It was a great HIMSS10 event for Ergotron. We enjoyed the venue change to Atlanta although the weather was interesting…sunny and 50s on Monday and a Winter Storm Warning on Tuesday. Ah well, the real excitement went on inside the convention center where we launched our new LX Wall Mount System and LX Keyboard Arm, and gave healthcare customers a sneak peek at our future StyleView roadmap of carts.

Enjoy the review!

Click here to view the embedded video.

It has been a busy couple of days here at the World of Health IT (WoHIT) in Barcelona. Doesn’t the stand look terrific?

Monday kicked off an invitation only ministerial day, hosted by the Spanish EU Presidency, the European Commission, and the Regional Government of Catalonia.

According to the WoHIT, this is the first time the conference has been held in conjunction with the European Union’s annual High Level eHealth Conference with an objective is to create the largest European high level platform for stakeholders sharing the common goal of advancing eHealth in Europe.

During the lull in the action we managed a quick Ergotron team photo.

From left to right: Inge Van Noort, Sem Wildenburg, Jean Baptiste Testa, Nancy Gregson, and Roger Alverez.

Overall the day progressed nicely. I certainly learned we can never have enough power adaptors.  We had monitors from the UK, computers from US, and luckily had invested in multiple converters. 

We also found out that our awesome software, StyleLink Software for StyleView powered carts, is pretty easy to set up on Windows 7.  And always a pleasure to see some old friends from Man & Machine; their keyboards look so clean on our carts! 

Tomorrow brings the first day of the exhibition with a press tour through the hall kicking off at 12:30 and more of Ergotron team arriving including Roger Alverez and Jean Baptiste Testa.  

As you can see, we haven’t started this year’s event and we are saving the date for next year in Budapest.

Follow WoHIT event at @ergoHIT or @ngregson on Twitter. It’s going to be a great show!

Buenos días from World of Health IT (WoHIT) 2010 in Barcelona! Pictures say a thousand words, right? This is what Sem Wildenburg, EMEA Marketing Events Coordinator, and I saw this morning when we went to the International Convention Center.

 

With roughly 1400 tax paying businesses in ShiJie Town, Ergotron is quite honored to receive this recognition.

DGE is located outside of Dongguan City, Guangdong Province, PRC, and employs over 900 employees from all over the region. Congrats to Craig Thomas, General Manager, shown here with Kenny Shi, DGE Financial Controller, and all the team for their hard work and commitment to business leadership.

In Chinese for our global readers:

Ergotron (爱格升)中国工厂2009年纳税创优

Ergotron（爱格升）中国工厂东莞铭异精密电子有限公司(Dongguan Ergotron Precision Technology Co., )Ltd荣获广东省东莞市石碣镇企业2009年纳税排名前十奖。

石碣镇作为中国电子信息产业名镇，共有工业企业1400多家，我们对获得此排名深感自豪。

Ergotron公司美国总部领导对长驻在中国工厂的美籍总经理克雷格.托马斯先生，以及他领导下的来自全国各地的员工表示热烈地祝贺！衷心感谢全体员工的辛勤工作！
上图中国工厂总经理克雷格.托马斯先生与财务总监史航舟先生手捧纳税奖。

Passionate people and partners.

We all smile because we love what we do.  It is easy to be passionate when we can help bring ergonomics to those caregivers who help others.  It’s been great to see all our partners as the show, especially some wonderful Insight folks who have a whole booth of our products. Shown here, Ergotron’s healthcare, sales, and events teams looking forward to meet with you if you stop by the booth!

New and exciting products.

Our new concept carts are a hit.  With a new design in the flooring layout of our booth, we were able to draw some attention to the newest addition to the StyleView cart family.  And @ErgoSteve  and I, @ngregson,  love to see our competitors in the aisles, looking nonchalant as they check the carts out as well. 

Quality attendees.

Day 1 at HIMSS10 brought some quality healthcare professionals.  We had doctors and IT purchasers stop by the booth this morning, all excited about the opportunities to try some product out for free as a part of our unique channel programs.

I also met a young woman in nursing school who told me, “I am all new to this,” in an overwhelmed tone.  She’s a future Ergotron user, and helping her have a long healthy career keeps us all going each day. 

What are your top three for a great trade show?

It is finally warming up here in Atlanta for HIMSS10. The Ergotron events team and healthcare team continue to a install and adjust Ergotron’s wide range of products that support the healthcare IT market. 

For this year’s event, we will have 24 carts around the show floor of different configurations and solutions; more than we have ever shown before with our great partners!

It is also wonderful to see our products in additional places that we hadn’t planned on originally.  Nathan Johnston, in route to get some service for a dead electrical outlet, stopped to help a customer install a TM.

Tomorrow brings the last day of set up as the show opens Monday. Configuring carts and perfecting product placements is on the docket.  Months of planning leads to the thrill showing off our new products and passionate team members. 

Here, Jorge Juarez and Steve Reinecke make last minute adjustments while Steve wears Canada red to supports his fellow countrymen and women in the Olympics.  

Last  night we relaxed at the Georgia Dome for a Supercross event. Today we realized we have eveything we need to watch the Canada-US hockey game for the gold medal from our booth while we are configuring carts. We have a laptop and an internet card, cables and our Neo-Flex Mobile MediaCenter. We will stream the game live and it will be awesome!  We know who the only one rooting for Canada is…should be interesting…

Check out the picture of Nate and Jorge, Americas events team, packing up the last of the Healthcare carts for the HIMSS10 (Health Information and Management Systems Society) event.  Already in Atlanta, these guys make trade shows look simple.

Make sure you stop by the booth (#2158) to greet them along with the entire Ergotron healthcare team.

We’re confident that you will love the wide variety of healthcare products, and we’ll even unveil new product to convince you some more!

Not able to attend this year? No problem! Sign-up your clinic or hospital now in our Enter2Win promotion for a FREE Ergotron wall mount system. The Sweepstakes runs through March 3 and is open to healthcare facilities in the US and Canada.

Check back here for exciting pictures, video blogs, and updates from the show. Follow HIMSS10 progress on Facebook and Twitter too!

Photo Credits: Jeffrey Forman

The new @ergotron monitor stand is put together and on the desk. This thing is huge. Now if only I can lower it from the stratosphere…

This is the one of the tweets from @jforman, prior to his review of the LX Triple/Dual Display Lift Stand on his blog, The Life and Times of Jeffrey Forman. 

‘Some assembly required’ is a given with Ergotron products, in order to let you customize it to suit your individual monitor models and space requirements. Jeff gives you an extremely thorough review of this popular unit, from delivery to installation. The highs and the lows of his experience. All told, it took about 45 minutes to build and attach the unit to his “two Samsung Syncmaster 213T LCDs.”

Jeff had this to say in conclusion, “I’ve been using the stand now for the past few days, and I really appreciate how it has helped clean up my desk. Having the monitors at eye height is a lot more comfortable.”

Take a look at his review that him know what you think.   

Shawn Roner, @shawnroner, on his blog http://edbuzz.org, is discussing this week ISTE’s Top Ten Edtech Priorities for 2010. ISTE (The International Society for Technology in Education) is an association for educators and education leaders with a mission to help improve learning and teaching by advancing the effective use of technology in PK-12 and higher education.

No doubt, as Shawn’s post points out, schools are already in the planning and consideration stage should Federal and State governments release the funds in 2010 to “facilitate school reform.” Technology will be a part of proposed spending and it is up to “school leaders to consider the extent to which technology will shape this effort.”

Of note, number 4, “Continuously upgrade educators’ classroom technology skills as a pre-requisite of highly effective teaching.”

Ergotron’s research into the classroom over the last year was illuminating to many on the team. Long-term memory of technology in the classroom? Sometimes you got to watch a PBS special on a black and white TV.

Things have changed. I just responded to a student’s blog, from a link on Twitter from @teachakidd. Lee Kolbert is using blogging in the classroom and was asking her Twitter followers to comment and to tell where they were from when they did so. 

Yes, things have changed.

Our sympathies, if you want to say it that way, and cheers do go out to the educators, who are having to learn how to do more with less, and to learn more to teach more. Learning technology can be fascinating, but it is time consuming too.

It’s good to note as we continue to design products for the education market. Easy to implement technology is definitely part of our strategy.

I recommend reading the whole post. It is a comprehensive list and I like that it ends with number 10, “Promote global digital citizenship.”