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Beltug, the Belgian Association of Technology Leaders, is a membership organization that represents over 1600 professionals (including 1100+ ICT decision makers) working at the ICT departments of some 450 larger Belgian companies or public institutions. To inform its members about new market trends, Beltug regularly publishes members-only recommendations. In addition, Beltug organizes more than 40 seminars and conferences per year to cover a wide range of ICT topics. During these events, Beltug is using crowdbeamer to strengthen its premium member service.
Positive feedback from our members.
“In addition to a limited number of roundtable discussions and working groups, we mostly organize seminars and conferences during which speakers explain a topic or share best practices with our members,” says Ann Guinee, Beltug Project Manager. “Although these events have a highly interactive nature, they are primarily structured around a number of presentations during which speakers share their message with their audience through a set of slides.
A few months ago, we successfully tested crowdbeamer during a short series of smaller seminars. It didn’t take very long before it became clear that crowdbeamer is very easy to use. By simply connecting crowdbeamer to both the presentation laptop and the meeting room projector, we could instantly combine our more traditional way of working with the highly personalized information sharing that crowdbeamer stands for. Because we got so much positive feedback from our members during these tests, the decision to use crowdbeamer during all our seminars and conferences was an easy one. Over the past two months, we have been using crowdbeamer during eight Beltug events.”
Excellent visibility warranted under any circumstances.
“Thanks to its flexibility, we can use crowdbeamer for the wide range of events that we organize,” Ann Guinée continues. “During the smaller seminars (with up to 30 participants), we often use a U-shape setup such that everybody has a reasonably good view of the big projection screen. However, if we have more people registering than expected, we need to expand the U-shape setup with extra seating. Especially for the participants in the back, it can become hard to read what’s on the projection screen, let alone take pictures of the screen.
During larger conferences, with up to 100 or more participants, the conference room layout can become quite a challenge. Columns may obstruct the view of the projection screen for some participants. Setting up additional projection screens to provide everybody with a good view of the presentation may not be possible. What’s nice about crowdbeamer is that it warrants excellent visibility of all presentations under any circumstances and with any conference room layout, because people can watch the presentation directly on their smartphone, tablet or laptop.”
No more need for taking pictures.
According to Danielle Jacobs, the Beltug General Manager, “any seminar or conference organizer will instantly acknowledge the problem that crowdbeamer solves. During presentations, people in the audience often take pictures of the speaker’s slides to complete them with information later in the office or to share them with colleagues. That is not always possible, however. Especially if the projection screen is rather small or if people are seated at a larger distance, the quality of these pictures can be very disappointing. And what if they are overexposed, or if there is an annoying spot on one of them that covers part of an image or makes the most important words unreadable?
With crowdbeamer, that can no longer happen. Anybody in the audience can use the crowdbeamer app to take crystal clear screenshots of the presentation on their smartphone, tablet or laptop, in a higher resolution than what you see on the projection screen. Thanks to crowdbeamer, Beltug event participants can now get all information delivered straight to their personal device, and can complete that information with their notes on the spot.”
Easy to find back information.
“Participants in our Beltug events easily get along with the crowdbeamer app,” Ann Guinée concludes. “Admittedly, our members are very IT-minded. We do not inform them upfront about the use of crowdbeamer however. Instead, we limit ourselves to a brief explanation using just one slide at the start of each event. The use of the app is entirely self-explaining.
What participants appreciate the most about crowdbeamer is the possibility to combine images and text: taking snapshots of the most important slides, completing them with comments, and saving all of that in the app and exporting it to other business apps such as Evernote or OneNote. Because the crowdbeamer app stores the information in a visual format, it’ so much easier to retrieve that information afterward. Whenever people ask themselves ‘Where did I ever write that down?’, the screenshots in the crowdbeamer app serve as a memory aid.”
“Once you start using crowdbeamer, it’s so easy to discover new opportunities,” Gregory Sergeant continues. “A visual communication tool such as crowdbeamer enables us to provide our customers with much more relevant information than ever was the case in the past. If we want to inform them about the next day’s ride, just to give an example, we can now summarize that information in a few slides. We can use maps and diagrams to document the complete track, the critical points along that track, … in a professional manner. We can then share all of this with our customers. They can use the crowdbeamer app to take screenshots and store these screenshots safely on their smartphone.