The Dow Jones index is hovering around 9900, October has been a busy month, and the pipeline for 2010 has new activity. It’s time to celebrate because the economy is coming back…right? As much as I want to be excited about the spurt in business so many of us are seeing, I want to caution against resuming “business as usual”. When we get busy we start to miss the people, suppliers, and perks we still had before the Recession. The natural tendency is to reward the team for their sacrifice by hiring up, suspending those furlough days, and reinstating full salaries. I don’t think it is time yet to do this – for most of us. › Continue reading…
Tag: infocomm 100
Tags: audio video, audio visual, AV, business, contemplation, downtime, economy, InfoComm, infocomm 100, infocomm100, managing personnel, Recession, recovery, reduce costs, rental and staging, strategic planning, Strategy, Tom Stimson, Trends, trstimson, unemployment
Once upon a time, AV integrators made good money from equipment and labor with a healthy premium for engineering expertise. Today, equipment and labor have become commodities and engineering is the value-added service we don’t get to charge for anymore. The burden of profit is now placed upon project management and operations, which is still pretty much based on the 1990′s model. There have been vast improvements in making project management more professional and educating installers. These changes alone are not enough. We need to discover the service, product, or convenience that we can charge for today, above the commoditized time and materials we are so familiar with. › Continue reading…
Imagine 100 AV Industry geeks talking about the future of technology without mentioning a single product. It was tough, but somehow we managed to stay on task. The InfoComm 100 was an think-tank of AV and related professionals from around the world that examined the 3-5 year future of the AV Industry. Let’s examine the list of primary assumptions about the 3-5 year future of technology influences on our industry and ponder their implications: › Continue reading…
The Visionaries of the InfoComm 100 think tank have presented us with some interesting and sometimes conflicting assumptions about how the AV Industry will compete in the next 3 to 5 years. Let’s examine the list of primary assumptions and ponder their implications: › Continue reading…
A huge theme of the InfoComm 100 event was the trend towards an IT-centric world. It predicts that more IT departments will take ownership of AV management and delivery, that computers will increasingly replace AV products as the endpoint for communications. “The AV industry will need to fully understand unified communications, networks, and wireless applications.” It will be an open-source world.
In my recent Roadmap for the Future blog I touched on the six macro-trends identified by the InfoComm 100 in April 2009. The implications for the Audiovisual Live Event Industry are significant and expand the outlook I have been noodling over the past three years. › Continue reading…
In April, 2009 I was fortunate to participate in a landmark event for the AV Industry, the InfoComm 100. InfoComm International brought together one hundred industry leaders and key volunteers from around the world for a two-day think tank. The “100″ as we came to be known, brainstormed about future trends that will affect the AV Industry over the next five years. › Continue reading…
When the Recovery starts, certain companies will grow faster and these companies will look dramatically different from what we’ve seen the past ten years. I have just returned from a landmark event called The InfoComm 100. This was a three-day networking think tank of leaders and visionaries from all over the AV Industry and around the world. › Continue reading…
