Democratizing the AV Industry with Logitech Tap

Today, Logitech Video Collaboration made an announcement that I’m really excited about Logitech Tap. Tap continues our tradition of fixing big pain points for meetings (“how do I start this $%^#&%$ meeting on time!?!). It's also a natural next step in our journey to create amazing video products that are very high-quality, affordably priced, are easy to install and use, high volume, and globally available.

Starting a video conference quickly and easily is a universal pain point. There are many stats lamenting the up to 15 minutes it takes an average meeting to get going as well as our own personal anecdotes struggling with technology to get an important meeting started.

Tap is something we’ve been working on and obsessing about for years at Logitech. We started with Logitech SmartDock, and built upon it. Tap takes all of the market feedback and learnings, and I think, nails the experience.

Some of the improvements are focused on the end user: how do you make starting a meeting just as easy as a tap of the finger? Others changes are centered around design and aesthetics: making a beautiful and low profile device that just works and gets out of the way when the meeting starts vs. some of the current solutions that are big celebrations of technology on the conference room table. And many of the changes are enhancements with an eye on IT: standard cables that are longer and more robust; flexible mounting options, while streamlining installation and management.

Tap hits the sweet spot, a magical place in between expensive, proprietary, and hard to program A/V touch controllers and consumer tablets like iPads that were not designed with IT use cases in mind, and while inexpensive, have a high TCO.

While just announced, the industry validation has been incredible. Most of the major cloud-based video players including Microsoft, Zoom, and Google are adopting Tap as their go-to solution for touch controllers. And many of our enterprise customers are lining up, itching to get their hands on Tap to scale their internal deployments or upgrade their existing ones.

If this is where the story ends, it would be an exciting launch. But there is a whole other dimension to Tap beyond video collaboration. As we’ve introduced this to the market, we’ve received overwhelming feedback that Tap can go well beyond video conferencing to serve as a Universal Touch Controller. Think about any use case where you need to control something with a touch screen in lieu of today’s inadequate solutions or as an upgrade to a keyboard and mouse.

Tap is an ideal solution for enterprise and IT deployments because it’s not only hardened for IT but also an open, standard solution (based on the near-universal DisplayLink technology) for Windows 10 PCs. Any application that runs on Windows 10 can leverage the touch capabilities of Tap, very much like other open platforms like smartphones or PCs. You don’t need any APIs, or special programing skills to leverage Tap, just the existing skills of running touch applications on Windows.

One great example is with interactive whiteboards. These devices are showing up everywhere in the enterprise. But control of them is a big challenge. If you are in a meeting at the end of a conference room table and want to make a change, you have to constantly get up, walk to the front of the room, make the change, and sit back down. And then repeat again and again. Tap makes this radically simpler. Don’t get up from your chair to make changes. Just tap.

Other examples include touchscreen for scheduling and calendaring outside of conference rooms, controlling audio/visual systems like lighting and blinds, cash registers, medical control systems, and really anything that creative people can think up where touch replaces keyboards and mouse input.

Some may ask if Logitech can be successful in this newer A/V application. I believe we can. We are using the same playbook that vaulted us to the top of the video collaboration space: create great products with beautiful design at reasonable prices and global scale. The AV industry looks very similar to the video industry five years ago: high prices, complexity, and a few big players with largely proprietary systems and limited distribution. In other words, ripe for innovation and change.

We will be unveiling Tap at ISE. As the largest A/V show in the world, it’s really the perfect place to introduce this new product and discuss these and other potentially innovative use cases. I’d welcome your ideas and thoughts (and perhaps we can meet in Amsterdam?). Please reach out to me at [email protected] to follow up. Or write your comments below to tell me how I’ve got it all wrong. Game on!