Fifteen years ago, managing customer data was a specialized role. Larger organizations had whole teams of information managers dedicated only to ensuring important customer records were appropriately kept.

Meanwhile, with gated access to the formal customer data, relationship owners in sales, support, service, and other teams began collecting their own informal customer information. Details like key contract issues, renewal blockers, and even simple things like birthdays and recent conversation topics were scribbled down on business cards and sticky notes and kept stashed in personal rolodexes.

Then came Salesforce.com.

Almost overnight, Salesforce enabled businesses to reimagine how customer data could be collected and shared. Salesforce ended the exclusive reliance on data specialists, and brought CRM technology right to everyone’s desktop. Everyone had access to the formal data, and everyone could add the informal notes they’d collected so that everyone on the team could benefit from the knowledge. Customer-facing teams could work smarter than ever before.

Of course, CRM solutions aren’t the only tools making the leap from the experts to everyone. Video is making that leap right now.

Conferences and events used to require a line item for AV specialists. Now even giant companies like Siemens are recording sessions with just a laptop and a webcam.

Classroom lectures used to be the ultimate “you had to be there” experience. Now huge campuses like the University of Arizona have a camera in every classroom, capturing every class session and providing an invaluable study aid.

Video platforms like Panopto have made creating and sharing professional-quality video possible for everyone, and as a result, more and more organizations are finding that video is both an easier and more engaging way to share information, insights, and ideas. Tech companies rely on desktop-level video to share code architecture insights. Law firms rely on desktop-level video to help attorneys manage their own professional development. Financial organizations rely on video to scale the knowledge of their subject matter experts. And schools and universities rely on video for lecture capture, as well as for flipped classrooms, student presentations, and more.

This week we saw more and more people taking advantage of the power of video to share ideas, present information, and show how the world works. And in the spirit of passing it on, these are just a few of the ideas shared this week with Panopto’s video presentation software.

Towards a Sustainable and Legal Wildlife Trade
Poaching and the illegal trade in wildlife are pushing a number of iconic species towards extinction. In the legal trade there is a mixed picture of successful trade models combined with unsustainable harvesting levels of animals, plants and timber, and poor animal welfare and governance. Conservation and development goals from the wildlife trade will only be achieved through effective collaboration and dialogue among governments, practitioners and the private sector, supported by state-of-the-art research. Despite the global importance of the wildlife trade in political, economic and cultural terms, policy development and implementation remains poorly supported by research. Sit in with the audience for the annual symposium presented by the Durrell Institute for Conservation and Ecology, School of Anthropology & Conservation, University of Kent. This year’s discussions aim to enhance understanding on how to support a trade in wildlife that is sustainable, legal and consistent with the principles of sustainable development.

Defeating AIDS: Advancing Global Health
On June 25 2015, The Lancet published Defeating AIDS―Advancing Global Health, the culminating report of the UNAIDS and Lancet Commission. In this address, the Commission, composed of 33 distinguished global leaders, summarises the lessons from the AIDS response, remaining challenges to expand access to prevention and treatment, so as to end AIDS as a public health threat by 2030. The report further discusses what these lessons and challenges hold for the future of global health and addressing new and chronic health challenges in a post-2015 world.

Saving Money and Space with Tiny Computers: Half your pi and asus too?
Trying to fit more PC units in a smaller budget? Want more power in less space? Many have been tempted over the years to reduce expenses and spatial impact by adopting the ultra small form factor computers. In this presentation from the CALIcon 2015 Conference, learn about new the hardware and software options with some observations from the personal experiences of the panelists. Specific systems addressed will include Xi3, NUC, Rasberry Pi, HP Stream Mini, and the Mac Mini. Regardless of the problem you’re trying to solve, you may find that the newest generation of tiny PCs will address that need: low cost pc, specialty applications, digital signage, small server, classroom lectern PC, lab PC, and desktop PC deployments for staff and faculty.

How to Ruin a Presentation with PowerPoint
As anyone who has attended a conference can attest, many of us don’t have a clue about how to design effective PowerPoint presentations. The result is distracted audiences, confusing presentations, and ineffective teaching. This presentation focuses on some of the most common mistakes people make in creating PowerPoint presentations and discuss how to improve your own PowerPoint presentations. Almost everything covered is also applicable to other presentation software, as well as to graphics created for videos — the focus is on slide design and content, not on the intricacies of PowerPoint. This presentation will not teach you all the magic things PowerPoint can do or make you a power user of PowerPoint. In fact, many of the amazing things PowerPoint can do aren’t particularly good for presentations. Instead the presentation will point out the horrors of bad PowerPoint and help you give more effective presentations with a few simple hints.

Enough to Be Dangerous: 00000110 Things Every Beginner Needs to Know About Coding
You can code; you just may not know it yet. This presentation covers the fundamentals of coding by looking at some of the most popular and important programming languages used today. By looking at different examples and the ways in which they share key commonalities, participants will learn about the concepts necessary to read and understand a block of code. This sessions is a must for people who regularly interact with individuals who do code (programmers, IT staff, software vendors, etc.) and wish to communicate more meaningfully; anybody who has little to no experience in coding wants to develop basic programming skills; anyone who uses a computer and wants to better comprehend how they work.

Functional Gastrointestinal Disorders and Food Intolerance: Is It All About Gluten?
Dr Anil Kesavan, Assistant Professor of Pediatrics at the Rush University Medical Center, delivers this scientific lecture on functional gastrointestinal disorders, with a specific focus on irritable bowel syndrome. Dr Kesavan looks into the role of the intestinal microbiome and visceral hypersensitivity in such disorders, and offers a definition for non-celiac gluten sensitivity. For those looking for scientifically-based recommendations, the talk closes with a discussion of the role of food in the management of many functional gastrointestinal disorders.

Seeing Television — Popular Culture in Society
Finally this week, join the students at Southern Illinois University for this flipped classroom microlecture on representations of gender in popular culture. Using feminist theory as a guide, the class delves into a series of questions related to how popular culture reinforces the status hierarchies related to gender as a social status. The class opens with an introduction to the classic understanding of gender as a binary construct, then looks at how that ideology is represented. The presentation then brings the issue to modern day, examining what the so-called “enlightened sexism” in modern media means for women, and what the ethos of “working-class masculinity” means for men.

Try It For Yourself!

Panopto makes it easy for anyone, anywhere to record video presentations and share them online, both as live streaming webcasts and recorded on-demand video. To see how Panopto can help you share your ideas, contact our team for a free trial today.