Picture this. You join a meeting remotely and spend the first five minutes trying to figure out who is talking. Someone makes a point and gets talked over before anyone on the call can respond. The camera is pointing at the table, not the people. The microphone catches the three seats closest to the center and leaves everyone else sounding like they are in another room. The technology is technically working. The meeting is not. This is one of the most consistent problems in commercial office design today and it is getting harder to ignore as hybrid work becomes the permanent default rather than the temporary workaround. The issue is not the platform. It is not the wifi. It is the room itself, and the fact that most rooms were never designed with the remote participant in mind. Here is what that costs organizations and what the right design actually looks like.

Picture the last time a meeting started late because the screen would not connect. Or the time a remote participant spent twenty minutes as a blurry square in the corner before giving up. Or the boardroom that always gets booked but somehow always seems empty when you walk past it at 2 p.m. These are not technology problems. They are space problems. The technology exists to fix all of them. The question in 2026 is whether the offices people are walking into were actually built to take advantage of it. The way offices work is changing in ways that go well beyond better webcams and faster Wi-Fi. AI is handling work that people used to manage manually. Buildings are collecting data that nobody was tracking before. And the gap between an office that feels current and one that feels frustrating is wider than it has ever been. Here is what is actually driving that shift and what it means for the spaces where your people spend their time.

The conference room was finished on a Friday. New furniture, fresh paint, a 75-inch commercial display on the wall. Monday morning, the first team tried to use it. The display looked great. But nobody could figure out how to share their screen. The camera captured only the first two seats. Remote participants on the call could not hear the person at the far end of the room. By Tuesday, IT had four tickets. This is what happens when a conference room gets built around one component and everything else gets filled in as an afterthought. A conference room AV system is an ecosystem. Every component affects every other, and a room with six things working perfectly and one thing underspecified will feel broken to the people using it. There are seven components every functional conference room AV system needs. Here is what each one does, how it connects to the others, and what goes wrong when it is missing or wrong for the room.

The conference room renovation is underway. New finishes, new furniture, new layout. Now someone has to make a call on the display. One vendor quoted a laser projector and screen. Another quoted a direct-view LED panel. The price difference is significant. The presentations both sounded convincing. This is where most organizations get stuck. The video wall vs. projector debate gets framed as a budget question, but budget is only part of it. The more useful questions are about the room itself: How much ambient light does it get? Is this a permanent installation or a flexible space? How often will people use it, and for what? What does the content look like? The answers to those questions do most of the work. What follows is a practical framework for making the right call: not the most impressive one or the cheapest one, but the one that actually works for your space.

The showroom looked great. The integrator walked you through a conference room setup with crisp 4K content on a seamless LED wall, a microphone array that picked up a whisper from fifteen feet away, and a touch panel that launched a Zoom call in under three seconds. You left impressed. Then the proposal arrived. Twelve pages. Dense line items you've never heard of. A number at the bottom that's higher than you expected. And somewhere in the middle, language about "standard installation" and "additional scope as required" that you weren't sure how to read. The demo showed you what's possible under ideal conditions. The proposal is a contract for what will actually happen in your specific building, with your specific infrastructure, on your actual timeline. Those two things are not always as close as they look.

You've sent out requests to three AV integrators. The proposals look similar at first glance. Each one promises a clean install, quality equipment, and responsive support. The prices are different. The branding is different. But from the outside, it's hard to tell what else is. This is the problem most organizations run into when evaluating AV firms. The differences that actually matter (how a firm manages scope, what happens when something breaks in year two, who's picking up the phone) don't show up on a proposal cover page. Most buyers focus on hardware specs and price. Those are the wrong filters. The questions that predict whether a project succeeds, and whether the relationship holds up after installation day, are the ones most buyers never think to ask.

A company redoes its fifth-floor conference suite. New furniture, fresh paint, a new camera bar on every display. Six months later, half the rooms sit empty most mornings while two rooms are double-booked every afternoon. People are back in the office, but they're gravitating to the rooms that actually work for hybrid meetings and avoiding the ones that don't. This is not a technology problem. It's a design problem that technology reveals. The way organizations use meeting space has fundamentally shifted, and most conference room AV hasn't kept up with that shift. The office is no longer just a place for co-located teams. It's a node in a distributed network, and every room needs to function accordingly.

Picture your IT security team's last audit. They inventoried every laptop, locked down every user account, patched every server, and documented every cloud application. Then they handed the report to leadership and called it done. Nobody audited the conference rooms. Sitting on your corporate network right now are cameras, microphones, DSPs, touch panels, codecs, wireless presentation appliances, and room controllers. Most of them have factory-default credentials. Many haven't received a firmware update since installation. None of them appear in your endpoint management system. All of them are reachable from the same network that carries your financial data, your HR systems, and your executive communications. This is the AV cybersecurity gap, and it exists in most enterprise environments.

Between 2020 and 2022, thousands of organizations made fast AV purchasing decisions just to keep people connected. Conference rooms that had a speakerphone and a wall-mounted display suddenly needed cameras, microphones, codecs, and video conferencing platforms. The installs happened quickly. The spec decisions were made under pressure. Those systems are now three to five years old. And many of them are showing their age in ways the people managing them didn't expect. The cameras still power on. The displays still light up. But the platform has updated four times since installation. The firmware is two versions behind. The codec that was certified for Zoom Rooms in 2021 is no longer on the certified list. And the room that worked fine two years ago now drops calls, freezes mid-meeting, or takes three minutes to join what should be a one-touch start. AV equipment doesn't fail all at once. It degrades. Understanding why it happens faster than most people assume is the first step toward planning a refresh instead of reacting to a failure.

At ISE 2026, every major AV manufacturer led with AI. Cisco called it "Connected Intelligence." Crestron called it "AutoMeasure." Shure called it "IntelliMix." The marketing was everywhere. The problem isn't the technology. A lot of it is genuinely impressive. The problem is that "AI" in an AV context describes several different categories of capability, and they're not all at the same stage of readiness. Some features work today with zero setup. Others require licensing, compliance decisions, and IT involvement before they touch your environment. Knowing which is which saves you from overspending on features nobody uses and underinvesting in the ones that actually change how your rooms perform

A property management team opens a newly renovated amenity floor in a Class A office building. The shared conference center has large displays, ceiling microphones, and scheduling panels outside each door. It looks great. Then three tenants try to use it the same week. One runs Zoom. Another runs Teams. The third just wants to plug in a laptop. The scheduling panel is tied to the building owner's calendar, which none of the tenants can access. And the network the AV sits on makes every IT director nervous. Multi-tenant buildings with shared AV spaces have challenges that single-tenant environments don't. Platform neutrality, network separation, booking logistics, and long-term flexibility all need answers before the first room is built.

You're reviewing construction documents for a new office build-out. Somewhere in the specs, a note says the conference rooms are "AV-ready." That sounds reassuring. It shouldn't be. In practice, "AV-ready" can mean anything from a fully coordinated infrastructure plan with conduit paths, dedicated circuits, and structural backing for displays down to a single empty conduit stub and a power outlet. The gap between those two versions is measured in change orders and rooms that don't work the way anyone expected.

A workplace planner is putting together specs for a new headquarters. The company has ESG targets. The architect is pursuing LEED certification. The furniture vendor submitted a sustainability data sheet. Then someone asks about the AV systems going into 30 conference rooms, a lobby video wall, and digital signage across three floors. Nobody has an answer. AV wasn't part of the sustainability conversation because most people don't think of displays, speakers, and mounting hardware as environmental decisions. But across a multi-room project, AV systems consume significant energy, generate measurable waste during installation, and create ongoing disposal challenges when equipment reaches end of life. The good news is that the decisions that make AV more sustainable are often the same ones that make projects faster, cheaper to maintain, and easier to service. Here's where sustainability actually intersects with AV planning, and what to ask before the next project starts.

A facilities manager at a corporate headquarters called us on a Tuesday morning. Three conference rooms on the same floor had gone down overnight. The displays powered on, but the room control systems weren't responding, cameras weren't initializing, and nobody could start a meeting without manual workarounds. By 10 a.m., six meetings had been relocated, two had been canceled, and the IT help desk had fielded 14 tickets. By the time a technician traced the issue to a firmware conflict on a networked switch, the actual repair took about 40 minutes. The fix was simple. The disruption wasn't. This is the math most organizations miss when thinking about AV reliability. The repair cost is almost always a fraction of the productivity lost while the system is down.

A general contractor on a 15-room office build-out once told us that the AV phase generated more dumpster runs than any other trade on the floor. Cut conduit, stripped cable jackets, cardboard from individual component boxes, foam inserts, mounting brackets that didn't fit, and leftover hardware from field-fabricated solutions. All of it piled up in the hallway while other trades tried to finish around it. It's a pattern we see often. AV installation waste doesn't get the same attention as demolition debris or drywall scrap, but it adds up fast on multi-room projects. The materials are small and varied, which makes them harder to sort, harder to recycle, and easy to overlook in project planning. This is one of the reasons we developed the CLAM System 3.0. Beyond the speed and labor benefits, the prefabrication approach fundamentally changes how much material ends up in a dumpster and how much stays out of the building entirely.

A major board meeting is in 20 minutes. The display in the main conference room is not responding. The room control panel shows a red error. Someone from IT just forwarded the issue to whoever handles AV. Whoever handles AV. That is the moment a service plan either earns its value or exposes a gap. It does not matter whether the room has $80,000 worth of hardware or $20,000. What matters is who picks up the phone, how fast they respond, and whether they can solve the problem before the CFO walks in. Most organizations spend months picking the right displays, cameras, and conferencing platforms. Very few spend the same energy choosing the right service relationship. That mismatch causes unnecessary downtime, frustration, and reactive spending on emergency calls that could have been avoided.

A facilities manager at a Minneapolis company walks into a newly renovated boardroom. The room looks sharp. New finishes, great lighting, solid furniture. Then she opens the credenza doors to reset the AV system after a call dropped mid-meeting. She is on her hands and knees, flashlight in hand, trying to reach a cable behind a 12RU rack crammed into a 9-inch enclosure. That scenario plays out in conference rooms everywhere. The AV credenza became standard practice decades ago because integrators needed somewhere to put equipment. It solved one problem and created several others. The good news is that the credenza is no longer necessary. Equipment has gotten smaller, mounting systems have gotten smarter, and the rooms we design today do not need a piece of furniture dedicated to hiding technology. If you are planning a new conference room or refreshing an existing one, this is worth reading before the furniture order gets placed.

A general contractor calls mid-build. The conference rooms are framed, drywall is going up next week, and the AV integrator still hasn't delivered shop drawings for 15 rooms. Each room has a different display size, a different mounting solution, and a different cable path. The GC needs penetration locations now. The AV team needs furniture dimensions that haven't been finalized. This is standard. It's also where projects start slipping. Custom field fabrication for every room means every room is a one-off. Design takes longer, install takes longer, and service takes longer because nothing is repeatable. Prefabricated AV mounting changes that equation. Here's what it actually looks like on a real project timeline.

A facilities manager installs scheduling panels outside 30 conference rooms. Six months later, half the rooms still get double-booked. People walk past the panels and open the door to check if the room is free. Others book rooms from their desks but never show up, locking out teams who actually need the space. The panels work. The calendar syncs. The technology is fine. But nobody changed their behavior because the deployment didn't account for how people actually book and use rooms. Scheduling panels are one of the simplest AV additions to a workspace. They're also one of the most frequently underperforming. Here's what separates the installs that change behavior from the ones that become expensive hallway decorations.

An IT director asks us to standardize 40 conference rooms across two floors of a new office build-out. Half the company lives in Microsoft 365. The sales team runs everything through Zoom. Leadership wants one platform for all rooms, but nobody agrees on which one. This is not a software debate. It's an AV integration decision. The platform you choose affects hardware selection, room design, calendar behavior, and long-term service. We've deployed both. Jamf runs Zoom Rooms. SunOpta and Inspire Sleep use Teams-enabled rooms. The right answer depends on how your organization actually works.

A building owner called us in January. The outdoor LED wall they installed the previous summer has dead pixel clusters along the bottom edge. Snow has been drifting against the base for weeks, and nobody planned a drainage path behind the cabinets. Moisture worked into the panel seams during a freeze-thaw cycle and damaged the electronics. This wasn't a product failure. The panels were IP65-rated and built for outdoor use. It was a planning failure. Nobody thought through what happens when wet snow sits against an LED cabinet for three days, melts during an afternoon warm-up, and refreezes overnight. Outdoor LED technology has matured. But surviving a Minnesota winter is different from handling rain in a mild climate. Here's what actually matters.

The 75-inch display looked enormous at the store. The salesperson stood three feet away and the image filled your entire field of view. It seemed like overkill for a conference room. Now it's mounted in your meeting space. The person at the far end of the table leans forward, squinting. Someone asks the presenter to increase the font size. Another person pulls out their laptop to see the shared screen on their own device because the display on the wall is too hard to read. This happens constantly. Facilities managers, office managers, and IT teams buy displays based on what looks big in a showroom or what fits the wall. Neither approach accounts for how the room will actually be used. Display sizing follows specific principles. The right size depends on room depth, typical content, and seating positions. Get it wrong and every meeting becomes slightly harder than it needs to be. Get it right and people stop thinking about the screen entirely because it just works.

The meeting starts in two minutes. A client is presenting from their laptop. They try to connect wirelessly. Nothing happens. They try again. The system asks for a PIN that nobody knows. Someone suggests a different app. That app is not installed. The laptop cannot find the display. Five minutes passed. Someone runs to get an HDMI cable. This scenario repeats everywhere. Wireless presentation systems promise seamless sharing without cables. Marketing materials show people walking into rooms and instantly sharing their screens. Reality delivers inconsistent connections, compatibility problems, and troubleshooting that derails meetings before they start. Understanding why wireless sharing fails points to what can be done about it, both in system selection and in room design.

The huddle room seemed like a simple project. Small space. Two to six people. Just put a display on the wall and add a webcam. Now the room sits half-empty on the booking calendar. People avoid it. The ones who do book it spend the first five minutes troubleshooting why the audio sounds like a tunnel. Remote participants ask everyone to repeat themselves. Someone inevitably gives up and moves to a larger conference room that actually works. Huddle rooms fail because they get treated as smaller versions of conference rooms instead of spaces with their own requirements. The compact size creates acoustic challenges that larger rooms do not have. The informal nature leads to underinvestment in equipment. Getting huddle rooms right requires understanding what makes them different.

The marketing team books the large conference room every Tuesday. They spread materials across the table, walk around, and use the whiteboard constantly. They love space. The finance team has their weekly forecast meeting in the same room. Half the attendees join remotely. They complain about the room constantly. Same room. Different experiences. The difference is not the room. The difference is how each group uses it and whether the room supports that use pattern. Understanding why this happens helps you design better spaces and fix the ones that aren't working.

Contractors install commercial displays using standard TV mounts to save a few hundred dollars. Six months later the display is sagging. Now you're paying for emergency repairs, and proper commercial mounts that should have been used initially. The total cost is triple what doing it right would have been. This covers what commercial mounting hardware provides, why proper weight ratings matter, and how to spec mounts that support displays running 12 hours daily.

An interior designer specs a beautiful custom conference table for an executive boardroom. It gets built, delivered, and installed. The room looks exactly as planned. Then the AV team arrives to mount cameras and realizes there is no good position that frames everyone properly. The table sits too close to the wall. Its width puts people at the edges outside any reasonable camera field of view. The shape creates impossible angles. This happens because furniture and AV get designed in separate tracks. The table vendor receives dimensions and aesthetic requirements. They build what was ordered. Nobody asks where the camera will mount or how it will capture participants until installation week. By then the options are limited. The table cannot move. The shape cannot change. Someone has to accept compromised camera angles, awkward mounting positions, or gaps in coverage because fundamental coordination never happened.

A team gathers in the conference room for a client presentation. Everyone can hear each other perfectly. Then someone dials in the remote participants and everything changes. Audio becomes muffled. Voices echo. The problem is that in room acoustics and remote audio are different challenges. Microphones pick up room reverb that human ears filter out. Ceiling mics positioned for aesthetics create coverage gaps. Understanding why this happens points to what needs to change during design.

You have twelve conference rooms across three floors. Each was spec'd by a different team, installed at different times, and uses different interfaces. A presenter walks into the west wing boardroom after leading a meeting downstairs and spends the first five minutes hunting for the right input. IT gets three support calls before 10 AM because nobody can figure out how to start the projector in the training room. This is not a technology problem. It is a standardization problem. When every room works differently, even good AV systems create friction. Users lose confidence. Support teams spend hours on issues that should not exist. And the ROI you expected from your AV investment gets chipped away one confused meeting at a time. Room standardization means building consistency into how spaces operate. It does not mean identical equipment everywhere. It means creating predictable patterns so users can walk into any space and know exactly what to do.

Most AV systems don’t fail all at once. They degrade quietly—audio gets harder to hear, displays take longer to wake up, meetings feel stressful instead of effortless. By the time something “breaks,” users have already lost confidence. High-reliability AV support is designed to prevent that erosion. It treats audiovisual systems as operational infrastructure—something that must perform predictably every day, across conference rooms, digital signage, video walls, interactive installations, and live environments. This article explains what high-reliability AV support actually looks like in practice—and why it matters long after installation is complete.

The architect has just presented schematics for a new headquarters. The floor plans show conference rooms, a town hall, and a digital feature in the lobby. The owner asks the obvious question: how much will the AV cost? At this stage, the honest answer is usually a range. Sometimes a wide one. That answer can frustrate project teams, especially those accustomed to tighter numbers from mechanical or electrical trades. But AV budgeting works differently, and understanding why can save months of misaligned expectations. We have seen projects stall because early estimates became anchors that could not flex as design evolved. We have also seen owners get exactly what they needed by treating budget development as a process that refines alongside architecture, interior design, and IT planning. The difference comes down to understanding what drives AV costs and when those drivers lock in.

Picture this: You've invested in a stunning LED video wall for your corporate lobby, only to discover that visitors standing a few feet away see a distracting grid of pixels instead of crisp imagery. Or perhaps you've specified ultra-fine 0.9mm pitch for a stadium scoreboard where viewers sit 200 feet away—paying premium prices for resolution no one can appreciate. These costly mistakes stem from one critical misunderstanding: the relationship between pixel pitch and viewing distance. When specifying a direct-view LED video wall, one decision towers above all others: pixel pitch. Get it wrong, and you'll either overspend on unnecessary resolution or deliver a frustrating, pixelated viewing experience. Understanding how pixel pitch relates to your specific environment is essential for designers, architects, and AV buyers alike.

Learn how architects and AV integrators collaborate during schematic design when floor plans, finishes, and budgets are still evolving.

Imagine investing hundreds of thousands of dollars in a stunning gigantic LED video wall—only to display pixelated, stuttering content that makes your brand look amateurish. This nightmare scenario plays out more often than you'd think. From the breathtaking Salesforce Tower installation to Apple's curved LED masterpiece in Macau, iconic video walls share one critical success factor: content engineered to exact specifications. At Spye, we've installed everything from the Baker Center's massive 60-foot architectural display to sophisticated corporate lobby installations, and we've learned that the technology is only half the equation. The other half? Content that's purpose-built for your unique display specifications. Here's why getting it right matters more than you think.

In today's competitive business landscape, creating functional, engaging, and technologically advanced spaces is essential for attracting top talent and impressing clients. A professional corporate AV installation can fundamentally transform your workplace—enhancing communication, elevating presentations, and creating seamless collaboration experiences. However, achieving optimal results requires more than just installing equipment. Success comes from strategic planning, including thoughtful system design, audio-visual integration expertise, and scalability. Here's how to design a corporate AV system tailored to your organization's unique needs and workflows.

In every workplace, lobby, and meeting room, the most powerful technology isn’t the screen on the wall—it’s the infrastructure hidden behind it. The AV closet is where reliability is engineered, where serviceability is protected, and where the long-term success of an AV system is quietly decided. Great integrators design this space with intention, clarity, and craftsmanship. Poor integrators ignore it. The difference becomes obvious the first time someone needs support, an upgrade, or a repair.

When a room looks good and sounds right, people notice. Meetings start on time. Presenters relax. Remote participants feel included. That is what happens when AV supports the architecture instead of fighting it. At Spye, we begin with the drawing set and how the space will be used. The goal is an AV plan that supports the architecture rather than cutting across it. Here is a simple framework architects and teams can use on every project.

Ever been in a space where you couldn’t hear a thing or maybe you heard way too much? Poor sound can make meetings frustrating, events underwhelming, and even day-to-day business harder than it needs to be. A great sound system changes that. It makes every voice clear, every note crisp, and every message heard exactly as intended. At Spye, we believe good sound is not about buying the most expensive equipment. It is about creating a system that works with your space, your people, and your goals. Here is how we make that happen.

Hybrid work is now part of everyday business life. Some people are in the office, others are working from home, and meetings often bring the two together. This can create challenges for communication, focus, and collaboration. The right AV setup can bridge that gap, making the experience feel seamless for everyone, no matter where they are. Here is how upgrading your AV system can make your hybrid workspace more connected and productive.

When you walk into a well-designed space, you notice. You might not be able to pinpoint exactly what makes it feel so comfortable and functional, but you feel the difference. That is what great AV design should do. It should blend into the background while completely changing how a room works for you. At Spye, we believe AV design is more than installing screens and speakers. It is about creating an environment where technology supports the way people meet, share ideas, and connect, without ever getting in the way.

Video conferencing is now a mandatory part of our work lives, and of course dedicated, video conferencing spaces are required.

Continuing our series on video, we are going to discuss some of the important facts and details about brightness, what those numbers mean, and image size. If you have not, may we recommend you catch-up by looking at the past few months!

Communicating with your staff and/or customers is so important these days, and with all the latest advancements in audiovisual technology that are packed into a commercial display they have more to offer than just a Television (TV). Last month we discussed many of the features and benefits of a TV, or consumer model display. This month we will delve into these advancements, features and benefits of a commercial display. Getting this out of the way, yes, a commercial display costs more, sometimes quite a lot more, are they worth the additional cost? The answer is, in most cases, yes!

Part one of our 2-part series discussing the difference between televisions and commercial displays.

At Spye, we’re here to help. It’s our goal to assist businesses in making the connection. For many organizations, that’s true now more than ever, as the definition of “workplace” has changed dramatically and many teams have gone remote and offsite. Spye’s expertise in creative, customized digital solutions will help your business navigate the COVID-era landscape to increase connectivity, productivity, and enhance the overall workflow experience. We not only implement these solutions, but we can also consult to help your business plan and execute.

This year, Spye attended the AV event of the year, InfoComm 2019! InfoComm is a worldwide audio-visual integration convention hosted by sunny Orlando Florida. The latest and greatest AV innovations across the globe are on full display to the conference attendees. This year was no exception with incredible innovations and ideas from all aspects of the industry. InfoComm truly lived up to the hype.

Discover the art world’s most mesmerizing new medium, Digital Walls. A canvas whose limits are on par only to the artists imagination.

Spye explores the future of virtual and augmented reality.

Spye was wrapping up a large AV integration project downtown Minneapolis when the customer asked us to solve a problem. They had a large common meeting space where they wanted to do some formal and informal town hall style meetings. They did not want to have a podium taking up space, nor did they want to have to store one and connect it every time they presented. Spye met with their project manager to define the best location for presentation visibility and to determine infrastructure requirements.

Spye installs large scale matrix displays for boardroom.

Spye builds custom system to install a Planar 10.4 MM pixel pitch video wall.

Spye designs 24/7 operation control room system.

The Future is now, as is the Furniture. The office furniture that you choose for your next conference room, boardroom or co-collaboration table is going to need to accommodate technology infrastructure.

Can you design a hologram? This is one of the most common questions we hear at Spye and it’s one that comes with a long answer. A hologram is the ideal visual display: visible from all angles, 3-dimensional without polarized viewing lenses, and free from the physical framework that often makes full suspension of disbelief difficult in a viewing experience. The complexity in the answer to this question lies in the fact that while we don’t have a commercially available way to generate a true hologram, there are a variety of technologies that will produce a floating image with a similar effect.

Try this simple exercise. Look closely at your screen, see if you can distinguish individual pixels. If you have a relatively new screen, it is likely that it will be difficult to see each pixel. Now, bring your eyes to within 12 inches of the screen, you will most likely start to see the pixels, and the overall picture will look more choppy. Now, bring your eyes 2-3 inches from the screen. At this distance you can clearly make out each individual pixel.

RFID doesn’t just stand for “Really Fresh Ice-cream’s Delicious” – it’s also the commonly used acronym for Radio Frequency IDentification. At Izzy’s Ice Cream, both interpretations of RFID are equally important. While technology may not be the first thing that comes to mind when you think about your neighborhood ice cream shop, Jeff Sommers and Lara Hammel, the owners of Izzy’s Ice Cream, might soon change that.

eSporting events are still new and will likely change and improve with time. Watching the competition grow will certainly be exciting but watching the infrastructure behind the scenes in the coming years will be fascinating as well. eSports may well pave the way for totally new viewing experiences in events of all types and it will be interesting to see how technology works to bring connection and content to viewers in a merged digital and physical space.

What can digital signage do that print cannot? Digital signage is inherently more dynamic than its print equivalent but when coupled with an immediate call to action and a custom build, digital signage can become an immersive and memorable experience.

With over 15 years in the retail design business, I field one question frequently: “Is it slowing down?” The askers almost always mention that EVERYTHING is AVAILABLE ONLINE. They, and you, might be surprised when I say that, fortunately, I still have a place in the industry and that I am still very busy.

Visiting healthcare facilities with generic, sterile, fluorescently lit environments can provide a less than comfortable experience for patients and visitors. Retail stores, hotels, corporate headquarters and almost every other commercial space make substantial investments in architecture and interior design to ensure that your experience creates a lasting positive association with their brand. Hospitals, largely private enterprises in America, must strive for these standards in addition to facing the added onus of preserving and enriching life at the most basic level. So why is it that many hospitals and clinics of the past fall short in their presentation and environmental design?

Creating good environments is a partnership of visual values. Architectural graphics, data visualization, and the user experience have a responsibility to serve, inform, and inspire audiences and to enrich lives emotively. As long as you have your smartphone or device in your pocket, the people to place connection will be tight!

Born in Ballyhaunis in the West of Ireland, Kieran Folliard started out in the hospitality industry carrying the bags of passengers in his father’s hackney (taxi) business. After 17 years in corporate marketing, he realized that he loved being in pubs, so, like any good self-respecting Irish guy, he decided to open one. 18 years later, the business had grown to include The Local, The Liffey, Cooper, and Kieran’s. 2 GINGERS® Irish Whiskey was launched as a test in those pubs in March of 2011, and quickly earned a loyal following. To pursue wider distribution, Folliard sold his shares of the pub business and made 2 GINGERS his full-time passion. In December 2012, Beam acquired 2 GINGERS and it joined the Kilbeggan family of Irish Whiskeys. As the COO of 2 GINGERS and the North American Brand Ambassador for Kilbeggan, Folliard will lead the charge for the Kilbeggan family of whiskey across the U.S. as 2 GINGERS continues its nationwide expansion. Tell your friends, family, and colleagues to ask for it all across the U.S.