NEC Display Solutions of America, Inc. today announced the launch of NEC ALP, a business intelligence analytics platform for retailers that delivers real-time content and data measurement. The NEC Analytics Learning Platform (ALP) combines advanced video analytics with NEC’s digital signage expertise to make retailers smarter through big data, content matching and delivering relevant content. […]
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, […]
As you may know, I have been teaching both new media advertising and branding at the University of North Carolina (UNC) for more than 10 years now. Nearly my entire professional life has been spent in marketing and branding and I was excited when the dean of the School of Media and Journalism (where advertising and PR live at UNC) […]
I don’t know if “As a Service” has replaced “experience” or “convergence” in the AV buzzword bingo game, but it certainly has been a hot topic as of late, opening some interesting questions as to how the business models of traditionally hardware-centric AV companies fit into a software — and software as service — based […]
Automation isn’t new to the audiovisual industry, but a new kind of automation for this technology-focused trade will be centered around automating the customer’s buying journey. As innovation has led the consumer markets to automate the discovery process for buyers, so too has the time come for the long-established AV industry to adapt and embrace […]
Helping prospects and clients inform themselves during their customer buying journey is not a one-size-fits-most process due to the exponential growth of online search. Instead of manufacturers and systems integrators publishing generic product features, benefits and specifications, today’s influencers and decision-makers are searching for how products work in their unique vertical markets and applications. To […]
This month at CCUMC, I will be discussing how Bates College began to turn around its service operations by using data, metrics, SLAs and dashboards. This is not an earth shattering new business tool, but it is something that I think many organizations still don’t use quite enough or don’t use it in the right […]
Back in the spring, I launched a series of blogs on The Hard Truth about Selling Soft Service(ices) focusing on why AV has had a hard time turning the corner to managed services, software, video over IP and AV as a Service (AVaaS). I wrote about the first two hurdles in separate posts dealing with […]
Optoma today launched its Creative Touch series of interactive flat panel displays (IFPDs) available in 65”, 75” and 86” formats. They start at $3,499. The Optoma Creative Touch IFPDs are basically native 4K (3840×2160) resolution, collaboration boards using LCD technology with up to 20-point multi-touch capabilities and a blue light filter (to reduce eye strain) and are aimed at classrooms, […]
Despite our industry’s change from box sales to services, I still see some integrators who don’t seem to understand how a service must deliver value to a customer. As I wrote about last month, I see some who still look at what can deliver money to the firm, independent of value to the customer. With […]
When it comes to workplace collaboration, huddle rooms are all the rage these days, and it makes sense — the number of huddle rooms, which are great for ad-hoc and small group collaboration, is growing at staggering rates. And while huddle rooms are well worth the hype, it’s important that we don’t overlook the mainstay […]
By Tom Vanthuyne Business Development Video Products, Silex Insight Ever since ancient civilization, people have been compressing goods; think olive oil, wine, flour, tomato paste… it is simply the most efficient way to store and transport bulky stuff. You preserve the essentials and get rid of the redundancies. When it comes to video, it has […]
Extron just launched itself into the AV-over-IP market with a family of products that distribute and switch video, audio and USB 2.0 signals over standard Ethernet networks (and they can send it over a network at 40 Mbps all the way up to 10-gigabit) — it’s called the NAV Series. Utilizing Extron’s patented PURE3 codec, NAV delivers […]
Photos by Sara Abrons 70 youth ages 14-20 years old direct, produce and execute the broadcast operations at MiLB AAA baseball team the Durham Bulls and have been for the past 20 years. As a part of a an Explorer Post under the Boy Scouts of America, both male and female participants fill roles ranging […]
Next month, I have the opportunity to be part of an amazing panel at CCUMC on AVaaS. Being part of this panel has made me think more about the service and do some research on it. I don’t want to spoil the entire panel here, after all, I know that we will have a huge […]
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. […]
CEDIA Expo is the ultimate AV geekfest. Walking around CEDIA is like being an eight-year-old at Toys ‘R’ Us wishing you could have everything. But like Toys ‘R’ Us, it’s on the verge of disappearing. Let’s be honest here — the show has had flat attendance (right at 20,000, INCLUDING exhibitor personnel) for the past […]
DILBERT © Scott Adams. Used By permission of ANDREWS MCMEEL SYNDICATION. All rights reserved. The wild, wonderfully sarcastic and incisive mind of Scott Adams as represented in his legendary Dilbert comic strips perfectly illustrates the core point of this column. It seems, based on the less-than-stellar outcomes of project after project thrashed out on industry […]
Huddle spaces are the Goldilocks of meeting rooms: not so big and formal they stifle creativity, yet not too small for a team to get work done. And while they’re great at facilitating collaboration, it’s important to note that they’re not “just another meeting room” when it comes to implementing video conferencing. These ad-hoc collaboration […]
Last month, I wrote about how I don’t want to see another whiteboard advertised as THE solution for the classroom of the future. I stand by that, I still don’t like them, but I think I may have not been clear about one thing, the concept behind what they are trying to do makes sense. […]
If you’ve read my posts before, you’ll notice that I have rarely predicted the death of any particular technology or business model. Sure, I have my ideas on where the industry is heading or which technologies may ultimately win out in the end, but I never go so far as to say this is 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 […]
Everyone who’s anyone in AV knows that 4K provides four times the resolution of 1080p. 1920×1080, commonly referred to as ‘Full HD’ was the industry’s high-resolution display platform for over a decade and has recently been usurped by 4K — which in ProAV-land is known as UHD, or 3840×2160 (or in DCI-world, 4096×2160) is, in […]
It doesn’t feel like that long ago that network connectivity in AV hardware was an idea more noted in the breach than in the observance. But times have changed. What started with lighting control and other automation hardware eventually migrated into mainstream AV products. Honestly, once you’ve got those features, there’s no going back. Luxuries […]
Integrate turned 10 yesterday when the halls opened at the new International Convention Centre Sydney in Darling Harbour. We have four reporters here covering the show both through extensive social media coverage (see @rAVePubs on Instagram and Twitter) as well as via a dedicated show microsite. In fact, we’ve already shot and posted over 150 […]
Every business owner in every company hopes, especially when they invent or pioneer something unique, that their competition will be good. Bad competition tends to shred an industry and can lead to its eventual demise. For example, I have many friends that own AV integration firms — they love the good competition and loathe the […]
There are quite a few conferences that focus on AV equipment. On the consumer side, there is CES, on the broadcast side there is NAB, then for residential AV there is CEDIA Expo and for commercial AV, we have InfoComm. The latest conference to focus on AV equipment, however, happened Friday, August 10th. The conference? DEFCON. […]
The corporate market continues to account for the largest segment of ProAV revenue. According to AVIXA’s Industry Outlook Trends and Analysis (IOTA), ProAV solutions for corporate office environments are expected to generate nearly $15 billion in revenue in the Americas in 2018. Growth is expected to be somewhat slower than the overall industry, at 1.5 […]
At my institution, we began putting our AV systems on the network over a dozen years ago. The advantages were simply amazing. In fact, we take so many of these for granted today, we forget some of them. For example, when was the last time you thought about how amazing it is that you can […]
This past week I was in Barcelona for ISE’s announcement that the show would move there icapitaln 2021 after 14 years in Amsterdam. We were under strict non-disclosure from telling anyone we had been invited there — we hadn’t been told what the announcement was, but it certainly wasn’t hard to guess — but then […]
Unlike EVERY other InfoComm awards program, we don’t let companies enter themselves AND we don’t take money to apply for awards. EVERY other InfoComm awards program is pay-for-play and are NOT to be believed. They aren’t real. They are, in fact, #FakeAwards Now, I am not saying rAVe’s Best of InfoComm 2018 Awards are perfect, […]
InfoComm 2018 is a month behind us, and over the last few weeks, people have been writing about the trends they saw at the show. We’ve seen blogs discussing increasing end-user attendance as well as several people’s lists of their favorite products or the ones they saw to be the most innovative or disruptive. There […]
