A Note from Caster’s New Vice President
I was a Medieval and Renaissance Studies major, and now I’m joining one of the best technology PR firms in the country. It’s a funny old world, innit?
This move is not out of nowhere. I’ve spent the last decade plus at AVIXA, the world’s leading professional audiovisual trade association and professional society. I thought the first book I edited would probably be about medieval female mystics; instead, it was about networked AV systems. I’ve had some time to think about how I got here, and turns out, the things I love about working in tech and the things I loved about studying Chaucer are exactly the same things.
The writers I studied in college were visionaries: as in, they literally hallucinated the structure of the divine cosmos on the regular. Though their lives were extremely limited, they looked inside themselves and found more. This is what technology designers and engineers do: They look at the limitations inherent in our current solutions and imagine more. Sometimes, their vision is so radical that it effectively summons a whole new world into being.
Writers build their visions out of ink and paper. Technologists build them out of code and circuits and wires. Both are mediums for creating shared human experiences. Take, for example, Caster client the Khronos Group, which develops open standards that literally enable people to share visions by offering stable 3D graphics rendering, reliable cross-platform XR, data visualization APIs, and more. They are creating the foundational standards upon which digital words will be built. It’s Guttenberg-level stuff.
You don’t get really into 15th century verse because you love fitting in. You do it because you love creative excellence. It’s incredibly exciting when a creator – a writer, an artist, or an engineer – rejects accepted wisdom in order to achieve a breakthrough in craftsmanship. Caster’s clients embody this spirit of innovation in a myriad of ways. While we’ve all spent the pandemic cobbling together at-home video conference rooms out of coat closets and half-baths, Crestron announced the release of the Crestron Flex MM, a tabletop device that instantly transforms any space into an enterprise conference space with one-touch join capability. Of course, we all hope to be able to physically return to our offices sometime soon. 22Miles is equipping their clients with Protection as a Service (PaaS) solutions that will make that return safe and manageable. 22Miles’s contactless temperature sensing TempDefend technology allows enterprises to deploy customized safety protocols, including initiating a video conference call or denying access to public spaces when an elevated temperature is detected. Crestron and 22Miles haven’t wasted any time mourning the end of business as usual; they’ve been too busy inventing the future.
This should be blindingly obvious at this point, but I’m a nerd, and I love nerds. I love being surrounded by smart, creative people who challenge me, teach me, and reveal new creative possibilities. In fact, I wrote this intro post four times, because I kept finding different ways to be inspired by Caster’s clients: the sense of joy and play they uncover in cutting edge technologies; the obsessive devotion to crafting beautiful experiences; the way true innovation begets even more creativity. Once upon a time, I found that kind of inspiration in lecture halls and discussion groups. For the past dozen years, I found it working alongside audiovisual subject matter experts to offer training and thought leadership to guide that industry in the future. Now, joining Caster Communications, I’m looking forward to broadening my horizons yet again. Our clients are visionaries too, and I could not be more excited to help articulate and promote the worlds they’re building.
