Making the most of a Movement

Nothing excites me more than recognizing a "Movement". Well, the only thing more so, is starting, facilitating or having my surfboard ready as I see the wave building. As a movement promoter, the crafty art of marketing storytelling can really galvanize a community into the movement. Malcolm Gladwell's book "Tipping Point" shows the way a phenomenon may happen within human dynamics. In it, you could learn to be a maven.

New ways of thinking and so perhaps new behaviors, ways of interacting and working are often within a movement. Probably in my career, one of the two most compelling Movements, I became associated with was the Wireless Audio Video Communications platform. Interestingly enough, it did start with the “A” in AV. 

A group called Maestro Labs approached Starin, because we were the world’s largest distributor for ClearOne.

Formerly called Gentner, under Russ Gentner’s engineering genius, ClearOne had created its own movement of taking broadcast interface equipment to get phone calls on the air and helped video integrators then get those calls on the air in a live-audience studio while Phil Donahue and Oprah Winfrey with open-mics talked with the crowd and callers. This required a technique called “acoustic echo cancellation” that anyone in AVC should know is fundamental to the modern video conference. It prevents the caller-sound to go back down the line to them, creating an echo.

Fast forward to the Maestro skunk works of radio engineers showing me how they could get 18 wireless microphones in a space. Furthermore, they were very compact and rechargeable. I had been sales-engineering at an integrator just prior to this. I had a conference floor at KPMG Chicago where they wanted each room configuration to be fully flexible for the function of the meeting; classroom style, U-shaped table, panel discussion, in-the-round, etc. 

The problem was they were within blocks of the John Hancock and Sears buildings (both world’s tallest, one right after the other), where broadcast towers beam very strong signals across the Midwest. You guessed it; interference galore. At best with conventional single frequency wireless, I could get 5-6 channels. That meant going wired instead, draping mic cables around the room.

Maestro became Revolabs and solved the dilemma by using spread-spectrum frequency hopping (a multiplexing technique). I had been working with Motorola building a NOC for a new cellular phone network called iDEN, using time division multiple access, to get thousands more callers out of the same radio spectrum, so I got the principle. From there, Starin put Revolabs on the map with our ClearOne applications.

The Wireless AV Movement advanced when I discovered the remarkable mind of Dinesh Trapathi, who had created a wireless computer graphics sharing product with his company Wow Vision. The device was revolutionary with the ability to share to screen, with multiple users, white boarding and annotating over it, starting a Go-to-Meeting session on it and numerous other utilities. It was way ahead of its time and perhaps did too much for people to wrap their heads around. With the analog sunset of VGA approaching and computer companies not deciding the digital connectivity standard between DVI, Thunderbolt, HMDI or others, wireless should have been a natural progression. However, the industry was very entrenched in the wired interface-to-matrix switch world. One engineer shared, as great as the Wow installs he did were, his boss had a rebate from Extron he loved. Yet, Wow did good enough as a forerunner to become the Kramer Via, which now is one of the top three wireless in-room collaboration platforms.

The large-scale break-through in wireless presentation was Barco’s ClickShare. Yoav Nir, the early entrepreneur for ClickShare, visited me after talking to Revolabs about how they grew to be the new standard in conference room wireless audio. He trusted Starin with the exclusive channel development and distribution of the new device. The beauty was in the simplification of the one-button, plug-and-play experience. The resistance barrier of the channel was broken by the end-user’s wildly enthusiastic reception to the experience. Perhaps, it was the real break-through of a new mindset, shifting from complex over-engineering to user experience simplification. That continues with the next generation of Clickshare, that was a response to my next Movement, beyond wireless in-room sharing.     

The Movement of Cloud AV is what I discovered emerging. Starin had used numerous on-line conferencing methods with software codecs from Dim-Dim (bought by Salesforce), to Go-to-Meeting and Webex. We’d seen Blue Jeans create a few waves. But when we experienced Zoom, the ease of use and reliability of the platform was clear. I lived in the San Francisco bay area at the time and when I witnessed how Zoom had focused on the tech sector itself to win over user advocates, it proved to be that ripple on the horizon that would become a significant wave. 

Working with our brands to get approval as Zoom certified for compatibility, led to Zoom asking Starin to facilitate expediting the delivery and execution time of getting Zoom Rooms for a fast-growing customer base. Nick Chong at Zoom impressed upon me the ability to scale and so, scalability of agile and streamlined methodology became what we call Outfitting. It is the complete deliverable of a solution, but goes beyond mere bundling to be an advanced supply chain advantage.

In each case of these Movements, there was a new democratization for more users, to more effectively communicate. Perhaps that is the impetus for a movement catching on. It is far beyond the old feature/benefit pitch. You have to circulate the realization of the new utility. You have to “illustrate” the new use. You have to teach people the way.

Today, I have had the pleasure of seeing a company radically change the traditional product-focused drum-beating into inviting people who have an inherent desire, to come into the new modern democratized media world. The Movement is the wide application of streaming specialty content, as a subject matter expert. 

To be that subject matter expert, you can be at any point of the learning curve. Yes, even a novice becoming informed and capable can be a terrific reference point for other novices, to relate the initial steps towards some proficiency. No longer need one be intimidated by seeing some master and think they could never become that. Master classes are enlightening, yet almost everyone who applies themselves can have something to contribute on a streaming platform. That is why interactivity has become a rich part of it.

The group of talented streamers who are disseminating the how-to is Stream Geeks. Led by Paul Richards, these folks are all about the user's growth and experience in communicating better. Here they are leading last year's NAB streaming. They help people go from selfie streaming into a compelling presentation or even better, live interactions among people in a community. Paul, his trusty and knowledgeable cohost, Tess Protesto and producer Michael Luttermoser, not only have regular on-line video events, they have held user group Summits. Paul has written three books as guides to streaming methods within education, houses of worship and e-Sports. Incidentally, they find that those in the on-line gaming community are most advanced at live spontaneous communications and event coverage. At first glance you would never know they have a product line called PTZ Optics*. They literally leave the products behind to only introduce in a casual, conversational and light logo appearance within the experiences they create.

In the Experience Economy-1, we know that what we offer the world can be 5 layers. From offering a commodity at the base level, to then the product, to then services, to then an experience and finally a transformational influence of how you truly changed people’s lives.

In To Sell is Human-2, we learn that no one wants to be “sold-to”. They want to be moved and they want to belong, if not be a mover like the persons that moved them.

Being Movement aware, to join in and aid in the communications revolution of the movement is not only a role of Audio Video Communications professionals, it is our responsibility. Those who get it, will get it. 

1 The Experience Economy is the paradigm-shifting book by Joseph Pine and James Gilmore you should read or decide to get out of the business.

 2 Daniel Pink’s To Sell is Human is the basis of an entirely new approach to selling where you aren’t using traditional closing techniques and other “tricks” to get someone to buy. You certainly use persuasive abilities, but it is for convincing them how you can serve their interests, where you stick with them in the use. 

*PTZ Optics is a brand available to resellers at wholesale from Starin and available to end-users from those good people.