Another Audio Visual Industry Acquisition, and This One Hits Closer to Home

This happened yesterday:

SMART Technologies Inc. and Foxconn Technology Group announced they have entered into an arrangement agreement under which Foxconn has agreed to acquire all of the outstanding common shares of SMART for a cash payment of US$4.50 per Common Share. The US$4.50 per Common Share purchase price represents a premium of approximately 21% to the volume weighted average price over the last 90 trading days prior to announcement of the Arrangement on the NASDAQ Stock Market.

For those who are already aware and have known SMART Technologies as well as I do, going on over fifteen years now, this is likely no surprise. SMART, as we all know is the company that brought to the education world the SMART Board, the first true interactive classroom technology experience in the early 1990's. In 1999, I entered the SMART Technologies world as an integration sales person focused on the K-12 and higher education markets.  At that time it was the SB300 series, followed by the 500 series, and if you were working with SMART as an integration sales person back then and did the demos, lugging it around was no easy task (with stand no less). Good thing I drove a Ford Explorer at the time. 

Not only did I sell the SMART Board to New Jersey K-12 schools, colleges and universities, I trained on it too. SMART Notebook of course as every teacher who was able to finally get their hands on a SMART Board in their classroom - and you could see the passion and excitement - wanted to learn about every possible way to use the software. I became well versed in Notebook and taught 2-3 hour sessions. Along with SMART Boards I also sold my share of Sympodiums (the 18" and 24" LCD interactive display panels) which I mounted in custom designed podiums and workstations for higher ed. My custom configurations became standard installations in various colleges and universities in New Jersey as well as New York. 

I built a small business approach to go along with education and well, let's just say it hardly mirrored the education experience as trainings were kept very short (somehow business people just didn't have time to learn an internally recommended product's proper usage), re-trainings were always necessary and Notebook just never really made sense as a business application. Meeting Pro when it did appear was good but certainly required upgrades and enhancements to finally become a worthy software business tool. 

And then came SMART Technologies' internal business side end user approach, and that was a whole other story. Read it here on rAVe [Publications].