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 […]
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. […]
For this article, I wanted to step away from AV and all that fun stuff and talk about a far bigger issue, which is communications. One thing that became very clear to me very quickly when I moved from being a long term “AV guy” to being an end user is that we have some […]
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 […]
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 […]
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 […]
Amazon, Apple, Google, and the Zigbee Alliance, this week, announced a new working group that plans to develop and promote the adoption of a new, royalty-free connectivity standard to increase compatibility among smart home products, with security as a fundamental design tenet. Zigbee Alliance board member companies such as IKEA, Legrand, NXP Semiconductors, Resideo, Samsung SmartThings, Schneider Electric, Signify (formerly Philips Lighting), Silicon Labs, […]
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 […]
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 […]
Standardization… the holy grail of the corporate customer. Years ago, when building out a technology space, enterprises relied 100% on the expertise of AV integrators and consultants. This worked well when the spaces consisted almost exclusively of just a few really big complex ones (auditoriums, boardrooms, EBCs, etc.), but over time, starting in the early […]
Barco announced this week that a security vulnerability was discovered within its ClickShare product, which is fixed with an update available immediately, ClickShare update 1.9.1. This vulnerability was discovered by security consultants F-Secure through a process known as “ethical hacking.” “In October of this year, consultants from reached out and shared that they had managed […]
After writing a couple blogs in 2017 about the equally loved and hated potential of “as a Service” (aaS) models to take off in AV, I took a break for a while and watched as the industry discussed the idea. If you missed my original posts on this, you can catch up here: AV as […]
There are any number of things that make big projects different from little projects. The first one that comes to mind, for me, anyway, is that while small projects are typically billed out at time and materials, large projects are more often subject to being quoted out and that requires estimating what the job will […]
Panasonic’s laser projectors are all over the place inside the new Star Wars: Rise of the Resistance ride at Disney World’s Hollywood Studios. And we want to show you! So, here’s the footage we took riding the ride earlier today — it includes story spoilers so, if you’re going to experience the ride totally for […]
The good folks at rAVe [PUBS] reached out to me and have kindly asked me to contribute on a more frequent basis around here. As it happens, I had something that I was working on that I would like to start with that’s a little broader than what I have written previously. I mentioned something […]
Every time I start to write a piece for rAVe ED, I try to think about what the broader AV industry wants to know about the education market. I always try to put forward ways that companies can partner with schools to provide value for all parties. As many people know, one area that I […]
Earlier this month I had the amazing opportunity to be the master of ceremonies at AVIXA’s AV Executive Conference (AVEC). I’m still not sure why they entrusted a room full of leaders and executives to me, but I’m so happy they did because I had an amazing experience. Why was it amazing? Well, for one, […]
Earlier this month at Microsoft Ignite, Microsoft announced that soon Microsoft Teams, the company’s web based video meeting and productivity applications, would be natively compatible with Zoom and later WebEx. If you missed this part of the story, rAVe founder Gary Kayye wrote about it here and it’s been a very popular article, especially in […]
Like so many industries, the AV industry has a robust and valuable community in the social media sphere. Many of us have dozens, if not hundreds of contacts and “friends” that we know only via social media. While we have opportunities to catch up and meet during industry events, including the always popular tweet-ups, the […]
Management guru Peter Drucker is often quoted as saying, “If you can’t measure it, you can’t improve it.” I have long believed in this philosophy and work with my teams to make sure we are setting goals and measuring our success. While I think Drucker was right, he lived and worked in a much different […]
In order to deliver the highest value possible at scale and velocity to the house of worship market, your AV firm will need to learn how to fail faster and succeed sooner. ‘Failing faster’ may seem counter-intuitive because the idea of failing evokes strong, negative emotional responses. And failure is often seen as something to […]
