is now 75 years old and while I am not quite that age, I look around and found that I have become an “old dog” of the AV industry. You can spot an “old dog” fairly easily. Sometimes he is identified as one who remembers easels, speaks […]

I’ve said before that a successful business is nothing more than “selling stuff to people.” But there are many ways to go about doing that, and by far the most effective is building lasting relationships, and the best way to do that is to take care of people’s needs and wants, and make them feel […]