Randy Johnston and Brian Tankersley, CPA, explored CES 2025 in Las Vegas in January. In this second CES 2025 podcast, they highlight some of the most useful meeting technologies they saw at the conference.
- Watch or listen to the CES 2025 Overview podcast at https://www.cpapracticeadvisor.com/154712
- Check out Randy’s column about CES 2025 at https://www.cpapracticeadvisor.com/154312
Watch the video, or listen to the audio podcast below (transcript below):
Or use the below podcast player to listen:
Transcript (Note: There may be typos due to automated transcription errors.)
Brian F. Tankersley, CPA.CITP, CGMA 00:00
Welcome to the accounting Technology Lab sponsored by CPA practice advisor with your host, Randy Johnston and Brian Tankersley, this is
Randy Johnston 00:11
Randy Johnston with co host Brian Tankersley. We’re talking to you about CES 2025, meeting technologies that we discovered. Now there were many more we could have covered. But Brian, what would you like our listeners to know about the meeting technologies this year? Because, if you think about it, there’s screens and there’s headphones, and there’s speakers and there’s cameras. I mean, there’s so many things on meeting tech.
Brian F. Tankersley, CPA.CITP, CGMA 00:36
I feel like the meeting Tech really kind of grew up this year. You know, there were a number of products that we thought were pretty interesting, you know, the it felt like, you know, the we felt like, I felt like a lot of the stuff that came out around the pandemic and during the pandemic was kind of rushed to market just to try to solve the need. And it felt like, again, we, the grown ups, finally showed up this year with, with some, with some products that felt like they had, they were going to make it for the long run, you know. And one of those is this Rico meeting 360 that you found at, at pep comm Randy. So, you know, you’ve, you’ve known the people at Rico, formerly the Fujitsu folks, for for a long time. What can you tell us about this? Well,
Randy Johnston 01:21
this particular product sells for about $800 I actually checked it out on Amazon. It was 749 by the way, and this superior to competitor Al. I believe there is a relatively static camera at the top that does a full 360 degree image stitched together and it displays across the top of a meeting screen in teams, or Zoom further, they maintain three images of the speaker, and I believe the last two speakers don’t quote me on that, but I think I’ve recalled that correctly. Further there’s engineering on the microphones and on the speakers to make people that are sitting around a conference room table sound like they’re the same distance away. And there’s directed speakers, so the speaker’s a little bit louder if you’re down on the end, and a little bit quieter if you’re up close. That’s kind of interesting engineering, in my mind, because it basically measures and then produces sound to kind of fit you like this. And you know, as you’re talking about growing up, this is a good example of something that’s grown up because the owl had some poor boy competitors that aren’t very good. I think this is going to be the first sincere competitor for Al. And you know, I’m also thinking about the Samsung Dex technology that we looked at in prior year, which was good, but Samsung almost buried Dex technology and didn’t talk about it much this year, favoring their smart home approach.
Brian F. Tankersley, CPA.CITP, CGMA 02:49
Yeah, it was. It was very interesting, how little Samsung talked about business this year, but, but you know, the for those of you that are that are listening to this on audio only, this Rico meeting device is about a 14 inch cylinder, and then it has something about the size of a Campbell soup can on top that, that has cameras going out at 360 degrees, and it’s a so it’s basically designed to have the cameras right at eye level, to capture people looking directly At the camera or at people across the table, and it looks like a very interesting device. You know, if I had a, if I had need for a traditional conferencing setup, one of these would definitely be at my office. Yeah.
Randy Johnston 03:31
And, you know, I, even though I’ve recommended al for a long time, I’m pretty sure this is going to be my main go to recommendation going forward. So, you know, Rico made some other announcements with scanners and portable monitors, but those are in our earlier overview session on CES. Now, another product that I made an appointment for Brian and I to see was a technology known as bubble. And bubble is basically an isolated, built to order meeting room, and it has its own setup, with its monitor and a workspace and its own ventilation system. These are really in a camera
Brian F. Tankersley, CPA.CITP, CGMA 04:12
and speakers and a docking station and a an adjustable, adjustable desk area. And, you know, the way of thinking about this is, it’s like a, it’s like a phone booth that you can get into, except it’s, it’s a little more spacious than a phone booth. I’m a great big corn fed boy, and there’s a picture of me on the screen now, in that thing. And you know, it’s, it’s, it’s, it’s substantial, you know? And if you were extremely skinny, you could probably get two people into this thing. But it’s really designed for one, and it’s got fans in the bottom as well as in the top, to keep the get the temperature right. And then you can even adjust the color and the temperature of the lighting to to make it, make it work for you. Yeah, but it’s a, it’s a really neat little device. Now, it’s not cheap, at $10,000 but, you know, I’ve visited a lot of tech companies in these Open Office formats, and you know, I I would really struggle to get things done in that kind of environment because of the sheer number of distractions. And I think this is probably one of the best compromises I’ve seen for people that do get distracted easily, is to just get one of these things. And again, they can, they can have it there. And again, it’s for those of you that are doing office hoteling, where you have to make reservations to to get a workspace. When you go into the office and you just have a card of your stuff. I think this is an addition, an outstanding ad here, for when somebody needs to, needs to yell because they’re frustrated, or somebody needs to, needs to have have some, some fairly frank conversations with people. I think this gives them the quiet space that they need to to really crank some stuff out. So,
Randy Johnston 06:03
Brian, did you just say Squirrel? Squirrel? Distraction? What squirrel?
Brian F. Tankersley, CPA.CITP, CGMA 06:07
No, oh, wow. Look, look, it’s Rocky.
Randy Johnston 06:10
Now, the other thing though, that I want to mention for our listeners, if you’re using cubicles and you don’t really have enough space to get private meeting spaces set up. The concept is you could put four of these bubbles, or two of these bubbles, in your open meeting area, and you would have a private space, soundproof that you could walk into. They also were in the process of designing a larger meeting space. I suggested that they needed one that was least double wide to accommodate two or three accountants in a single meeting, and so they are working on larger versions. They also said it took less than an hour to assemble one of these units. So bubble b, u, B, L is, again, an interesting concept. You could build it yourself, but I don’t think you want to based on the soundproofing and other things that are in there. And so, you know, four of these would be 40k compared to a lot of office setup. And you know, if you had outside engineering done on it, yeah, this probably an okay approach. Now we’re going to show you an even better concept, I think, from Samsung, even though we’ve said that the dex unit kind of got buried this year a little or talk about it here in just a little bit in the podcast. So bubble meeting was worth time. Now we also got to speak with a group called alfonia, a l, p, H, O N, I, a alfonia out of Paris, and they have local representation in Colorado Springs, but the noise canceling microphone was stunningly clear. Brian, it’s hard to picture the amount of noise around you in these big shows now we’ve through the past years, done our cone of silence display, which we used in our presentations. And it was amazing how sound control is so big a deal. But you know, this isn’t a basketball game level of sound, but it’s a lot of sound in a closed area, and the person that demonstrated this was able to whisper over the sound, and we could hear them pretty clearly. Brian, I’ll let you speak to your own experience on that
Brian F. Tankersley, CPA.CITP, CGMA 08:27
it was, it was absolutely amazing in how well it stripped the ambient noise out of the background and really focused in on just what that person was saying, and then amplified it such that, such that you could hear just that. I mean, if I had received a call from somebody like, you know, so many times, Randy and I are making phone calls from from airports. And at an airport, you have so much ambient noise, just the general den, the announcements, the the planes taking off and landing, you know, the the all the cleaning machinery that they have through there, and everything, you know. And so it’s, it’s generally fairly noisy at these airports. And I will say that I could see this being absolutely invaluable for people that are trying to take conference calls at airports and not have the extraneous noise in the background. You know, so many times, so many times Randy or I, or both of us, are on conference calls together, and we’re and we do take these things from airports and other places, and it’s nice, you know, I’m actually strongly considering picking up one of these, just from the perspective that I think it’s, it’s very it’s, it’s the politest way to take things from a fairly public place, so that you speak at a normal volume. Because, again, so many times when there, when they’re when you have that loud noise around you, you’ll increase your voice to compensate for it so that, and then you’re blasting everybody out, and then they have to listen to all that background noise as well. What’s great about this is that, again, the software in this really strips it out and and makes it a much more usable. A much more usable setup.
Randy Johnston 10:01
Now, as it as you may know or may recall, we have recommended the poly black wire family products as noise canceling headphones. And there’s many models, but most of the popular ones are like the 3320 today, and those are relatively inexpensive, and I use a black wire headphone, but the black wires noise canceling capability just doesn’t even touch this one. So you know, again, is that the right thing for you to buy? Maybe, maybe not. But I can tell you that the higher end black wires, the 8200 family, for example, that have the active noise canceling are about the same price as the alfonia. Now, I got to tell you, I was most impressed with the Samsung meeting room, and I kind of razzed Brian trying to get him to be Alfred Hitchcock and take a picture of himself inside the meeting room, but, you know, he deferred. I don’t know what that’s about, but I did point out that the Samsung meeting room had used the Canon camera that we have recommended for a long time. So this was a nice high end setup at the top. It used a canon, a CRN, 300 pro PTZ camera. And those have come down in price quite a little bit, Brian, because when those first came out, you remember we talked about them, they were about $10,000 and then they were 7000 then they were five and this one’s about 2200 now for the camera, but it’s a killer camera.
Brian F. Tankersley, CPA.CITP, CGMA 11:39
But remember, you’ve also got 100 179 a month, or something like that, subscription for the for this camera software. So it’s, it’s still, you know, the it’s, it’s kind of like airplanes and boats, you know, it’s not, it’s, it’s as much about the operating cost as it is about the initial acquisition.
Randy Johnston 11:57
But I suspect that they were using that high end camera to show off their, you know, 4k panels and their fancy microphones and so forth. But there was another little trick that I thought that these guys had used, which was an interesting deal, and that was a, I don’t know the name of it, but a meeting cube, for lack of a better name. And this cube, well, I’ll let you describe it. Brian, yeah,
Brian F. Tankersley, CPA.CITP, CGMA 12:25
so, so it’s a it’s a cube. It’s about two inches, two inches cubed, and it, and it basically has a a gravity sensor, a motion sensor in it. And so as you flip it and have a different side up it, you it applies that function. And so the, you know, you could flip it. And one thing would put you into video conference mode. The next would be in the meeting. The next one would put you in in, you know, would mute all and see how all these different settings that you could access simply by taking this, it was almost like a two inch die, like a, like a dice, you know, like a single die out of a pair of dice that that you had that was, that was actually pretty cool. Now, one of the things that that really, really hit me hard when we, when we looked at the at the Samsung televisions, was that they have made a deal now with with many major art museums for their frame panel. Okay? And so many of you may not be familiar with Samsung’s frame, but it’s available in both glossy and a matte finish, and it is a high end, high end frame that’s designed when you’re not showing video on it to show world class art. And so I’ve actually been coveting these for a while, and I think, I think one of these may be coming to my home fairly soon as kind of a compromise, since my wife is one class short of a degree in art history, her dad said she couldn’t come home if she came home with a degree in art history, and so she didn’t. But it’s, it’s a, it’s a pretty amazing thing that they’ve done, and I really like that they went in and and included this. Now our friends at LG also had also included a number you were trying to show off that they were the panels that were driving some of these Van Gogh experiences and other art experiences that you’re seeing that are immersive panels that have that feature the art of, of, again, Masterpiece paintings. And so it’s, it’s a pretty interesting experience we had with these. Okay, you want to talk about the ViewSonic projector. Randy, yeah, I was
Randy Johnston 14:35
just trying to recall the, I think we did take a picture of the seven or so providers of those art pieces. And, you know, I again, I will try to remember to pull that out for our listeners as well, but I didn’t do a very good job on taking this picture of the ViewSonic projector. View Sonic made a portable project. Projector that was roughly four inches by four inches by one and a half inches thick. Battery operated, it basically turns itself on when you take the little flip cover and just rotate it off the lenses and it’ll stand up. So it’s got kind of its own built in stand that way. It was a pretty nice projector. The specs there, Brian are at the bottom, but it was not as high aluminum lumens and not as high resolution as I would like. It was. Thank you. A, W, V, G, A, at 854, by 480, on 16 by nine, and it was only 150 antsy lumens. Okay, so a fairly dim projector, but you know, the lights were full up in the room we were in, and I could see the image. So another projector we’ll talk about in a minute. It’s only 100 lumens, so it probably is going to be lights out, but it’s a very versatile projector. The person from ViewSonic mentioned that for New Year’s Day, they on New Year’s Eve. Sorry, they actually had the projector running in their home, along with the TV running because some wanted to watch football and someone to watch the New Year’s Eve Ball dropping. So they ran that projector for several hours to accommodate that. So projectors are coming along, but if you need a super small one, the size of about an old historic flip phone, is a triple fold orzen Zip projector. Now this thing’s battery operated. Also it’ll run about an hour off its native battery. It has an augmented stand that will give you another two and a half hours of run time. And you may need a stand, but you probably are more interested in the extra, you know, two and a half hours. So it’ll run three and a half hours off of battery in a thing that would fit in your pockets, and that’s pretty impressive technology. So in any case, Brian, you have any closing thoughts for our listeners on meeting technologies, again, we didn’t actually go to the screens because, you know, another one you and I asked you to take pictures of because I was looking at them with the translucent Samsung screens. You know, they had kind of an interesting way of showing them, but I mentioned pretty it was pretty amazing. Yeah, I mentioned to you, I was in a CPA firm recently that was trying to do that type of thing where you could have the translucent screen on the window of the meeting room or your office, be able to see out to the outside world, and then when you wanted to use it, it had a opaque back that would put up, and you’d have a full image available. So it was actually last year when we saw translucent screens. I said, Man, I can’t really see much use except for in retail, you know, food cases and things like that. But it dawned on me, with Samsung’s display, you could actually use that for a meeting screen in a conference room that had big windows to the outside world.
Brian F. Tankersley, CPA.CITP, CGMA 18:12
Yeah. And the use case that I thought about, that I thought would be quite interesting, would be if you could have, if you could have two LCDs on your exterior window in your office. And then you could have, you could have a black one underneath it that concealed everything. And then you could have one on top. Excuse me. Folks, sorry. Folks, my phone decided to ring there. But you could have a you could have a black one on on the bottom that would kind of conceal everything, and then you could have the clear screen on top and have it present the content that you needed to present to somebody. So you know, by doing that, you would effectively be you would effectively not lose any any part of your office. You would lose the confidentiality, but you would make it possible now to use that entire wall as a video display, almost like some of the sci fi movies that we saw in the 80s and 90s.
Randy Johnston 19:05
When you see another configuration, because I’m thinking of a firm I was at in Houston, and many firms are built like this. They have a showcase conference room with a glass wall, and you could mount one of these Samsung translucence on the glass wall and keep it translucent most of the time to get the effect of the glass wall, but when you wanted to do a meeting, just turn it up with an opaque background, and now you could actually have TVs, if you will, displays on all four walls of a conference room that had a glass wall, an outside window and two standard walls, so you’d have, you know, displays all directions, so everybody could see the images without turning around in a conference room table. Well, that’s maybe a little over the top, but you get the idea. I hope friends from our discussion.
Brian F. Tankersley, CPA.CITP, CGMA 19:58
You know, I thought it. Thought it was quite interesting, you know, the things we saw there. Because even though there weren’t many new displays, I thought the implementation with art of the of the Samsung art store was particularly interesting to accounting firms, because so many times you have this screen sitting in the background in your meeting room and it looks awful. Now, what you can do is you can put world class art on there, and maybe you even take world class art and you you have it morph into your logo, or something with an AI video loop or something like that to to provide little entertainment. You know, the the thing about this is that even though there wasn’t much brand new technology, I think we saw more effective application, and we experienced more of the technology than we did the first time we saw some of these things, like the like this, the see through screens and the, you know, the the Samsung, Samsung frame, and other things like that. So in many ways, I think, I think the technology really grew up, and it’s it’s really ready for prime time at this point.
Randy Johnston 21:02
Sounds great. Well, we appreciate all of you listening in, and we’ll talk to you again soon in another technology accounting lab. Good day,
Brian F. Tankersley, CPA.CITP, CGMA 21:11 good day. Thank you for sharing your time with us. We’ll be back next Saturday with a new episode of the technology lab from CPA practice advisor. Have a great week.
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Tags: Accounting, Firm Management, Technology