Where are we going?
Every once in a while, it’s good to stop and think about where you are going, and for what purpose. In the audience response industry, not very many vendors do this. Perhaps the five largest companies do it routinely, but if so, they don’t have enough influence on the others to really affect any sort of industry wide change.
I am in the unique position of having relationships with close to thirty different audience response companies around the world and I tend to communicate with these folks regularly. While I can’t say that I know everything that they are planning, I do know enough to get a sense of where they are going.
Based on that, I’ll take a shot at predicting the future, at least the short term future. First, I would say that the market overall is growing quickly and broadly. It seems to me that interactive meetings and interactive classrooms are becoming mainstream technologies, and may have already reached that point. The companies that receive the biggest benefit of this are the manufacturers, including Fleetwood, Turning Technologies, IML, and others.
In general, businesses continue to engage their audience with this technology and although interactive systems have been in broad use for a decade, there is no sign of market fatigue. The same seems to hold true with higher education. These folks are spending lots of money on classroom response systems and there’s no sign of declining demand.
The most intriguing segment though is public schools, commonly referred to as k-12. While most would agree that kindergartners don’t need wireless keypads as learning tools, it is equally apparent that high-school students do.
Because the size and cost of handhelds are moving lower rapidly, and because higher education has already worked out the issues of ownership and logistics, high-school classrooms are in my view the next big market opportunity for student response system vendors.
I am in the unique position of having relationships with close to thirty different audience response companies around the world and I tend to communicate with these folks regularly. While I can’t say that I know everything that they are planning, I do know enough to get a sense of where they are going.
Based on that, I’ll take a shot at predicting the future, at least the short term future. First, I would say that the market overall is growing quickly and broadly. It seems to me that interactive meetings and interactive classrooms are becoming mainstream technologies, and may have already reached that point. The companies that receive the biggest benefit of this are the manufacturers, including Fleetwood, Turning Technologies, IML, and others.
In general, businesses continue to engage their audience with this technology and although interactive systems have been in broad use for a decade, there is no sign of market fatigue. The same seems to hold true with higher education. These folks are spending lots of money on classroom response systems and there’s no sign of declining demand.
The most intriguing segment though is public schools, commonly referred to as k-12. While most would agree that kindergartners don’t need wireless keypads as learning tools, it is equally apparent that high-school students do.
Because the size and cost of handhelds are moving lower rapidly, and because higher education has already worked out the issues of ownership and logistics, high-school classrooms are in my view the next big market opportunity for student response system vendors.
