Have you ever had those meetings when you would bring your laptop or tablet but couldn’t connect it to a projector, monitor, or any other kind of peripheral? With a presentation ready to go, you wasted so much time trying to figure out how to make the technology work. It can either transform a meeting into a complete frustration or really make it valuable. Some of the most common meeting problems companies have are trouble with starting and finishing a meeting on time. Factors like failing technology, silent participants and collaboration dominators often result in a conducted meeting with no decisions made. The results of this survey show that 45% of participants most of the time leave a meeting without a clear understanding of their responsibilities. Also, 47% of workers react stressfully to tech malfunction. With Layer Logic’s CoreTouch, Today, we have a device that’s both easy to use and simplifies collaboration and sharing.

Once confined to company lobbies, secretive government command centers and science fiction movies, video walls are becoming increasingly commonplace across multiple industries including retail, higher education and utility and traffic monitoring applications. And that’s just the beginning. According to a recent industry forecast, the global LED video wall market is set to grow at a compound annual rate of 35.1 percent, reaching $73.51 billion by 2025. If you’re thinking of jumping on the bandwagon, here are some trends to watch—and some important considerations to keep in mind.

Education is a staple of modern life and technology is increasingly a staple of modern education. The education technology industry represents $8 billion in annual spending, and public schools in the United States spend $3 billion a year on digital content. In most cases it’s money well spent. Seventy-four percent of teachers who responded to a recent national survey conducted by PBS said technology enables them to reinforce and expand classroom content. In addition, 73 percent of respondents said technology helps them better respond to a variety of learning styles, and more than two-thirds said they want more technology in their classrooms. Despite the benefits, however, simply adding more technology to the classroom, whether in K-12 or higher education, doesn’t guarantee results.

Of all the professions out there likely to run afoul of the law, an IT buyer or AV integrator probably doesn’t come to the top of your mind. But, thanks to new FCC regulations about bandwidth use, your AV solutions—particularly your wireless microphones whether they’re in conference rooms, auditoriums or city council chambers—could be out of compliance. For that, and probably a few other reasons, too, it might be time for your organization to consider a sound system upgrade. 

For students the nightmare is showing up on the day of a test and realizing you’re late and forgot to prepare. Or standing up to give a presentation and realizing you have no clothes on. For the AV integrator and IT professional the project nightmare is getting to site and two other trades occupy the space and the hardware has not been delivered. Or delays in commissioning the system have delayed end-user training. (And maybe you forgot your clothes, too.) AV technology is advancing at a rapid pace, but product knowledge and quality management training and certifications for individuals and companies has not always kept pace.

There are plenty of times when less is more, including when you are making decisions about your conference room technology. The best meeting room technology is a simple, one-stop, unified solution. But many conference rooms today are cluttered with technologies, including conference phones, USB speaker phones, flat panel displays, laptops or desktops running meeting applications, and lots and lots of cables. Some technologies might be compatible while others aren’t, and integrating personal devices such as mobile phones is complicated at best and impossible at worst. Meetings can already be a drag—a poorly equipped meeting space only makes it worse. The Crestron Mercury was developed to address those common—and annoying—problems with the typical meeting room user experience. And Crestron’s new partnership with online meeting platform Zoom takes meeting efficiency to the next level.

If you’ve ever bought a house, planned a wedding, or organized a large corporate event, you’ve probably consulted a list of preferred vendors. Preferred vendors are service providers who have been vetted by a realtor, a wedding planner, or a venue—for example—and are recommended for superior service—and because of their partner relationships they often offer superior pricing as well. For large entities such as state and local governments, universities, or corporations, using preferred vendors has the added benefit of amplified buying power. By purchasing a large volume of goods or services from a preferred vendor—for example, laptops for every city employee or catering for every university event—the price comes down as the volume goes up. Governmental and educational entities in the state of Arizona can realize the benefits of doing business with preferred vendors by soliciting quotes and proposals from companies through the State Purchasing Cooperative.

If your presentation system stops working four days before an in-house conference, you likely have better ways to spend your time than digging up warranty information and troubleshooting the source of the problem. Researching technology investments can be a hassle, but managing and maintaining them for years can be a big commitment. How do you ensure that your audiovisual (AV) equipment, in particular, runs smoothly for years to come? You don’t have a crystal ball to tell you what’s going to go wrong, but the next best thing is to partner with a service provider that will make sure you have the right plans and agreements in place. When a customer purchases and installs new technologies, they will receive warranty information and offers to maintain their new system. The customer, the manufacturer, and the service provider are three sides of the triangle that will keep your equipment running optimally. However, “that triangle is sometimes difficult to understand,” says Mark Teifert, Director of Service and Support at Level 3 Audiovisual. Buyers may not know what’s included in warranties or who will be responsible for what. Here is a simple breakdown of terms to make sense of it all and feel confident about the long-term care of your audiovisual investments.