I was one of those 6th grade nerds in the AV corps. We were the guys who got to run the projectors or show the filmstrips. We’d wheel the equipment around the school and feel quite important because we knew stuff the teachers didn’t – like how to thread a 16mm projector or splice a film. But there was always a projector bulb or a fuse blown that would sabotage our efforts. And it seems like even today, even with our technology advances, there’s always a glitch that gets in the way of our best-laid plans.
Last week I spoke at the MIT Enterprise Forum. I’d spent considerable time preparing what I thought was a great set of slides, dumped them into a PDF for easy presentation purposes, and contacted the organizers to make sure I’d have a projector and screen.
Well, there was a projector, and there was a screen, and there was a complicated control panel (hey, it was MIT after all), but after 30 minutes of messing around, nobody could get the projector to come on. I really didn’t want to give up on the slides as there was some visual data that supported my thesis – and I’d put in too much time on the presentation to give up.
The planners looked for help, looked for adjacent rooms with functioning projectors, and were at a complete block when I realized I had the solution at hand: I asked the audience to fire up their laptops, wrote my ConnectNow URL on the blackboard (MIT still has blackboards and real chalk!), and off we went. I shared my screen, members of the audience (with laptops) joined my meeting room, and all could now see the slides.There were enough laptops in the room that everyone could see a screen and I could support my talk with my visuals. Piece of cake.
So, keep an ConnectNow meeting room in your bag of tricks. Great answer to the “projector bulb” problem.
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