INTERVIEW Ed Morgan - DisplayNote
“We want to make sharing of content easy and we want to just remove the barriers to quick and
easy simple idea sharing.” Ed Morgan, Chief Operating Officer, DisplayNote
Keeping collaboration simple
Built from the concept of simplicity, DisplayNote’s Ed Morgan is hoping it’s agnostic solution will hit the
ground running
Idon’t need to tell you
that the collaboration
market is a crowded
and sometimes
complicated place.
From the initial
concept of meeting
rooms using private
technologies to the
move from vendors to be
more open to work with
alternative systems, its
been an area of change
for some time.
Simplicity is one
of the concepts that
is now driving the
collaboration market,
as with all markets, and
is also the concept that
DisplayNote has built
software on in order to help
the nation’s teachers.
“We wanted to just make it
really easy to get teachers to
put content on their laptop,
whatever is on the internet
and just get it out to mobile
devices as quickly and easy
as possible” said Ed Morgan,
Chief Operating O cer at
DisplayNote.
“ at was our rst product,
that’s what we started o doing
and the vision of the company
has never really changed.
We want to make sharing of
content easy and we want to
just remove the barriers to
quick and easy simple idea
sharing. So things like cables
on the table, device types,
SIP room setups, cameras,
anything that could get in the
way of me sharing content with
someone else, and we want to
remove that and make it as
easy as possible.”
Morgan said that the origins in
education has led them to strike
partnerships with whiteboard
and projection specialists such
as NEC, Dell, Sahara and Clear
Touch in the States to bundle
DisplayNote’s solution with their
hardware solution.
“Our next solution was for
meeting spaces” said Morgan.
“And it was around this idea of
wireless casting.
I think market leaders
have done an amazing job of
making it really easy to one
touch join, one touch share
your screen, once you plug the
dongle into your PC ,but we
wanted to approach that from
an angle of: why do you need
any hardware at all? Why do
you need a box?
More PCs are coming with
compute power, more rooms
are coming with mini PCs and
devices themselves, from the
web, Windows applications,
going to mobile and Android.
So we took a software rst,
software only approach to
wireless sharing, and still do so
from Chrome, Firefox or from
iOS and AirPlay, Windows or
Mac, we have a solution that
allows you to just share what’s
on your device up to the main
display.”
DisplayNote’s software
allows users to log into a
room and contribute to a
collaboration board via a URL
link generated by the host.
However, Morgan says that
the next phase of growth will
be generated by ‘Launcher’ it’s
latest piece of vendor-agnostic
software that allows users to
set up and carry out meetings
using the platforms they prefer.
“Some of the problems we
were hearing are starting to
percolate as we play more
in corporate meeting rooms
and huddle spaces” said
Morgan. “One trend that we
found kept cropping up time
and time again is that, for
facilities managers and people
responsible for kitting out
meeting rooms, the meeting
rooms or the boardrooms
were becoming more
multifunctional and have to
earn their keep a lot more.
With all this collaboration,
workers are coming in and
out from di erent
departments to do
di erent things.
Sales teams show
sales presentations,
marketing teams
viewing content, just
regular workers where
someone wanted to
show their screen and
what we found is that
no one was really doing
a great job of making
it easy for just typical
users of the room to get
to the application that
they needed.
We felt that the
windows experience,
while it works on
desktop, didn’t really
lend itself to a large form
factor so we created a solution
called Launcher that gives
meeting rooms or meeting
attendees, meeting hosts and
IT administrators a way of
allowing users of rooms to
quickly launch any application
of their choice, launch any
video solution that they have
and any video conferencing
meeting that they had booked
for the room that day.
We wanted to rst of all
make it really easy to get to the
things that you need to get to,
the content that you wanted to
share, and the apps to use. We
wanted to make it really easy
and frictionless to launch video
conferencing calls without
having to go through some
of the things that we have
endured. Where’s the meeting
ID? What solution are we
using? How can I join?
But also, to make that really
secure as well, so that when
you left the meeting, or left the
room, the room reverts back to
a cleared state.”
52 | Comms Business Magazine | February 2020 www.commsbusiness.co.uk
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