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Partners in Collaboration. Even More So Now.

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Enhanced video conferencing and state of the art furniture from Sharp and Salamander are bringing conference rooms to the next level.

Partners in Collaboration. Even More So Now.

It may be hard to believe during the current state of uncertainty in this country, but the Modern Workspace is a significant piece of the Pro AV industry. When offices eventually reopen, the modern workspace may look slightly different than we’re used to, but there is no denying that room analytics and smart space management will be a tantalizing feature for businesses regardless.

Companies that are upgrading their huddle rooms and conference rooms to enhance video conferencing capabilities should consider the Windows collaboration display from Sharp. The first display to be certified by Microsoft delivers Windows® 10 and Office 365® at room scale on a huge 4K screen, enabling multiple users to collaborate together. It is Skype for Business certified and Microsoft Teams enabled and can be daisy-chained via dual source side-by side capability and extend mode for an even larger collaborative canvas.

Making spaces smarter with the embedded sensor hub is what makes the Windows collaboration display even more special. Using Azure IoT, the sensor hub can detect room occupancy to determine the location of people to turn on displays nearest each individual and even amplify their voice with a three-dimensional microphone. In turn, this allows the opportunity for better management of room-booking systems. Additionally, temperature and lighting are detected by sensors to help provide a better understanding of energy utilization. Whether there’s small breakout with 2-3 people or a large meeting with 12 or more, the sensor hub can help provide data allowing you to optimize your meeting spaces for a more comfortable and productive environment for all involved.

Simply enhancing the video capabilities is but one piece of upgrading collaboration. When it’s time for a technology refresh, it’s time for Salamander Designs. Now is the perfect time to leverage this high quality, fully customizable solution to transform and refresh your workspace. Even simple, preconfigured cabinets and carts will immediately improve productivity and collaboration with premium furniture engineered to make today’s offices mobile, global and better than ever before. Whether your needs require display stands or cabinets, Salamander stands will keep everything safe and supported while still looking great. Mobile stands are also available for easy portability between workspaces.

With Sharp and Salamander products combined, you’ll have top of the line smart display technology supported by the best furniture to bring any conference room to the next level.

Sharp has strategically partnered with Salamander Designs and Almo to offer five Windows Collaboration Display Bundles giving you incredible savings opportunities never seen before. Integrators that become Windows collaboration display certified will save $1700 per display as well as up to an additional $300 on the mobile stand or cabinet when purchased as a bundle.

Sharp and Salamander Bundles »

Social Butterfly Thanks ZOOM for the Tiny Taste of Normal during infocomm CONNECTED

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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.

Whatever our “new normal” is, I’m ready for it.

COACH OR ARCHITECT?

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Building a winning team not entirely unlike building… well, a building. Ah, it’s that time of year.  The kids have gone back to school, the northern states have a crisp evening chill in the air, and the pigskin has begun to fly.  Millions of people across the United Sta read more

Why I’m happy my outside TV died during Football Season

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I couldn’t wait for my TV to die.  Crazy, right?  Read on and I’ll explain.

More than half the TVs installed in outdoor spaces are engineered for indoor use.  And I was like most people.  Why would I spend more on an outdoor rated display when I could get something for less than half the price?  If it dies I can run out and pick up a newer model and throw it up on the wall without much down time.  And when my first display died I did just that.  I found an old plasma in the house and hung it up outside.  Eventually, as expected, its performance began to decline.

Flag on the play!

What’s the black box in the corner of my screen?

“Die, you imperfect plasma, just DIE!” I muttered to myself in the fall.  Here’s a snapshot of its demise, notice the upper right hand corner image fade.  It was only a matter of time!

(Full disclosure, Brian Rhatigan, my coworker and display expert tells me this isn’t a typical symptom of aging displays, and probably has more to do with the source.  But that doesn’t work with my story.  Read his blog here.)

"Heather's Hut"

Living in paradise has its perks

Cut to earlier this month.  A recent Polar Vortex had 75% of the country experiencing below freezing temperatures.  I was in chilly, snowy Chicago (my hat is off to those of you who can handle that!) and I couldn’t wait to get home to my beloved South Florida, the 85°+ December weather and watching the Miami Dolphins claw and fight their way to their first winning season since 2008 in my outdoor football paradise.

 

Flag on the Play!

It’s a Saturday night prime-time Dolphins v. Jets showdown in New York.  December football in-conference rivalry at its finest!  The bevvies were ice cold, the sausage dip was made, and the propane tank was full.  I was ready!  But I was unprepared for a dead display.  It was a football fail, to put it mildly.  Yes, I’d wished ill-will upon my clunky old plasma, but the timing was terrible!  I’d wanted to brag to my northern neighbors!  (Karma much?)  We watched the Dolphins trounce the Jets, 34-13 in the living room on the couch.  Booooo!

Can this be corrected in the second half?

Earlier this fall SunBrite TV introduced their new Veranda Series 4K UHD outdoor displays for full-shade outdoor spaces.  These beauties are up to 30% brighter than typical indoor TVs, and they’re weather proof!  And while that was always a major selling point for buying an outdoor display for outside, now… NOW they’re affordable!

Iguana

My Spirit Reptile

If there’s such a thing as a spirit animal, mine is an iguana.  (OK, spirit reptile).  Not glamorous, cuddly or even cute.  What we have in common, according to Wikipedia is that we thrive only in temperatures between 79-95°F.  This makes South Florida the perfect place for me to live.  And ideal for outdoor winter TV watching.

 

You can’t keep a true Dolphins fan down for long.  My Veranda is on a truck headed to South Florida.  Just in time for college bowl games and the NFL playoffs… I’m holding out hope that my Dolphins are still standing by mid-January!  Stay tuned for Part II, as I turn my Football Fail into Veranda Victory!

Do you have an outdoor setup you LOVE?  Share a picture in the comments, I’d love to see what you’ve got!

 

Digital Signage – Any Which Way

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October finished up the last of the Almo Pro AV E4 AV Tours for 2016, the last of which was in Dallas, TX.

One of the many things to do is walk through the Exhibit Hall, where all of Almo’s manufacturer partners showcase their latest and greatest products…

I really “flipped” over the all-new R Series product displayed by Sharp at our Dallas Show.

PN-R series


This beauty will come in a 42”, 49” and 55” display, and with the extreme tilt capabilities opens up new mounting possibilities that gives more flexibility than ever before to digital signage installations.  My imagination went wild.  Not only can this series be mounted in portrait or landscape mode, imagine the 42” display mounted face up on a table in a sleek apparel shop, or the 55” face down from the ceiling in a planetarium…

While I wouldn’t suggest mounting it on a floor surface that would be walked on, the design of these monitors is robust enough that they can be suspended from the four corners of the rear housing using wires.  I immediately envisioned a simple, elegant look for an office lobby, like an attorney’s office or accounting firm or a retail shop where information, daily specials or other content could be simply and beautifully displayed.

The ingenuity and creativity of our dealers and integrator customers is always impressive.  And I can’t wait to see what they come up with when they let loose with Sharp’s new PN-R Series!

I’m Ready to Geek Out

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I’m an aspiring techie.  As a marketing manager in the Pro AV channel I marvel daily at what you guys and gals (girl power!) can do.  While I’m at home battling my wireless printer you’re out there day after day beaming Cecil the Lion onto the Empire State Building in New York City.  Well, maybe you don’t do that every day, but what you do on a daily basis is still quite impressive.

old school projectorI was a high school student in the 90’s.  (You Gotta Fight! For Your Right! To Partyyyy!)  We had the old school projectors that shined the lesson written on multiple sheets of clear plastic onto a pull down screen, or even a cement wall in some classrooms.  Teachers would walk away with colorful smudges on their hands from the ink they were using to illustrate their points.  Imagine how Mr. Flammond would teach me the DNA sequence of an amphibian these days!

But, I digress.  I haven’t walked the halls of BHS since back when we were sporting Members Only Jackets and fluffy Love Eric socks, but I see now what you the installers and integrators are putting inside those classrooms.  And I’m downright jealous.  I want to go back and learn the way children of today are learning!

And education isn’t the only way you are changing lives.  Making meetings more productive with amazing technology like Sharp AQUOS BOARDS and the InFocus Mondopads and Barco Clickshare in boardrooms and conference rooms is changing the way companies think and do business. Even Almo Pro AV!

Don’t even get me started on retail right now.  I just can’t.  Because if I start talking about that LG Dual-Sided Curved OLED display and how many pair of shoes that thing could sell me I may have to run to the Galleria Mall immediately.

The point is… the dealers and resellers and installers and integrators that trust Almo Pro AV with their technology needs are pretty impressive folks.  And I’m going to be lucky enough to meet some of them in person this coming Tuesday in Dallas, Texas, where our E4 AV Tour makes its last stop in 2016.  If you’re close-by, come check it out.  You can register here.  There are classes and other educational opportunities for CTS Renewal Credits and a super-cool experience by Samsung of their outdoor displays that Paris Hilton would actually describe as “that’s Hot”.

Yes, I’m going because it’s my job.  But don’t think I won’t be walking away all geeked out and excited over the technology we’re showcasing.  And when I come home I’m going to beat that pesky wireless printer!

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