In the original movie Ghostbusters, Rick Moranis (in his immortal role as Vince Tully, CPA) is taken over by an evil spirit from another dimension and transformed into the Keymaster, the minion who will enable Gozer the Gozerian to enter our plane of existence and destroy the world. First, if you don’t understand that reference, […]

It’s the last day of the show, and TGIF. It really has been a great show, setting records for attendance, and I think the attendees really got their money’s worth this year. There was lots of new technology and ideas, and most new products that were introduced seem to be shipping, which means people can […]

OK, so on the second day of the show I found the best thing I have seen so far this year. And it isn’t a product. It’s a program. Let me back up a bit. This morning, two longtime friends and colleagues from “down under,” Rod Brown and Jonathan Seller, introduced me to two friends […]

Well, InfoComm got off to a roaring start yesterday, and it continued into today. The show floor is packed, and the manufacturers and distributors I have talked to seemed happy with the attendance. And so am I, for a number of reasons. International attendance — I have often complained that the show of the International […]

You know, every year I can’t wait to come to this show — and then I remember the parts of it that I deliberately forget during the year, like the eternal wait for coffee and the fact that my feet hurt. OK, now that I am done being cranky (at least for today) lets talk about […]

Well, the show opened with the usual ribbon cutting, and we are off and running. I have done my first turn around the floor, and here are my morning observations: First, I ran into David Labuskes, InfoComm’s executive director. Besides a nice conversation about the friendly “sibling rivalries” among some of our mutual friends, he mentioned […]

Well, Gary Kayye and I have just finished our first podcast about the show. This threatens to be the largest Infocomm in history, with advance registration far ahead of previous years. As usual, we are both excited about the show, but disagree about the reasons. Right now, while I am excited about the presence of […]

I’m taking a last look around the show floor tonight before it opens tomorrow. Everybody is commenting on the fact that the floor has a long way to go before opening and they are right. It is now 7 p.m., and it looks like many crews are going to be here all night. Most of […]

It’s hot here in Orlando. Both outside, (where the humidity is curling my hair) and inside the Orange County Convention Center, where the largest InfoComm show ever is less than 24 hours from opening. The rAVe booth is set, and the crew is checking out our equipment, preparing to bring you all the latest product […]

If you move back in history, the human race progresses from crude tool to artform along a predictable path. For instance, once humans learned to break rocks, that path began. We progressed from using the rocks to break each other to turning the broken rocks into crude tools and then to using the crude tools […]

Over my last couple of columns, we have talked about the trend in meetings towards group collaboration, and the equipment and setups that will be necessary to accommodate this trend, as collaboration (and extended collaboration through social media) become the norm in public meetings. This led several of you to ask the question, “what is […]

Last month, we talked about the market’s trend toward collaborative meetings and how that will presumably affect the rental and staging company and its employees. I thought then, and I still do, that the most important aspect of this change was one of familiarizing our employees with the concepts and techniques of collaborative meetings. This […]

I am in Amsterdam. Or, at least I believe I am at this point. As many of you know, I am in the middle of a very large project and was unable to travel to Amsterdam for ISE this year. This is a pilgrimage I’ve made every year for quite a long time, in fact […]

Well, once again January has come around. Time to close out 2016, to send out all those final invoices that you forgot about and to make some dynamic resolutions for improving your organization in 2017. With my personal resolutions, I tend to set myself easy goals so that I will not be disappointed by my […]

Last month, I confessed to all of you that I really enjoy the holiday season. It seems that as the season approaches, all you remember about it are the good things. However, over the last couple of weeks, I have been reminded of a few of the negative sides of the holidays. For instance, today […]

I love the holidays. Even though they often come as a mixed blessing, combining some welcome time away from the office with seeing the relatives that I didn’t necessarily want to see. I really enjoy this time when people make an effort to smile a little more, to contact old friends and, frankly, just to […]

In a cold, punishing rain, only the brilliant flashes of lightning illuminate our hero, who stands at the entrance to the mysterious, forbidden jungle temple. Rain streams steadily from the brim of his battered leather hat and his fingers twitch on the handle of the bullwhip that hangs from his belt. Is it the guy […]

Last month, my column spoke about the changing role of the AV rental and staging company in the client’s technical universe. As I stated in the article, one of the things that I have always enjoyed about being in the rental industry was that we were a very early purveyor of new technologies. As such, […]

Over the last couple of months, a lot of the articles here on rAVePubs have had to do with new technology adoption, and the costs involved with being either too early or too late with any new technology. I am a long-suffering “Innovator” (for those of you who have read Crossing the Chasm, something I […]

Last night, I was watching the Republican convention from the Quicken Loans Arena in Cleveland. I will admit up front that I tend to watch political conventions more as theater than for their political content, as these have always been the most scripted events in our world. They are also among the most lavishly equipped […]

Just a couple of days ago, I was working with a colleague in the UK to troubleshoot a conferencing system with a client in a third location. We got together on a call for a few minutes before we dialed the client in order to make sure we were on the same page with regard […]

Well, today was “Super Tuesday.” No, not the political type, however. This is the day that the association traditionally holds a ton of educational events before the opening of the how. Normally, I would have been teaching at least one of these courses, but this year I had a different project. As many of you […]

Well, things are heating up in the quadrennial political circus: Our presidential election in the United States has begun. We are approaching the time when the public portion of the circus really cranks up, with lots of rallies and events that will need massive audiovisual support. I have done a lot of political events in […]

As some of you will know, a few years ago I moved home to Connecticut, the state that I was born in. However, I moved to the southern part of the state, about 75 miles from the town that I was raised in. And it wasn’t until recently that I made the trip to drive […]

Recently, a rep from a firm that we work with fairly frequently asked me to name the most important tool in my toolkit. I believe he was expecting me to name the Leatherman I constantly carry on my belt, since (among other things) he reps a line of multi-tools that are supposedly more sophisticated than […]

As many of my readers will know, I have just returned from the ISE show in Amsterdam. As many of you may know, from my articles, blogs and podcasts, I am pretty enthusiastic about this particular show. Not only does it combine InfoComm and CEDIA, it also features more exhibits of products and product lines […]

Well, here we are at the close of ISE Day Four. My feet hurt, and my new sneakers are definitely trashed. But it has been a great show, and it broke all records. This morning, at the closing keynote, the director of the show announced that we had not just broken ISE attendance records, but […]

This afternoon, Annabelle and I had the opportunity (a rare one) to stop Amanda Beckner, vice president of learning at InfoComm, to talk about the direction being taken by InfoComm’s education department. Amanda is a person of rare energy and enthusiasm. I have at times in the past been critical of InfoComm’s educational department and […]

OK, folks, this show is tiring. I am sitting here at lunchtime on Day 3 of the (now) four-day show, wondering if my new sneakers will make it through four full days. However, this morning Annabelle Kayye and I got a number of great interviews… First, we sat down for a discussion of 4K scaling […]

Well, Day Two has gone really well, although like last year I am certain that my brand-new running shoes will be completely trashed by the end of the show. Seriously, folks, with 1,200+ exhibits in a dozen buildings, the last two years I have bought new sneakers to wear at the show, and thrown them […]

Today’s interviews: Well, first of all, Annabelle and I had a chance yesterday evening, before the show opened, to interview Steve Montgomery of IHSE about their new distributed KVM technology, which allows secure access to keyboard, video and mouse over an encrypted network. Today we first interviewed Steve Scorse of SiliconCore about their new high […]

Well, the signs outside read “Welcome to ISE 2016”, so I’m sure I’m in the right place. However, the show is still in a state of uproar at 6:02 PM the night before opening. Folks, this show is massive. I’ve been part of setting up for many InfoComm shows (in fact, many shows) and have […]