We have been podcasting for months now, and have interviewed some incredible names in the AV industry from Barco to PTZOptics and beyond. We wanted to share some short audio clips and quotes from our favorite podcasting moments. Enjoy the top 5 Tech Podcast moments from ConferenceCast.
1.
"The one thing I would add is there is this other dimension I've become interested in, and I'm going to talk about it when I'm in Philly this week. It's about engagement. You know, I came out of academics and in that community, student engagement is just a massive topic of discussion because it really leads to better performance, better tests scores, and actually, if you want to be cynical about it leads to year over year student enrollment which means revenue from tuition, right? Because if you have attrition, the students don't feel engaged and that's a bad thing. So, deans track it, CTO's at universities track it. I think engagement is going to be the next big thing in corporate.
Because it's the same set of challenges. You want your employees to feel engaged in meeting spaces. So, I'll give an example of how our product can help them. I previewed it at Infocomm, Annotation. And our approach to Annotation is very different than all the finger painting tools that exist out there today. And it's centered around using your mobile device as sort of a magic wand that lets you highlight and augment scenes as you interact with other people in the room. And the reason we went down that path is that kinesthetic learning and kinesthetic engagement has a massive research history that shows that if I have to move my arm around in the room, even if it's slight, you're more engaged in that space. And if you feel like you can use your own tools to do it, all the better. So, that's another example of things that I think are important are trends, but how we're trying to respond to them with our products." - Christopher Jaynes
2. 
PTZOptics seemed to sprout up just about when live streaming was in its infancy. Was that luck, or did you predict that live streaming was going to take off?
"I think we had a good hint that it was on its way. We were watching as computers were getting faster and faster and saw that it was continuing to conquer more and more markets. Lucky enough for us with focusing on the design of a camera made for web PTZ, it was just a perfect marriage for what was going on in live streaming and a way to make that easy on end users. So, yeah, it was part a little bit of knowing something was coming and a little bit a bit of luck like everybody hopes for." - Matthew Davis
3. 
"This year has probably been one of the busiest, craziest years. It's almost been a year since Hurricane Irma came through. And fortunately, our church did well, but our town kind of got hit pretty hard. But we were able to become the disaster recovery area. And that really opened up the doors to help us meet a lot of new people. So, a lot of new people have come to the church because of that and we've made a lot of really great connections with a lot of other churches all over the state and the country who came down and helped us during that process.
But I've actually heard from a few people that they've never gone to a church before. And I think it kind of goes back to post-hurricane where we were in that disaster recovery. We were getting a lot of publicity in the local news and stuff. And people who'd never been to church before were watching our live stream like a month or two after the storm.It was a few months after that things were getting really normal, but I was live streaming during the whole time. So, folks who'd never been to church before started watching this stream. And they'd watch it for a few weeks and then out of the blue, they'll just show up to the church. So, our church is just one more. We do whatever we can to get one more person in a relationship with God. So, seeing something like live streaming bringing people to the church is really cool." - Douglas Lawes
4. 
the fact that Barco has been in the business world for so long gives you a unique advantage to figuring out what people need and designing collaboration products. Do you think that's true, and how so?
"It's one of those things, when you spoke earlier about associating Barco strictly with projection. I think most people's first experience with Barco was in that world. Especially in the corporate AV space. If they weren't part of Barco's operations-partner team they didn't know that we were doing these operation centers, emergency operations centers, or that we were doing work for oil and gas for data visualization. They never really saw that part of Barco's business, it was a very niche business for a long time. We've really been working closely with end customers and our dealers for a lot of years to learn what their problems are, how they want to see data, learning how to get different pieces of data into the system from multiple sources and bring them into one dashboard where they can see things. That history, and that closeness with our end customer, has really served us well in developing products that we brought more into the mainstream of our enterprise that you see now." - Mark Coxon
5. 
What do you think the future of video conferencing will look like?
"First of all, video conferencing is becoming mainstream and replacing audio communications. How often do you actually pick up the phone and call someone now, right? People are texting, sending messages, or getting on some sort of video collaboration product and talking live, right? You're going to see much more of these products fusing together and coming in more of a platform. Really the single solution across those cases that I just described whether you’re messaging, you're threading different conversations, you're having a video chat, you’re sharing content and files, all those different things are going to merge into one platform which Zoom does a lot of that today. Also, more introduction of AI and AR into the medium" - Laura Padilla
