Not in my lifetime have I been a big fan of Las Vegas. This June I never missed it more. (I’m one of those rare birds that have only been to Vegas to attend InfoComm.) I’m not a gambler. I don’t party late into the night (any more). I live in Florida, so it’s really hard to justify paying for access to a hotel pool party – I do that pretty much every weekend all year long!
The list could probably go on and on (I won’t blame the Vegas heat, though. I love the heat).
I was going to do Vegas right this year! I’d planned to extend my stay after helping with the booth tear-down and stay another night or two so I could experience the ever-famous Strip with my Almo friends. I wanted to stay out LATE! I was going to dance and sip colorful cocktails and laugh, and blow on dice for whoever was throwing!
Thanks to the worldwide pandemic we’re all so sick of hearing about, I never even got the opportunity to book my flight. So I spent the week at home like the rest of us, attending the virtual event that had some incredible content, but none of the smiles and hugs I took for granted in years past.
Early on in 2020 I put together a loose calendar for the Almo Blog. It takes some effort managing multiple contributors, you know, and I had planned to pen the “InfoComm Social Butterfly of 2020”. The booth tours, the dinners, the happy hours, the after-hours… even though I’m not a night owl I love it. I enjoy the networking with our vendor partners, the interaction and introductions with our customers and end-users. It’s invigorating!
It was definitely different this year. The InfoComm we know became a virtual infocomm CONNECTED, thanks to the world we are living in. (NOTE… you can still check out the virtual replay until August 21!)
Obviously AVIXA and the industry made the right call. We have to protect ourselves and our loved ones. I know I’m not alone, though, when I say I really, REALLY missed InfoComm and Las Vegas this year.
So, my “InfoComm Social Butterfly” blog post feels more like a Poor, Poor, Pitiful Me post. I did manage, however, to find one social highlight. Normally at InfoComm I attend a happy hour networking event organized by the USAV group. At the end of the week they hosted a “Coffee and Cocktails” virtual happy hour on ZOOM. Certainly new to us all, but a way to connect just the same.
Oh, thank goodness for Zoom! Just 30 minutes, but I met some new people and got to virtually “cheers” some old friends.
Zoom is no substitute for in-person events, but I’ll take all I can get these days. Thankfully we have Zoom and other platforms that enable us to have face-to-face interactions when we can’t be in-person. I’m so grateful for that.
If I didn’t work at Almo, surely I’d have heard about ZOOM thanks to the pandemic, but like my parents and countless others, I’d have had to adopt it and learn how to use it. The silver lining is the window has been thrown wide open, and businesses and organizations everywhere are open to incorporating this technology into their daily operations. Almo has experts on-staff who can help our customers offer Zoom Rooms to end-users with bundles that include the hardware and the license for a complete solution with multiple options for different sized huddle and conference rooms.
We all can’t help but reexamine how we do business and how we can learn from this experience and save ourselves time and money when we are living that “new normal” we keep waiting for.
I wish we’d have been able to connect last week, and I’m (not so) patiently waiting for whenever it’s safe to return to in-person conferences and meetings, though they’ll certainly be different.
Let me start by stating the obvious, being quarantined to our homes with next to no human interaction is hard. Even for someone like me who has spent the past 15 years of his career working remotely, it is difficult. I enjoy being able to grab lunch during the day or running errands on the weekend. Just the other day my wife convinced me that buying fertilizer for our lawn was not “essential” so I ordered online and paid extra for shipping instead.
One aspect that I do not mind, however, is having my wife and two daughters Samantha and Sydney (ages 12 and 8) home with me every day. They allow me to close my office doors and focus on the work I have but it is also nice to get a break and watch them play outside for a little as well.
The most interesting part of being home with my family is watching them adapt to remote learning/teaching and how technology, specifically video conferencing, has helped them remain connected.
The day was March 18, 2020. Our house had been under a quarantine since Saturday the 14th and my wife and daughters were learning a “new normal” of home schooling. My youngest, Sydney, was having the hardest time because frankly she is a social explosion waiting to happen! She has so many close friends, classmates, cheer teammates, girl scouts, and cousins that you could see the smoke coming from her ears when she realized she could not see any of them. That is, until I introduced her to the world of Zoom. Watching her eyes light up like Christmas morning the second she saw her friends Talia, Lianna, and Reilly on the screen was worth more than gold at that moment. That is when it dawned on me that something I have always taken for granted, Zoom, was now viewed as the “recreation of the wheel” by those that have never experienced it. Sure, we have FaceTime, Skype, and a number of other video-calling platforms to choose from, but the ease of “zooming” your friends, colleagues, family, and customers takes it to another level.
Zoom’s platform is the perfect teleconferencing tool for a multitude of uses and as each day goes by, we are finding new ways of creativity on how to use it: happy hours, school assemblies, birthday parties, even quick check- ins with a customer. We have certainly done it all. Almo Professional A/V is certainly no stranger to Zoom, having utilized it for 4 years now. What started as a necessity for our organization to remain connected to our customers has expanded into the 2019 introduction of Zoom Certified Hardware Bundles and the April 2020 announcement that we are now an Authorized Zoom Solution Provider which means our customers (and their customers) can source a full solution from us; Certified Hardware Bundles and the necessary Zoom License to make it all work as desired. One of the best features of the Almo/Zoom relationship is that it requires little to no extra work from our valued resellers. For every opportunity that is brought to us, it is assigned a Zoom Account Executive to help see through the sales process.
“What’s the job of the reseller?” you might ask. It’s to send the initial referral and then collect the recurring commission that is paid out on every job. The ability to collect recurring revenue in these times of uncertainty can certainly be a valuable proposition.
In closing, I hope we can all find creative ways to use Zoom as a bridge during these interesting days and weeks ahead. While most of us might not have the same bright-eyed look that my daughter Sydney had, I know we all appreciate the ability to connect with the outside world while being told to “not go outside.” I would love to have future discussions with all of you on how Zoom and Almo Professional A/V can help you stay connected and make your business, schooling, family get-togethers, or happy hours even better!
ViewSonic’s ViewBoard IFP70 Series — the newest in its line of interactive flat panels — is here, and it’s better than ever.
The industry’s first interactive flat panels (IFPs) were a big deal, helping classrooms and businesses transform thinking and productivity. Every year, interactive displays got bigger, brighter and more affordable. But eventually, the industry sought to do more — it hoped to make IFPs more versatile and more effective. Now, interactive displays are promising to be all-in-one solutions for the modern collaboration space. A particularly notable evolution in this space is ViewSonic’s latest ViewBoard series, a beautiful solution designed for seamless integration into your conference room infrastructure. The ViewSonic IFP70 Series is here, and it’s better than ever.
What Does “All in One” Actually Mean?
When we say the ViewSonic IFP70 Series is an all-in-one solution, here’s what we mean: The 4K Ultra HD (3840×2160 resolution) series is both an interactive display/whiteboard and a built-in videoconferencing solution in one — all hardware and software included.
“The ViewSonic ViewBoard IFP70 series is our most innovative enterprise-grade interactive flat panel display line to date,” said Andy Chien, product marketing manager at ViewSonic. “We took all the necessary steps to solve the modern conference room challenge with the most advanced technologies, while simplifying typical collaboration complexities. The sleek form-factor and bezel-less frame also allows it to be designed into innovative and contemporary environments.”
The reason it’s built as an all-in-one solution is because, more than ever, the technology in the AV industry is being driven by the end consumer’s need — the AV end user today is asking for more simple systems with multiple capabilities in one product. They don’t want to have to buy two systems when they could just buy one. In addition to being a true collaboration board, ViewSonic’s IFP70 Series is even more versatile than its previous IFPs — the display allows users to securely connect to their meetings directly on the display. So, no more complex puzzles trying to find the best display to go with the best conferencing software to go with the best speaker and microphone. The IFP70 Series has it all.
HARDWARE Built-in Camera/Speakers/Microphone, an IoT Sensor and the ViewSonic Active Pen
Equipped with the latest collaboration tech for modern workspaces, the IFP70 Series sparks creativity and drives productivity. There are a few primary hardware collaboration technologies built in, which include:
1. A Skype-for-Business-certified conference camera with crisp 4K UHD resolution. Also integrated are three speakers — two 10-watt stereo speakers and a 15-watt subwoofer — and a microphone array that’s also Skype for Business-certified.
2. The ViewSonic Active Pen tool, which includes multi-level pressure sensitivity, giving users an accurate yet natural-feeling interactive writing experience.
3. An IoT Sensor Hub compatible with the Microsoft Azure Digital Twins cloud platform. The IoT sensor measures humidity, room temperature, ambient light and human proximity to the screen. The data is then sent to the secured Microsoft Azure cloud-computing service, which analyzes it and provides information on how to optimize meeting and energy efficiency.
SOFTWARE ViewSonic’s myViewBoard, Integrated Zoom for Conferencing and More
ViewSonic’s myViewBoard collaboration software, integrated into each model of the IFP70 Series, is an easy-to-use and secure ecosystem. Users have a choice between myViewBoard software versions, designed to meet any and all collaboration needs, whether for enterprise-level security or for more straightforward screen-sharing or annotation. The beauty of the software is that it’s seen as a one-stop shop (no compatibility issues with external apps). Additional integrated software into the IFP70 Series includes the Zoom app for conferencing, the WPS Office suite, an optional SureMDM by 42 Gears Unified Endpoint Management (UEM) tool, and the ViewBoard Cast (vCast) content-sharing software app with support for iOS, Mac, Android, Windows and Chrome devices. vCast enables content streaming from devices onto a ViewSonic display over wireless or wired networks.
The Icing On Top of the ViewSonic ViewBoard IFP70 Series Cake
The other bells and whistles of ViewSonic’s IFP70 Series include:
The Latest Connectivity Options, Including USB Type-C. Walk into the room and plug in your device, and you can immediately share onto the display. Other connectivity ports include HDMI 2.0 and HDMI 4K, USB 3.0 and more. (Translation: meetings can actually start on time for once.)
One-wire USB-C Connectivity. While added USB-C connectivity is great, a single cable transmitting that signal to the display iseven better. That means — in addition to faster data, audio and video transfer — the USB Type-C connection provides quick 60-watt charging and touch pass-through over a single cable. (Translation: one cable. No confusion.)
Edge-to-edge, Optical-bonding PCAP Touch Screen. IFP70 displays are designed with high-performance PCAP (projected capacitive) technology with 20 touch points. (Translation: exceptional interactivity and viewing.)
Almo Professional A/V is the nation’s largest professional audiovisual distributor with forward-thinking product integration and support. Almo is committed to offering only the best in the AV industry. The sleek and slim ViewBoard IFP70 Series (less than an inch thick) is more than an upgrade to the dense marketplace of interactive displays. It’s a completely reimagined solution to the modern collaboration room and to the world of unified communications — adding key elements of flexibility, versatility and duality for the AV end-user customer. Learn more at ViewSonic.com/ViewBoard, or get in touch with your Almo sales rep for more information.
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