The Chris Voss Show - The Chris Voss Show Podcast Kramer Electronics US CEO Clint Hoffman

Episode Date: July 13, 2019

Kramer Electronics US CEO Clint Hoffman

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We got an excellent guest as always. And this is from Infocom 2019. You probably saw some of our coverage from it there in Orlando, Florida. We profiled a number of really exciting companies, really awesome products that will blow your mind. And I think we'll be reviewing a lot of them here at the Chris Voss show. We've already got some of them.

And we now have with us live on the show Clint Hoffman. He's the CEO at Kramer Electronics US, and he has been in the pro AV industry since 1985. He began his career at the pro AV dealership in New Jersey. He spent many years working at manufacturers including Sony, Panasonic, and Mitsubishi, serving in a variety of sales, operations, product development, and marketing solutions. Welcome to the show, Clint. How are you doing, buddy? I'm doing great, Chris. I think everybody has an idea that I'm fairly old, but that's all right.

Well, that makes two of us, doesn't it? A bunch of old farts on the fairly old but that's all right you know well that makes two of us doesn't it a bunch of old farts on the show but that's okay i think part of saying i've been doing this for like 35 years it's like well i'll just date you well at least we know a lot i wish i wish i wish i could know as much as i know now and have my youth again youth Youth is waste on the young, I like to say. I don't know who coined that term. Exactly. We're wise now. We're wise, and we can't feel our legs. So there's another body parts, for that matter. So, Clint, tell us a little bit, before we get into Kramer, Kramer US,

Kramer Electronics US, you can go to their website, too, if you want to check it out during the show at kramerav.com. Tell us a little bit more about yourself. What got you on this journey, took you down this road? What got you into audiovisual in the first place, I guess? Well, I thought that when I was coming out of school that I wanted to make movies and be a director and that kind of stuff. So I went out to California for college and ended up getting my degree and realizing that that's just not something back at that time you just did. It's just to come to you. And so I'm back in New Jersey. I haven't gone out to school in California. And I found an ad

for what was at the time a video dealership, Video Corporation of America in Somerset, New Jersey. And I went down, checked it out, and I've been a captive member of the pro AV industry ever since. Well, it's got to be a lot of fun, especially when it comes to speakers, technology. I mean, that's one of the things I love about the business I'm in is the technology businesses. You know, it's always fun to see the newest thing and the greatest thing coming out. And, you know, it's always advancing just quicker and quicker and all the toys and gadgets and everything. So it's a great business to be in. Oh, it's fantastic.

And it's kind of a little secret industry. You know, the joke in the industry is if you go to a family picnic and somebody in the family asks you what you do and you explain it, they're like, well, what is that? And, you know, you work with Best Buy? No, it's kind of different. You work with Best Buy? No, I, it's kind of different. Kind of different.

Are you one of those guys who works on the aisle with the blue shirt? Uh, yeah. I mean, it, you guys are in the high pro and sort of, uh, audio visual stuff. So you guys aren't selling like,

uh, um, I don't have a joke for that. Uh, I wanted to pick on some different makers, but I can't think of the cheapest makers right now. I not working with panasonic oh um so i'm i'm just being mean to panasonic that's not right uh so anyway yeah i mean you get to work with the latest stuff i mean i i love going to the cs show every year and seeing all the the cool stuff the info com

show is of course one of the large i think the the largest audiovisual or largest next to CS. I don't know. The C show over in Europe. Infocom's a participant in that, but that's become really huge. Yeah. So technology. Technology is going to a lot of crazy places, and now we're dealing with stuff like 4K,

and I think 8's an extra something. You can probably tell me better than I can tell you about that. But, uh, uh, give us a rundown on, uh, Kramer,

av.com. Uh, tell us about, uh, those guys, what you guys are up to. Maybe give us some low down the show to idea from info. Sure.

Sure. Well, you know, Kramer has been in the, uh, pro AV business since, uh, 1981.

Uh, we have a founder and he's still in charge of the company, Dr. Kramer. Dr. Kramer has a degree, got a degree in pharmaceutical biology. And he's like, well, if I want to use this degree, I'm going to have to leave my country. And he didn't want to do that. He's over there in Israel. So he had built this little box for his TV because he wanted to adjust the color, tint, and brightness on his own personal TV. And he built a little box that allowed him to wipe half the screen over, make the adjustments. They would show up on half the screen. And when he got it the way he wanted, he would take it. And essentially that box was then publicized in Playboy magazine at the time as a must-have for men in whatever year 1983 or whatever and that little box then led to a company that has several thousand SKUs and here we are some you know I don't know 38 years later that's awesome so pretty much technology that's started uh, started out in Israel and stuff. There's a lot of great technology that comes out of Israel, the Waze app. I know there's, uh,

VR, AR coming out, a lot of technology over the last, they almost kind of were like the second Silicon Valley there for a while, uh, early about 10 years ago when, you know, Silicon Valley was really starting to rage with all the different stuff they were doing. And I've always been amazed at the technology that comes out of there. It's quite a lot of stuff that comes out of just a little country when it comes down to it. It sure does. And he was at kind of the forefront of that wave way back on. That Playboy story is kind of funny because I do remember the day, and I don't think that day is possible anymore

because I think now you just have the Tinder app. But I do remember there was a day where if you wanted to get the chicks, you had to have that hot stereo for your party house. And, you know, you had to – because if you didn't have the good stereo, you probably – or the Corvette, you probably weren't getting, you know, you're probably going to end up lonely all your life having two dogs. Wait, I'm there now. But yeah, the stereo was part of the whole scene, I guess, if you will.

Right now, millennials are going, what the heck is he talking about? That's funny. It's making a comeback. If you don't have a stereo with giant tubes on it, vacuum tubes these days, it's you know that's the it's making a comeback though that classic analog oh yeah and people love records record players like we're getting record players to view still on the chris foss show and i'm like what you're still a thing but it is evidently evidently from what i understand records never died like c CDs died, tapes died, 8-tracks died. I still have some of those.

I can't remember what it was before 8-tracks, 45s and LPs. But evidently record sales never really died. They just stayed stable. And so now you can go, and the only thing that sucks about that is the cost of the record now is pretty darn expensive. I was looking at some records the other day at uh or was it electronic fries and i'm like man i remember records were a lot cheaper than that man i mean that gets in the sun it's just gonna melt what the hell i don't want to pay half a billion dollars for that plus it's gonna get scratched i know it because that's how i am

and get static yeah exactly but hey if you want to play your uh your led zeppelin and your elo albums backwards so you can hear the hidden messages you need a record player so you're at the sweet seat yeah i did that actually i took the tapes back when i was a kid and i i programmed so let's get back to uh the infocom show you know you guys produce a ton of pro av products and i tried listening listing these a few times but you really need to go to kramer av.com and check out all the product categories they have presentation systems switches and matrix extenders distribution amplifiers wireless presentation av over ip audio scalers and converters control management multi-viewers

and video walls, uh, accessories and AV tools. I don't know if we have enough time on the show just to say all this stuff. Cables room KB. Wow. You guys make everything. I mean, the list is amazing and you guys have 4k at 60 frames per second products all

the way down to VGA. So there you go. I didn't know VGA was even still a thing either it is it absolutely is yeah wow man uh usb ethernet rs k net ir relay rs 422 right now anybody who's in the audio visual business is uh starting to get excited just me talking about all that stuff so you guys had a big show um what were some of the fun things or some of the things that came out of the Infocom experience you guys had with your booth there? Well, you know, it's usually always about the new products.

That's the thing with Infocom. It's like, you know, has always been a launching pad for new products for the manufacturers, you know, all your dealer integrators and hopefully a bunch of end users in the same place at the same time. Some of the stuff that one of the trend that Kramer is involved in the most right now is the solutions that we sell. You just listed a whole bunch of stuff. And historically, we were a box company. You know, we had a box that solved every problem or every need or performed a specific function you needed done. And that's who we were. But the AV industry is kind of morphing, and the solutions that we're selling now, they're more software-based.

So basically what's happening is we have these independent things like wireless presentation and collaboration, which is software. We put it in a box because the pro AV industry is familiar with that way. But we don't have to put it in a box, but we do. And then we have Kramer Control we just came out with recently which is a cloud control system and and actually sony's putting that into every professional bravia monitor they sell but we'll come back to that in a little bit um and then um we have a kramer network because if you're going to put your your av stuff on the network which is the way that we do things now, you want to be able to get out and see it and control it. The IT managers are in charge now, and that's what they're used to.

That's what they demand. So when we have all these little solutions that are becoming software-based, what we're trying to do is move to a future where it's one platform, and you can get all that functionality as you need it from one piece of software. So at the show, the primary thing this year we were showing is how we were taking a solution. We may have used to sell you A and B to do different things, but now we can take B and make it a part of A. So now you can get A and oh, by the way, you've also got B. So it's this kind of, you know, doubling up on increasing the functionality, making multifunctional solutions is what we were primarily showing this year. That's awesome. Can I get C and D too?

Say that again? Can I get C and D too? Yes, you can. That's what we're moving to. I want all my ABCs. It's kind of like my ravioli. I like all the little letters on there in the Chef VRD. It's just amazing all the little letters on there and the, and the chef BRD. Uh, yeah,

it's, it's just amazing. All the different stuff. Yeah. And you guys, uh, even had, I guess one of the sons of, uh,

the Kramer family is, uh, a rock star or heavy metal rock star. Yeah. Yeah. Well, he's, he's now working for Kramer,

but he was a heavy metal guitarist, a very famous one and a record producer. And, uh, he's a Dr. Primer has three sons. This is one of them. And he co-hosted him into coming to the company and he's in charge of our audio products. Now we, at Kramer, we basically break our product line down into, I'll just use the expression, you know, bags. We've got like four bags of product that we're about to have five. And we have traditional AV signal management, which is all the presentation switchers, distribution amplifiers, range extenders. We have wireless presentation and

collaboration. We have control and we also have installer solutions, cables, table boxes that, you know, you put the cables in and somebody can just flip the lid over and plug in at the table. And we're now about to have audio. So it's going to be becoming about five different bags of stuff that we sell. It's good news, bad news, because we compete with some people who only pick one bag and sell it. And we have to be, you know, we've got all five of them. But we do. We can provide you with a complete solution other than the display and the source. We've got everything else.

One of the products that you guys had was, I think, a 4K 60 frames per second product that you guys are featuring there? Well, we have a whole range of those. What we did is we made a commitment to take the entire line of traditional AV Sigma management products to revamp them, to introduce new models that are only full 4K, 4, 4, 4, 60 hertz. So, yeah, we had a whole bunch of those we were showing at the show. Yeah, I'm looking at the one that's on your website, the KDS-8, 4K, 60 frames per second, 4, 4, 4 receiver for streaming. Wow, that thing looks pretty freaking awesome. So now you've taken us to a very important point in the conversation. AV over IP versus

traditional pro AV where you come in and lay in proprietary highways and like HDMI and HDBaseT, and you have giant matrix switchers to do the switching. Well, the new way to do that, and they're coexisting in the market right now, is AV over IP. And when you're doing AV over IP, Kramer's offering a full family of solutions. There's H.264 stuff, so that could be your, you know, if the latency is not an issue and prices, then you go with that. There's JPEG 2000 devices, and if you're in room and you don't have you don't want to go full 4k 444 that's a perfect solution and then of course you've just mentioned the full uh the kds uh 8 which is the top of the line 4k 444 so if you want to use uh get maximum image quality across your network then

you're going to go with the 8s and they're a little more expensive and it's a family of product that we offer that's amazing man uh Who usually uses a product like that? What's sort of the end user consumer that uses that? So it really can be anybody. So we have a training facility in our building that we purchased that are at New Jersey headquarters for Kramer US. And we purchased about 2012, 2013. We've got this nice 50-seat 50 seat training facility and and um we recently took out our matrix switcher that we had in there and all the wiring and cabling that was proprietary

and we put in the kds6 models which is the mid-range i was talking about there we put that in on our head of technology budgeted three days for three guys to make that transition and it took three hours oh wow yeah and as a result we got a half a rack that used to be filled it's now available since since this kind of av over ip is is poe power over ethernet we have a whole strip of outlets in the rack that now are empty and available because before it was filled up the room that the equipment's in no longer makes a bunch of noise because all those bigger machines had fans. And we can add a display or a source anywhere in the building we want with ease.

So, you know, AV over IP is a wonderfully flexible. It's going to be the future of our business. But some applications today are still better off with the proprietary technology. Others are going this way. And probably the one that it's not necessarily a traditional pro AV application that fits the best is sports bars. And you've got a couple of, you know, decoders for your direct TV or whatever, and then 40 TVs. An AV over IP solution is really the ideal way to go with that. That is awesome because, I mean, when you're spreading that around,

I know that over the years we've reviewed a lot of HDMI extenders and DisplayPort units, and I know they're used a lot in different things. The thing about the InfoComm show, if no one has gone to that before, it's a huge audio-video show. And so now the big thing is these video walls, these big presentation things you see and a lot of them they can put them together in pieces and they just put these like little brick chunks these little square by squares in the form of giant wall and then of course they

have the technology to make your all the images move seamlessly across them like you're watching one big screen but it's like a screen that started out little pieces. And, and, uh, some of the stuff you guys do help, you know, make all that functionality work and is, is really cool. Um, and you know, it's kind of funny. I, I, I grew up from the day and age where he went to a bar to, you know, have some beers and meet some chicks. But, uh, nowadays when I see all these different technologies that are out there, it's like, holy crap, your local beer bar is now the high-end technology.

You know, shared screens and everything else. And, you know, you've got to be watching the game and doing the thing. And entertaining people just goes to a whole new level at that point. It sure does. It sure does. We also have a – there's a casino out in Washington State. I can never pronounce the name right. It's like Tulalip Casino. And that casino has like 80 encoders and a couple and like 140 decoders.

And basically the entire casino's digital signage, and it's all digital signage that tells you where to go and what to do and what's happening throughout the entire casino, is all an AV over IP solution. Wow, man. Wow. I remember the days when they just used to put like a little sign, you say, go over there. But you know, people want to be entertained and they're so used to the experience of, you know, getting great video on their phones now. You know, it used to be that was hard to do with getting video on your phones. And they're so used to having, you know, it used to be that was hard to do with getting video on your phones. They're so used to having, you know, seeing this entertainment brought to them in so many different formats. That's what they expect everywhere they go.

They're like, you must entertain me and you must have really cool screens and really cool digital entertainment going on. And that'll keep my interest and everything else. Yep. Yeah. So you guys have been around for, I couldn't remember. It's like 30, 40 years or something like that. Yeah. Dr.

Kramer started the company in 1981. So 38 years, 38 years. Wow. That's crazy, man. And you guys have more than 38 products. That's for sure.

Uh, global warranty, friendly tech support. Uh, if you haven't checked it out, go to Kramer, Evie.com. You can see all the different

stuff they have there. Hopefully we'll be reviewing some of this stuff. Wireless presentation, collaboration. How much of software, you talked a little bit about this, you touched on it, where you're talking about how software has really kind of taken over. You're moving into the cloud, different things like that. How much of this stuff do you see in like the near future, say over 20 years, is going to be more and more software-based as opposed to hardware-based? Well, I think that in maybe five to ten years, you will buy a piece of software and put it on a server or buy it on a server

and then connect it to your network, and it'll have all your control in there. It'll have all your wireless presentation and collaboration capabilities in there. It'll be able to switch sources on your network, look out your network, push firmware updates to all your products that live out throughout your building or even in the world. So it's all going to be networked and it's all going to be driven by software.

And I don't know if that's five years or 10 years, but that's the direction we're heading in. At one point, if you got a display and a source like a laptop or something, you're, it's just going to be about, uh, you know, decoding or encoding the video at the source or the destination. And, and you know, H dot two six four is a, is a software Kodak. So it might, that might even be software too. Yeah. Everything will just be Kodak to death. Uh, I forget what the, uh,

I think it was the, was the Watson or IBM, but there's some sort of rule of how everything just keeps getting smaller and smaller and faster and better, and it just keeps compounding where it just gets more crazier. And, you know, I'm still working on getting a 4K TV, and I think now it's starting to talk about 8K, and we can't even see in 8K. I don't think we can see in 4K

when it comes down to it. It just looks really good. Infrastructure required for 8K is going to be a challenge. 8K might be more of a specialized industrial medical type of thing. Who knows? Maybe I'm selling it short, but there's also a good enough factor.

In every market, there's a certain point where everything is like good enough. And 1080p is pretty darn good. 4K is even better. So who knows, that might be good enough. And then the other stuff becomes specialized. My biggest problem I'm having is as I get older, my eyesight's going.

So I have, you know, the bifocal contacts now and all that sort of good stuff. So I'm not sure if 8 AK is really going to help me out that much when I'm sitting on the porch telling old stories rocking in my chair, which is much like what I do now. So you guys probably target a lot of different audiovisual professionals, people that are rig operators in the field, and they go in and set these up for different companies.

You guys have training there at your guys' office. You guys do where people can come train, learn the business and stuff. It's got to be a fun business because you guys are so diverse with so many different things. So you can't really get bored with one product. No, you never get bored. That's a fact. And, you know, and all this stuff moving to the network

has just created a new challenge. There's an old Far Side comic that I like to refer to a lot, if you remember the Far Side comics. And it was a picture of a dog on a high wire, like in a circus tent with a crowd underneath. And he's juggling some cats and he's doing a hula hoop and he's got a vase on his head and the caption read some to the effect of suddenly rex realized he was an old dog and

this is a new trick but i know where we're at in our industry right now we're a lot of old dogs and this networking it stuff is a new trick and uh it's it's really really exciting it's a challenge but it's exciting. Now you, I mean, managing a company with this, this many different products. So we talk a lot about entrepreneurism, leadership on the, on the Chris Foss show. How much of a challenge is it to have this many products and you're overseeing them as the CEO and you're trying to, you know, make all those, all those plates spin at the same time and balance everything? It's a challenge. And it's a challenge on a couple of different levels.

As I mentioned earlier, it's a challenge on the level that some of our competitors are only carrying one bag. And so every time they go visit an integrator to try and convince them to sell their stuff, that's all they're talking about. Well, we're going in, we're carrying five. But it's also a challenge from the support side. And that challenge is becoming exponentially more difficult, again, because of these networks. You know, when you have a box and you plug it in, and it's not working, troubleshooting is fairly easy, straightforward. When you got the network

involved, now it's a different story. And you need specialized people with specialized capabilities and a conversation, which might've used to last 15 minutes with a customer now might last an hour or 45 minutes as you're troubleshooting every aspect of that network. Yeah. Anything that go wrong can go wrong with the network when it comes down to it. You're like, have you tried turning it off and then turning it back on again? That would be my, that would be my thing number one yeah a little insulting sometimes to the customer but

that is absolutely but sometimes it doesn't work you know it's like that's sometimes my windows 10 computer is the same way i'm like yeah i'll be like what's going on with this thing and turns out there's some update that's come down from windows which of course you know you know that drives crazy they hate turn it off and turn it is my wife because she's not a technologist by any stretch and she's like that can't just fix it it's it's a computer shouldn't even have to do that what is it like it and you're like well i don't know honey somehow or another it's gets stuck yeah that was the problem i used to have with my ex-wife i was turning her off more than I was turning her on, and that was kind of one of the problems.

It's not only a technology thing, but really a human thing. But I don't have any further jokes for that other than, I don't know, it costs a lot of money in diamonds whenever I didn't want to turn her off. So anyway, but technology, turning it off and turning it off and you can check it out guys you can go to kramerav.com that's kramerav.com and see all the different products that they have on there so um anything you want to announce are you guys going to be at ces do you guys go to the ces show no ces is more of the uh you know of the residential slash consumer side. The consumer side is the better choice.

Yeah, no, we're strictly professional AV, and so that's where we live. The fun of these big shows is just crazy, all the walking you do. I don't know how you guys do it where you guys stand in a booth for two or three days and talk to these people. I mean, it's crazy enough when I have to walk around, do booth interviews and, and, um, I'm talking to people,

of course I'm walking, but I actually think that walking is easier than standing in the booth all day. Like, um, and, uh, so I always feel bad for all the people that we do booth interviews,

all the shows we do. Cause, cause they're just the, you know, you kind of have to stand in this corral, you're kind of corralled in this little booth and you're just like i'd really like to leave and go get a burger and a fries and then not have to talk to all these smelly people exactly and then no i say but you know i don't mean that oh i i said it you you didn't uh so uh but uh i'm one of the smelly people actually so there's that um but uh uh you know

it's it's always crazy and the biggest the biggest challenge of these shows is not getting sick like i don't know i'm pretty good because i only have to meet a few people at the show and i don't go running around shaking hands but if you're working a booth you're like shaking hands all the time and i would like be slathering myself in that, that alcohol hand wipe stuff at all times. I'd have a hazmat suit on. In fact, I think next time I fly, we're wearing a hazmat suit.

Cause that seems to be, you weren't feeling well at Infocomm. I hope you're, you know, clearly you're feeling better. I'm doing better. I had walking pneumonia. And,

and I still, I still have a cough. I'm starting to wonder if maybe I did some damage to my lungs or something. So, you know, I had walking pneumonia. Um, and, uh, and I still, I still have a cough. I'm starting to wonder if maybe I did some damage to my lungs or something. So, you know, I don't know, but, uh, yeah, in fact, my doctor that I saw for the, uh, what's that Z-Pak they gave you? Uh, I said to her, I said, you know, I'm not, I had been on a plane to AWE and, uh, Silicon Valley, I think a couple weeks before, and that's where I picked it up. And I said, you know, I saw this gal there wearing one of those masks that I see them wear

in Hong Kong and China where the air is really bad. And I said, I'm thinking about doing that on the plane, but I know it looks so weird. And she's like, I do that. And I'm like, wait, if the doctor's doing that, I need to start doing that. But Infocom was a huge show for you guys. Was there anything there that you saw that really stuck out to you that you were like, holy crap, that's pretty awesome?

Oh, well, from other manufacturers, the booth right next to us, and I'm not going to remember the name of the manufacturer, but they had this giant monster curved, you described it before, they took all these monitors and they put them side by side so they looked like they were one big piece and it was huge and it had this curve and they had this content that was like you were going through space or something and

it's just what they can do with monitors now and especially this was curved because they were OLED and they can curve a little bit. Yeah, especially this was curved because they were, Oh, led and they can a little bit. Yeah. And, uh, this was just,

uh, just amazing. Beautiful. I don't know how it serves, but it was entertaining and gorgeous. Yeah. I've seen that at CS. I think Samsung's had like huge curve walls in their booth and stuff like

that. And, and of course now they've got the, uh, well, there's a foldout phone, but I think somebody had a curve phone, I think. But some of that stuff and that technology where it's no longer that two-dimensional flat where it comes out at you,

and it can create a lot of different sort of optical illusion where you're just like, whoa, I think I'm in something. And you're like, nope, just stand in front of it for TV. But it changes the experience and the dynamic sort of tactile function you have with it where you're like, wow, this is, you know, really awesome. You feel like you're surrounded. You feel like you're in a reality environment, basically, without having a VR headset on. It's the experience, and it is cool. And so that's going to be awesome. Anything you want to talk about? maybe what's coming down the line? Give us some hints about what the future, maybe some products you're launching or working on?

Yeah, absolutely. So I mentioned the audio category before. We've got a really excellent audio DSP that we're working on, and that will be available in the next couple of months. On that wireless presentation and collaboration side, the VIA lineup is, you know, we feel industry leading and we've added some new features, included digital signage capability. Remember I said the A and B, if you buy A and get B, you know, so we've included digital signage capability at no charge. So when you're not actually doing a wireless presentation,

you can run whatever you want on those screens. Think of a classroom and you're having like now the ability to have a continuous information flow on that screen until the class starts and then it's wireless presentation and sharing. And Kramer Control is our cloud-based control solution. It's very unique in the marketplace. And we've made an arrangement with Sony where every Sony Bravia monitor sold into the professional marketplace is going to have our intelligence embedded in it. So you could run the software from the monitor and then now have a control processor in the room.

So the control will get into the room because it's in the monitor and you just kind of activate it. And now you can control the room, lower the lighting, raise and lower the shades. And it's all going to be done from the brain that lives in the monitor. Wow. Everything's going to be all centralized.

I'm looking at your wireless presentation, collaboration stuff, the via family of wired and wireless presentation on creamer, av.com. Uh, this is pretty cool i said we actually had some products sent to us from some of our people like you guys we featured at the infocom show and uh basically you can use these this via product in uh like conference rooms so if you have like multiple people that want to take and talk about something and maybe they're editing or maybe they're just presenting their ideas, pitching, or they're collaborating on like the sales function or

report or whatever it is, you know, that they're in there discussing and they can literally sell their laptops and take turns controlling the screen, whether it's a projector or it's an HDMI TV or, or some sort of a device that way, monitor, they can literally control and share and take turns without having to sit and be like, okay, now I got to get up and I got to put my slides in the unit now. Yeah, exactly right. You know, Chris, I'll tell you, when we first came out with VIA, it had more of that what I'll call collaboration capability than any of the competitors what you just described um and we're like okay well we're going to stand out in

the marketplace so we're going to focus on that and the analogy we used at the time to market that line of products was from the movie crocodile dundee remember that movie yeah yeah now i'm really he ends up in new york city and they're walking down the street and uh they get accosted and the guy's got a knife and he's trying to mug him and then uh he reaches behind crocodile dundee reaches behind his back and says you think that's a knife and pulls out this giant monster yeah and he goes so we thought okay well that's how we're going to market this product you think you got collaboration no we're kicking your butt with collaboration. Only problem is very few people actually use collaboration. I'm just being honest here. We got it and we got it. It's better than anybody else, but most people want to get connected

and present. So we have both of those and we've made both of those a priority. And you want to get connected and present, you can do that real easily with Avia and do it really well. But if you want collaboration, we got that too, and you can do exactly what you described before, have an interactive editing session with a bunch of people in a room at the same time. And a lot of my friends and audience and people that are influencers are speakers, book authors and stuff, and one of their biggest complaints I always hear from them is

being able to use, have their media be used and work with the collaboration media that they're using at the shows and events they go to, you know, so they can have their slide presentation go and work well. And some of the stuff that I saw from Infocom like this would, would be great for that. And being able to very seamlessly take their laptop get it projected and play and and you know you don't have to sit there and try and fiddle with it and all that stuff i uh my my speaker friends they hate it when they can't get their slides to communicate with the with whatever the events media is and they can't you know it can't work and if they have to give a speech

without the slides they're almost like a speech without the slides, they're almost like a fish out of water because they're just like, ah. I hear you. And you know, one of the beautiful features of that product is actually what we call view main display. So say you're in an auditorium and there's a main screen. And yeah, anybody in the room can connect and present or the instructor can control who's connecting and presenting.

But at the same time, on your own personal device, you can choose view main display. So if that screen is at the front of the room and you're in that last row of seats, you can have that same information wirelessly right there on your own device. So that's a very highly used feature. And then a lot of you guys' products have great quality, great warranties, and you guys are also environmentally friendly, if I can learn to say that. So that's good. You guys work to reduce and prevent industrial waste and other forms of pollution. I know that's really big for a lot of people, especially for schools and companies too. They have green initiatives they have to keep.

So when they do business with companies like yourselves, they, you know, they need to have those formats fit and their bid processes, all that stuff they do. So that's always important as well. Anything else we need to know about creamerav.com? No,

you know, listen, if you, like I said earlier, if you have a display and a source and a professional environment and you want to get the signal from the source to the display, we make everything that you could possibly want that would help you do that, anything in the middle. We got it all.

We can provide you a solution, a complete solution for that type of application. So check us out. And you guys make everything. You guys really have to go see the website. It's just like, it's a candy store for, I don't know, diabetics or something. I don't know. It's got everything there. I don't know.

It's got everything. Whatever you can dream up, they probably have it. And if you haven't dreamt it up, they probably have it too. So be sure to check it out. Go to creamerav.com uh where some other videos we did where i think we spoke with you uh during the infocom show and then uh i think you guys won some awards there too didn't you or you you won some awards i know a few different shows yeah we got some best of show we got uh best of show for our via campus plus product uh which is one of the VIA family of models in the VIA family.

And over at ISC in February, we won an award for something we called our AD Ring Adapter. You know, whenever you do go in a conference room, if somebody needs to plug something in, there's always not the connector necessary to make the transition from whatever laptop. So we make this ring you can secure in the room and then it's got every one of those adapters and they can't be taken off so nobody can walk out with it. That's what we won an award for

over in ISE back in February. Nice. Nice. Well, we certainly appreciate you coming on the show, Clint. It's been a lot of fun. We should have you on. What's the next big show you guys are doing so people can take a look for you guys there? Traditionally, we do Infocom in the U.S. and we do ISE

over in Europe in February and we do versions of the Infocom show throughout the world. But for the U.S., it's usually Infocom. All right. Well, check them out on the next show if you guys get a chance. And all that good stuff, wherever they are in the world, be sure to go to the website at creamerav.com.

Thanks, Clint, for joining us on the show today. We certainly appreciate you. We certainly appreciate, of course, the most, our wonderful audience for tuning in. Thanks for being here. Be sure to retweet the show. Share it with your friends, all that good stuff. Be sure to go to all the different places you can get on the syndication. Go to chrisvosspodcastnetwork.com or the cvpnnetwork.com.

Actually, it's cvpn.com or the CVP and network.com or actually CVP and.com. There's too many. I feel like, I feel like one of those TV stations, CBS.com. The more, you know, anyway,

thanks for tuning in guys. We certainly appreciate it. And we'll see you next time.