A Year End Recap
It’s time to reflect on the happenings around the video
conferencing world from my view as part time pundit, part time consultant and
full time product developer for the year 2014. Most of it relates to my
experiences with Array with a smattering of other news from our genre. This is
a year in the life of a startup.
Note that this article/blog ended up much too long and
boring to submit to any website I write for, so that’s why it went on my blog.
January
January started and ended with road show demos, first to
Florida then to California. While every new product demo can be nerve racking,
the first one is usually the worst then hopefully you get the kinks worked out.
In the beginning of the year, the demos took a significant amount of setup time
due to working with early Alpha prototypes. The ‘problem’ was that everyone
wanted to see what we were showing before I could even set up the demo. That meant
setups took even longer. After the Florida demo, we agreed to have me locked in
a room by myself to set things up. That didn’t last long, but what can you do?
The drive home from Florida to Cincinnati was long and something I care never
to do again. The main drink of choice this week was ‘top shelf’ margaritas.
The California demo at the end of the month went well as we
loaded up the gear (including two 65” tvs) and shipped it to San Jose with us
following a few days later via an airplane. We ended up being able to take a look
at Prysm’s video wall product up close while we were out there, which was cool.
Everyone seemed very positive on our product. We ended up having a wine and
cheese happy hour with our last demo period late on a Friday evening.
February
On February 11th, Polycom introduced their latest
immersive telepresence product, the Immersive Studio. Designed to replace the
RPX, there were some things I liked about it and some things I didn’t. I
haven’t heard if it has made the impact that the RPX has. For the record, I
hate 3-screen products. My thoughts on the Immersive Studio here: http://hellarddesign.blogspot.com/2014/02/polycoms-realpresence-immersive-studio.html
I wish Polycom well, but I think they should get furniture
designers involved instead of outsourcing their products to industrial
designers that specialize in hand held widgets. It seems like human factors are
an afterthought, not just with Polycom, but with other vendors. I read it took
19 months to develop the immersive studio from concept to manufacture. Wow.
March
Enterprise Connect hit in the middle of March and I was
excited to see that Cisco released new hardware products! Hardware, for those
that don’t know, is apparently some sort of archaic form of technology that’s
dead. At least that’s what the marketing personnel of software products tell
me. While I wasn’t excited about the actual products themselves, the fact that
they released something in hardware form was greatly appreciated.
April
In April was AVI-SPL’s Global Sales Meeting in Tampa in
which we were invited to attend. The event took place at SaddleBrook resort
which is a pretty cool place. Unfortunately, due to us being a late invite, our
‘booth space’ was next to a bunch of windows in the ante space of the hall.
Windows + video conferencing = bad experience but luckily for us people were
able to look past the lighting problem and saw what our product was all about.
We really appreciated the invite and I had a great time since the demo went
well. Plus I got to fly to Florida and back instead of driving. While I do hate
flying, it beats driving any day. Drink of this week was white wine, even over
steak dinners. Don’t be a hater.
May
In the early part of May, we loaded up the truck again and
drove to Virginia for another round of demos and a photo shoot. From that photo
shoot is where most of our current marketing photography came from. Not much
else to say about that event other than some advice to other young companies;
have a plan. Trying to ‘wing’ a photo shoot in the middle of a demo crushes the
soul of the guy who has to keep everything running. That guy was me. Drink of
week were Double Stolis.
June
The 2014 edition of Infocomm had me participating as an
exhibitor for the first time with Array. Boy, what a long week that was. Working with a
startup has its ups and downs and believe me that the setup and tear down of
our booth was most certainly a “down”. I arrived in Vegas on Sunday evening the
week of the show to start working on our booth bright and early Monday morning.
The next few days took a toll on me physically getting the booth built. The
show itself, while considered an absolute success for us by any measure, took a
toll on me mentally. I stayed glued to our booth praying nothing would go wrong
for the first two days and not leaving our space except for the rare occasion
to take a leak. Yet another downside of being in a small startup is being the
only person who knows how to fix something if it fails. I felt comfortable
enough by Friday to browse around for a couple of hours looking at everyone
else’s booths. Drink of the week during
Infocomm was “yes please”.
After the show ended (and teardown was complete), I spent
the next week and a half off the grid and on the Colorado River in a raft.
Beer, chilled from the Colorado River was the mainstay.
July
At Infocomm, I was able to spend some time with Dave Maldow
over a few cocktails and expressed that if he ever wanted to start something of
his own I would be happy to help in any way I could. When I got back from the
river trip, he contacted me about his new company, Let’s Do Video and
immediately started publishing my articles.
David’s Website: http://letsdovideo.com/
October
I was contacted in October about writing for another
startup. While not exactly IT or AV, video conferencing sort of holds place in
both worlds, so writing for an AV based website made sense.
Cavalry Rides website: http://cavalryrides.com/
Not much else to say about October except I spent most of it
grinding out part files for our parts.
November
Cisco’s Collaboration Summit was in November and they rolled
out their new TelePresence 3-screen system. I gave my thoughts on their new
product here: http://letsdovideo.com/initial-thoughts-on-the-new-cisco-telepresence-ix5000/
Cisco could stand to study resolution vs pixels per facial area vs percentage
of life size and understand it’s not necessary to put only two people on a 70” 1080p
screen.
Through CavalryRides, I got hooked up with Rave Pubs as part
of their ‘blog squad’. I mentioned to them that I didn’t have time to write for
three websites and hope keep a day job so they were happy to take the content
that was written for CavalryRides and post it. It seems that they’re looking
for ‘edgy’ or somewhat ‘controversial’ writing. I guess I fit that bill but in
reality I just write what I think and if I don’t like something, I don’t like
it. It’s simple. On the other hand, if I really do like something, I’m just as
adamant about telling the world about that as well. Keep that in mind the next
time I write something about your company’s offering. It’s never personal, but
I am opinionated and want what’s best for the end user and our genre.
Rave Pubs website: http://www.ravepubs.com/
That brings me to December. No road shows or major demos
this month. It’s all about sitting in front of my laptop in AutoCAD or Inventor
and banging out parts. I did end up getting a 3d printer from Formlabs
specifically to make prototypes. It sure beats ANY other alternative out there.
2015 will be an exciting journey with Enterprise Connect and Infocomm on the
schedule and getting product out to eager customers as soon as we can.
Thanks for reading.
Bryan
Follow me on Twitter @bryanhellard
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