Event Management
February 8, 2017  •  by Sean Burke

How CES devices can help you with your next event

Ah, the Consumer Electronics Show. The good old CES. It’s the show where nerds of all types look to Vegas to see what kind of new, fun tech toys will be coming into the consumer world in the coming year. This year, there were a lot of new devices and different gadgets and interesting tech launched at the event (have you seen how small they can make computers now? It’s insane) but these were the  things that caught our interest: Lenovo Smart Assistant  lenovo-smart-assistant-1The Smart Assistant is another in a line of voice activated, smart speaker assistants like the Amazon Echo and the Google Home. The idea amongst these is fairly simple: a speaker connected with a smart computer device that you can activate by your voice and use it to manage day-to-day tasks. The different assistants can manage anything from purchasing items for you (Amazon Echo does this really well), to streaming music (Google Home has this down with a ton of YouTube playlists) to managing your calendar (Lenovo Smart Assistant seems to have a handle on your calendar and updates really well), these small devices make it easier for you to get things done and set reminders by just using your voice. Great, I can hear you saying to me in a fairly intoned bored voice. But what does this have to do with events and event management? Well that’s the beauty of this device. IoT devices and smart assistants make streamlining your life so much easier. Let’s say you’re throwing a fundraiser for your local animal shelter and you’ve got an Amazon Echo in your home. Like many fundraisers, you’re probably trying to put the event on and raise money by yourself. With just your voice you can set your Echo to remind you about sending out email blasts, to book the location, to call about the food truck showing up, to verify with volunteers the right location. You can even set up your assistant to purchase extra dog shampoo and towels, all while you’re busy working on other parts of the event (like the budgeting. Ugh.) Are there other ways of setting reminders? Sure there are. But I’m never able to remember to write something down when inspiration strikes me at that moment and half the time if I remember to write it down, I won’t remember where I left it. Having a smart assistant makes that a lot easier AND saves on paper. It’s like a win, win all around. Hover Camera [video width="580" height="380" mp4="https://www.ticketbud.com/wp-content/uploads/2017/02/Hover-Camera-Passport-Auto-Follow-f87eeee9e3-2.mp4"][/video] There are drones and then there are drones (pretend that you can hear the inflection there). The hover camera is a drone with a high powered sensitive camera that can follow you around. Imagine having an event and you want to go through and take pictures but having a huge camera is bulky in a music festival! Flying a drone is cumbersome and difficult and also hard with a ton of people all around you. With the Hover Camera all you need to do is walk around the music festival and the camera will take photos of everything, following along behind you at a set height. It truly makes it so much easier to capture aerial shots of any type of event. Qualcomm Snapdragon 835 VR 527961-qualcomm-snapdragon-835Yes this is not a product just anyone can buy. Yes this runs at a steep $800 so it really isn’t for the faint of heart (or wallet) but the things you can do with this! What makes the Snapdragon so different from current VR setups is that there is no connection to a phone or a computer, everything exists in the headset. It is all in one and the future is now! While a device like this would be completely awesome at just any kind of event (I can’t imagine anyone who wouldn’t want to test one of these out to be honest– motion sick people, maybe) what this headset would be perfect for are events where you need to transport people. Are you running a home expo? Or a conference with home builders? Maybe your event-goers want a chance to fully experience the homes and see for themselves exactly how everything can look– more than what just looking at plans on paper or a tv screen WYSIWYG CAD can be. This allows for full immersive experience without lag time. LG Transparent 55-Inch TV samsung-display-55-inch-transparent-oled_1_1-100611476-origMost conferences have some form of presentation right? There is the set-up most of us are familiar with: a podium, a dais and a bunch of bulky, ugly screens. This is different. This is cool and completely futuristic and frankly we want 12 in our house right now. This screen is transparent, allowing anyone to see through it when it is not projecting and then for it to me semi-opaque when it is. No longer will you have huge, ugly screens blocking sight lines making it so much easier on your event attendees to see what you are saying (and to see you!)         (This post was not sponsored by Google, Amazon or Lenovo. We just really like cool things. If they want to send me a device though or sponsor us, that’s totally okay by us.)]]]]> ]]>