“Marilyn” was kind enough to model some of our promotional material during the opening reception.

Posted by Lee Potts at 11:30 PM .

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Am just wrapping up 3 days in Philadelphia at the OnDemand conference in Philly. Has been an interesting show overall, although the quality of the educational sessions I attended were slightly below average in most cases. I hate panel discussions. I know some will disagree, but I cannot remember the last time I attended a panel discussion I thought was truly effective (and that includes many that I have been a panel member on). For some reason, most of these sessions were PDs.

This conference which is focused on commercial printers and enterprise content management users does have somethings of interest to Pres Pros – especially the Graphic Designers among us (although there are better places to get this information and I would not recommend this conference for most of our Council members or VB readers).

I had a chance to get up to speed on Adobe’s Creative Suite 2 and the upcoming release of Quark 7. Both have some support for enhanced work flow management in general, and the relatively new JDF (Job Description Format) standards specifically. Although I can’t go into JDF at length here – it is an interesting development that Graphic Designers should become familiar with. There are of course many other upgrades and enhancements to these softwares as well. I thought the new digital asset management tool called Adobe Bridge that is included in CS2 was pretty interesting, especially for small operations that don’t have access to larger enterprise solutions.

Many of us who have been in the presentation business for a long time have fond memories of the days when Kodak was our primary vendor. Although they have struggled to make the jump to digital they do appear to be making some progress. I was very impressed with their digital color production press called the NexPress. It competes with the Xerox iGEN(3) and the Indigo digital press. All of them are great high volume digital printing solutions if you have half a million or so dollars lying around that you don’t know what to do with.

Posted by Robert Befus at 11:35 AM .

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I might be late to the party with this one but my boss introduced me to The Wainhouse Research Bulletin the other day and it seemed worth sharing.

The goal of The Wainhouse Research Bulletin (WRB) is to help vendors, reseller channel partners, service providers, investors, and end-users alike follow the fast moving action in the world of rich media communications. Wainhouse Research analysts cover presence, instant messaging, audio conferencing, web conferencing, videoconferencing, distance education, streaming media, and unified communications products and services. Via the WRB, we both report and give our unique perspectives on product announcements, financial results, and corporate developments as well as technology and market trends. The WRB is published approximately weekly via email.

There’s also an RSS syndication feed available.

Posted by Lee Potts at 9:13 PM .

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This is fascinating stuff. Will we someday be able to fill a PPT object with a “spatio-temporal gradient”? I sure hope so. Check out the video on the Khronos Projector site linked below.

KHRONOS PROJECTOR – Alvaro Cassinelli
The Khronos Projector is an interactive-art installation allowing people to explore pre-recorded movie content in an entirely new way. A classic video-tape allows a simple control of the reproducing process (stop, backward, forward, and elementary control on the reproduction speed). Modern digital players add little more than the possibility to perform random temporal jumps between image frames. The goal of the Khronos Projector is to go beyond these forms of exclusive temporal control, by giving the user an entirely new dimension to play with: by touching the projection screen, the user is able to send parts of the image forward or backwards in time.

(via Boing Boing)

Posted by Robert Befus at 1:12 PM .

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At today’s quarterly Webinar, the ICIA Presentations Council previewed their InfoComm 2005 Super Tuesday program for presentation professionals. It looks like it going to be an extremely useful set of sessions covering technology, design, coaching and business strategy.

Please don’t take my word for it. You can see for yourself as they have been kind enough to provide a link to an archived version of the webinar for Visual Being readers. Although the webinars themselves are open to the general public, access to the full archives is one of the benefits of membership in the Council.

Posted by Lee Potts at 8:31 PM .

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“…there are still grown men and women in business suits crawling around on the floor…”

Over at Contact Sheet, Scott Steffens makes an interesting observation about accessing networks cables in corporate meeting rooms. My guess is that many of us are experiencing the retrofitting phase of conference room wiring on a daily basis. Infrastructure is still catching up with the technology and inertia is built into most buildings. Most of the rooms I’ve worked in that have been designed and constructed or renovated in the last couple years aren’t too bad. It’s the rooms that existed long before anyone even had a laptop (and that remain neglected for any number of reasons) that can bring me to my knees (both literally and figuratively).

Posted by Lee Potts at 9:55 PM .

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Now it can be told and revealed. Check my story on InformIT for the full details of Microsoft PowerPoint Secedes from MS Office. Suffice it to say that this is huge, HUGE, HUGE — only my sources in the PowerPoint community let me reveal the sordid underbelly of what has been festering in Redmond. Here’s a hint — check the package of the next version of Office and guess what WON’T be there. Read it all now! (It’s all there with the full final slide show from the PowerPoint team).

Posted by Tom Bunzel at 5:05 PM .

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Here’s a really great blog about the hardware side of the AV industry by the consultant Gary Kayye. Lots of insider news and commentary.

Do you know a "Randy AV"?

Posted by Lee Potts at 3:19 PM .

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Why should the speakers be the only one to use the laser pointer?

As often happens, Google lead me to an interesting item that had very little, if anything, to do with what I was originally looking for. This article (PDF), described a method for combining a laser pointer, a web camera, and some programming skills, into a system that allows meeting participants to interact, from a distance, with what’s being displayed on the screen. Although interesting in and of itself, it got me thinking that there must be other, slightly less technically advanced ways to use laser pointers in meetings.

For instance, what if you were holding a meeting where it was necessary to quickly get a sense of a group’s opinions about a series of issues. You could do a seemingly endless series of hand votes: "All right, on question six, please raise your hand if you agree strongly that we should pursue this opportunity. Now raise you hand if you feel we should pursue the opportunity, but don’t agree strongly…"

You get the idea.

What if you were to draw some squares on the white board, or have flip charts arrayed across the front of the room, each labeled with an answer to the questions you’re posing (i.e., agree strongly, agree, yes, no, etc.). Give each participant a laser pointer and have them point to the square or the flip chart that corresponds to their answer. You would then have an extremely interactive and graphically concise representation of which way the vote went.

Although there are some drawbacks to this method that I’ll get to in a minute, there is a lot that would be cool about it. First, it takes what is usually a sequential, option-by-option process and makes it simultaneous. This, of course, speeds things up, but it might also help groups reach consensus because everyone sees which way the group is leaning in real time. Second, it’s a way to take a vote in public, where everybody can see the group’s sentiments, while letting each voter stay relatively anonymous. I haven’t tested this yet, but I’m willing to bet that if you used small key fob laser pointers and positioned the voting squares close together, it will be hard to determine which point of light is coming from which pointer. The third cool aspect of this method is that the novelty might help an audience get more involved in the proceedings than they might otherwise be.

As I said there are at least a few drawbacks to using this method. For openers, it’s not terribly precise. I don’t think there’s any way to get a quick, exact count of who was voting for what, especially in a large group setting. This is obviously best used as a way to get an overall sense of how many members of an audience are voting for what. It will also be difficult if not impossible to generate a permanent record of the proceedings. It might be possible to snap a quick digital picture of each vote but that seems to go against the ephemeral, quick and dirty nature inherent to this method. The other negatives are mainly those you would have whenever you are trying to do anything with a small, very bight, highly focused light source. In certain environments, it might be difficult for everyone to have a clear shot at the square they are aiming at due to architectural features of the meeting space or other attendees getting in the way. In this setting it will also be a lot easier to accidentally to laser someone’s eye. I imagine it’s the moderator who is in the most danger.

In retrospect, this seems like one of those ideas that might have been really obvious to everyone else, and it’s either been done before or is dismissed as impractical by those with more experience. If you have ever participated in or ran a meeting that used a technique like this, please share your experiences with the rest of us in the comments section. I’d also like to hear about any other novel ways laser pointers have been used in presentations.

Posted by Lee Potts at 12:01 AM .

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