Hi Tiger Nation,
It has been a crazy few weeks. Obviously, I fell off the train of the weekly blog posts. No excuses. I failed to make time to do what I really wanted to do. That is now in the past and I’m fired up. We had a great response to our new embosser during the launch at the CSUN 2016 in San Diego. The VP Columbia is shipping to dealers and customer shipments should start in the next two weeks. Check out the picture included with our brand new pop up banner.
Also at CSUN, we continued to demonstrate our new IVEO Transformer product to help quickly create audio tactile graphics for our IVEO platform from graphic and scanned images. What used to take hours can now be done in minutes. The more I play with it, the more excited I get about the potential for audio tactile graphics to make a huge, positive change in the world. By making it quick and easy to create accessible content from images and other sources, kids will be able to access STEM graphics at early ages. I think parents and teachers with blind kids are going to be blown away with what they can teach with this technology.
Behind the scenes, we’ve also been working on our website to make it look better, highlight our awesome dealers around the globe, make sure you can search for what you need to find on our site and add alternate text for screen readers for our graphic images on the site. One of the common requests is to provide a way to share tactile graphics amongst the community. ViewPlus has many examples already on our website, https://viewplus.com/examples/iveo-examples/. I also trying to see how many other people are interested in sharing ideas and graphic files. As a first pass, a private Facebook page may fit the bill until we can implement a full, interactive community page independent of social media. Check it out at https://viewplus.com/tiger-nation/.
It has been a busy April already. Immediately after CSUN, the sales and marketing team was in Texas for TAER and Los Angeles for CTEBVI, running out now famous “Taming the Tiger” workshops. We’d love to more workshops if you can help tell us where you’ll be. We are planning to be in Arlington, Texas, along with Vancouver B.C. and Uruguay, all before heading to Sight City in Frankfurt Germany in May. I even have a trip planned to China in June, along with a family reunion in Texas. Wow, it is getting exciting.
I love seeing all the new likes for our ViewPlus Technologies Facebook page, plus we continue to get a lot of attention on Twitter. I’d rather you come up and introduce yourself at one of the live shows, but I’ll take whatever I can get. What other social media platforms do you use? We are also on LinkedIn and Instagram, plus Google+ and YouTube. I’ve started to follow some of the entrepreneurs moving to Snapchat but I don’t have the courage to put up videos every day. I’ve usually felt I had the face for radio, so was more interested in podcasts.
Of course, there is a lot of stuff going on outside of work. My family loves our new house just outside Corvallis. We had our first bonfire this weekend in our new fire pit. The concrete pad around the basketball hoop is all cleared off now, too, if you fancy a quick game of 1-on-1 or HORSE. We are excitedly waiting for the neighborhood swimming pool to open at the end of May. Until then, we’ll keep hunting the frogs in our pond (with flashlights, of course). With college basketball done, all eyes on our surprising Trail Blazers as they prepare for the NBA playoffs.
I better leave some more stuff for later in the week as I try to keep this blog a regular thing. Until then, peace out.
Dan Gardner
CEO
ViewPlus Technologies