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Infocomm 2019: The scoop from Clear Touch’s Peter Taylor and Rave Publications
Below is the transcript of the interview between Rave Publication and Peter Taylor of Clear Touch at Infocomm 2019. To hear the full interview, please click here.
Victoria: Hello everyone. Welcome to InfoComm 2019. You are listening to The Trade Show Minute. My name is Victoria Barela and I am here with Peter Taylor of Clear Touch. Welcome.
Peter Taylor: Thank you, Vicky. Thank you.
Victoria: Hi. So this is day one, and I wanted to ask you about Clear Touch. If someone lives under a rock, just tell us who is Clear Touch. What do you guys do?
Peter: Clear Touch Interactive has been around since 2012. We’re a fairly new company where we’ve been to market in the U.S. now and have achieved—in 2018—the number one supplier of interactive flat panels by U.S. owned and operated manufacturers. We’ve gone from zero to the top within five years.
Victoria: Go big or go home, right? Well, here at InfoComm 2019, what are you guys featuring? What is your favorite product that you go crazy about?
Peter: Actually, this is a bit of a breakout year for us. We’ve done very well with the interactive panels and software solutions. However, we haven’t forgotten about our commercial side of the business. Commercial as we know and collaboration has really taken off. It’s become a forefront of most work environments and the fact that people do want to collaborate with it. How do you get them involved and how do you get them collaborating with each other? We released a product last year, which was actually called Chorus. Chorus has gone through a few changes. One of them was being that it was just an Apple-based platform, which was good, but to some corporate environments, they didn’t want just Apple. So, we are announcing at the show today our Linux based version. The Linux version will fit in on our PCs. The PC just plugs inside of the panels and makes a total collaborative solution. That’s been a work in progress, but it’s been a good work in progress and it’s gotten to where most people want it to be.
But my favorite product at the show? All right. We’ve taken a little bit of time coming to market with this one, but as the world has gone LED—and we’ve seen a lot of entrance into the LED marketplace—often it’s a custom product. Often, it’s a 12- or 14-week delivery timeframe because it is custom. But we wanted to take some of that away from the market place, so we released what we call a prefabricated solution that takes about two people two hours to put together, and you get it in specific sizes: you have a 110 inch; 138 inch and 165 inch; and a 220 inch.
So for example, in the commercial environment, in your lobby displays, in your waiting rooms even where you don’t project or you have projectors, you want to upgrade it to LED. People often ask, “Hey, what’s your pixel pitch?” And what we say is, “Well, it’s all 1080.” So a 110-inch is actually 1.2 millimeter pixel pitch. And then the 138 goes to 1.5. And the 220, for example, is 2.5 millimeters. So it keeps it standard. The nice thing about ours is there’s no external boxes—not only is it easily assembled, but you don’t have to find a home for power supply; you don’t have to find a home for a processing unit. Everything is built in to the wall. And yet, it is only 37 millimeters thick, so it’s the thinnest LED on the market as well.
Victoria: What’s the biggest difference between that and what’s already on the market?
Peter: Our prefabricated units. The nice thing about prefab is that the cost will come down dramatically—the cost is about 50 percent lower than a custom-built solution. That’s one advantage of it. Does it always fit the custom’s requirement? Maybe not. But hopefully the 110, the 138, 165 and 220 inch do fit those requirements, or at least the majority of those requirements. There’ll always be a need for custom, and always will be, but for the average person that wants a good price performance basis, that’s where the prefabricated comes in.
Peter: The other thing is…the challenge with LED is it gets hot. You don’t want to be presenting in front of an LED screen.
Victoria: Sure, it gets sweaty, get gross and you’re also trying to present.
Peter: You’re already nervous, right?
Victoria: Yeah.
Peter: So, what we wanted to do is we have an interactive podium. This is brand new for us. It in concept stage.
Victoria: A podium, you said?
Peter: Podium.
Victoria: Okay.
Peter: It can be totally wireless including power.
Victoria: So what does that mean?
Peter: Ah, good question. The podium itself is an interactive panel, 23-inch interactive panel. It’s mounted on a stand, which is electrically operated, so you can adjust it to the height.
Victoria: It’s a very cool looking
Peter: It’s got a rechargeable battery, so you can actually recharge it, and it’s got micro casters built in the front of it.
Peter: The ability to move it is paramount without unplugging.
Victoria: That’s a big deal. You don’t have to worry about wires anymore, especially it’s rechargeable. That’s great.
Peter: It’s rechargeable and it’s got HDMI wireless out. So you can actually put it your projector, or in our case the LED screen, and drive everything from the podium, control it all, be interacting with it, marking it up, making highlights on that LED screen from that podium.
Victoria: That’s super cool. What else? If someone’s not here at the show floor and can’t see it for themselves, where can we find it online?
Peter: You can find this at www.getcleartouch.com. If you want to see a demonstration of the products, we incorporated a couple of live studios last year. They’re manned full-time. They’re interactive. It’s not a webcast or anything like that. It is live interactive. We have 22 appointments a day, five days a week. Just pick a time that’s convenient. Just click on that home page at www.getcleartouch.com and click on live demonstration, and there you will find the times available. Click on one of them and we’ll send you a meeting request!
Victoria: That’s awesome. I’m going to switch gears here. I wanted to ask. Rave is promoting this #AVislife hashtag. Could you tell me maybe either for yourself personally or maybe Clear Touch, what does that mean, AV is life?
Peter: When you say AV is life, AV is all my life. It has been, as many people probably know me, but for 27 years this has been my life, AV.
Victoria: You obviously like the industry because you’ve been for so long. And it seems like you’re really enjoying it.
Peter: What it means to me actually is all the, “Yes, we like to show our products at shows like this,” but one of the things that I love to do is catch up with people. We’re all busy these days. One of the things I enjoy is catching up with old friends. The industry has been the industry for many, many years. Still the same faces; still the same relationships. It’s always good to catch up with people and at least say hi.
Victoria: Yeah. That’s awesome. Well thank you so much for coming onto the show.