Introducing OneDrive Video and Dropbox Video to Airtame Cloud

Video is a powerful communication tool, and that’s why we made sure to add support for OneDrive Video and Dropbox Video this year, increasing our supported video platforms. (Which also includes YouTube!) With each of these apps, you can choose to have the same video play on a loop or plan for a playlist of videos to be shown at specific times with Scheduled Content.

PowerPoint app added to Cloud

Digital signage was made even simpler with the PowerPoint app for Airtame Cloud. Showcase presentations from your OneDrive account to all of your screens with just a few clicks. No longer do you need to convert slides to JPEGs for display! 

European partnership signed with Maverick AV Solutions 

This distribution partnership introduced Airtame’s wireless screen sharing and digital signage solution into 15 more countries. As Joel Chimoindes, Vice President for Europe with Maverick AV Solutions explained, “This new partnership is a perfect brand fit into the Maverick smart meeting portfolio in line with the huge increase in demand for collaboration environments for 2021.”

Airtame and Rise Vision partner up for Digital Signage 

With the addition of Rise Vision templates on Airtame Cloud, school administrators can now instantly share important messages to keep students, staff, and educators informed.

#1 for Cost-Effective Wireless Presentation Solutions

Futuresource Consulting recognizes Airtame as the global market leader in cost-effective Wireless Presentation Solutions (WPS)! In the research report, the company was also named a joint market leader in the Americas across all WPS categories. With this ranking, Airtame’s reputation for simplicity and reliability is appreciated by more schools and corporate clients than ever.

​​Secured funding from Vӕkstfonden to fuel expansion

This autumn, the Danish state’s investment fund added their backing to Airtame, fueling us as we lead the way with modern, collaborative leadership practices, continued expansion across North America, and new products to make video conferencing easier.

In this rapidly changing world, Airtame is here to help you make your school’s and organization’s screens smarter, and we can’t wait to keep helping you use your screens better. And when it comes to hybrid meetings? Well…a better way just might be on the way. 

The post A Year in Review: Airtame 2021 appeared first on Airtame.

And, despite some pretty treacherous thunderstorms, we didn’t disappoint. By all accounts, our first Infocomm as official exhibitors went swimmingly. We got the chance to speak to thousands of pro-AV enthusiasts, resellers and potential partners and convince them that Airtame is the preferred screen sharing solution for smart organizations.

And the pro-AV Oscar goes to …

As if our lead generation success wasn’t enough, we hit the big time at Infocomm this year, winning a Best of Show award!

Presented by the industry leading AV Technology magazine, the Best of Show award honors outstanding achievement in product development.

The award committee judges evaluated thousands of new hardware products against multiple criteria including innovation; performance against category standard; richness/relevance of feature set; ease of installation/maintenance; network friendliness; and value/ROI.

Products with the highest total points were designated as winners, and Airtame 2 – our most recent hardware solution – was one of the select few to be chosen as grand prize winners.

In short, this is a huge win for us. We know that the Airtame solution can transform the worlds of work and education, and it’s great to see industry experts and thought leaders agree. Congratulations to the entire Airtame team, and thank you to all our early adopters that love our new hardware.

Next up on the event front line, our expert North America team are representing Airtame at ISTE 2019, one of the world’s most significant edtech conferences.

Are you attending ISTE? If so, drop by booth #707 for a chat

The post Infocomm success: we won Best of Show! appeared first on Airtame.

You might be wondering, what even is Airtame? To get you off on the right foot, let us give you the lowdown.

What is Airtame?

Airtame is a solution that helps you use your big screens better.

During meetings or classes, Airtame helps you wirelessly present to TVs or projector screens using an app on your computer or mobile device.

To get a 1-minute overview of what Airtame offers, watch this quick video:

On top of that, Airtame lets you customize the default screen (or Homescreen as we call it) however you like, so you can:

• set various backgrounds to spruce up the room,
• display team metrics
• use the Homescreen app Room Overview to display booked meeting rooms or agendas

With Airtame Cloud, it is also easy to manage your Airtame devices, no matter how many you have. Airtame Cloud is our device management tool that lets you monitor and update all your organization’s Airtames remotely, even if they are located on different networks and locations.

Why Airtame?

Switching to Airtame can help IT administrators reduce the number of support cases they have to deal with by 40-80%.

IT admins cut down on the manual work of constantly switching out broken or lost cables. And since Airtame is a device-agnostic solution that uses a cross-platform app, you don’t have to worry about having multiple cable inputs on hand.

With Airtame, meetings and classes become more interactive as everyone can present from their own smartphone, tablet, or computer. And switching between presenters doesn’t mean having to call for help when you discover that your computer needs an adapter to work with the HDMI cable. The Airtame app makes it possible to switch between computers with a couple of clicks.

So much more than cable clutter

The possibility of customizing the Airtame’s default background when no one is streaming makes it a cost-effective signage solution. We have users who use Airtame purely as a signage tool not only because it is inexpensive, but because adding and adjusting onscreen content is easy enough for the non-tech user to accomplish.

Last, but not least, is Airtame Cloud, an IT admin’s dream. Using this device management tool, you can monitor and manage all your Airtame devices through a browser. This means you can push updates to your Airtame devices or troubleshoot any issues without having to leave your desk. Getting through helpdesk tickets is just a little less painful.  

To help ensure a smooth handover, here are some questions you need to ask about the Airtames at your office or school.

How are you using Airtame?

What’s your use case – wireless presentations, signage, or both?

Airtame has two main use cases: wireless presentations and digital signage.

Knowing which use case is used most often will help you understand how your Airtame rollout is going to be managed and by whom.

If Airtame is used mainly for presenting, it is a good idea to ask how satisfied people are with their performance, so you can plan an effective maintenance plan, as well as optimize Airtame usage and performance.

If Airtame is used for signage, you will potentially need to work with different stakeholders who have a say about what is displayed on the screens throughout your organization.

Installation and network setup

How is Airtame set up on your network?

Knowing how Airtame is set up on your network will help you understand who can use Airtame and what can influence the performance.

Our most recommended setup is to create a separate VLAN for your Airtame device. You can then connect the Airtame to the VLAN using Ethernet and routing the necessary ports to the networks where your users are – in most cases it is the internal and guest network.

There are plenty of other ways to setup Airtame on your specific network. Check out this overview of possible network setup scenarios, including the network requirements for using Airtame.

Check this article for further tips on how you can test and improve your network. If you are using a wireless connection, we would recommend you monitor your Airtame’s signal from time to time from Airtame Cloud.

We also have a quick overview of system requirements and a room checklist, so you should double check to make sure your rooms are fully equipped for the best Airtame experience.

Have all Airtames been fully installed?

Are there still Airtames laying unpacked in boxes? Where were they supposed to go?

If there are still new Airtames that need to be installed, the information you found out in the previous section regarding network setup will help you plan a further rollout.

It is easy to set up an Airtame device, no matter how many you have to install.  Here are some tips for speeding up a mass deployment.

If you have multiple Airtames to manage, then it’s certainly important to consider a way to organize and monitor them. Let’s find out how you can easily manage devices using Airtame Cloud.

Administrating – Device management and configuration

How are your device settings configured?

Now is a good moment for you to ask your predecessor if device settings are configured the same for all your locations or if different locations require their own configuration.

If you are using Airtame Cloud, you can see all your devices’ configuration details in one neat overview. You can bulk edit device settings, as well as group devices based on various categories, such as location.

Ask your predecessor to invite you to Airtame Cloud and transfer the ownership to you. Go to the Team section of your Airtame Cloud account and check which other colleagues are using the account and what user roles they have.

A quick tip is to turn off auto-updates on the Airtames to avoid the Airtames updating during office or school hours while people are using them.

Need a hand?

You are always welcome to book an onboarding call with our Customer Success team! They can answer any questions you might have about Airtame.

If you prefer, you can also sign up for onboarding emails for IT administrators that will take you through all the Airtame basics, from setting up devices to registering to Airtame Cloud.

The post Getting a fresh start with Airtame in your new IT role appeared first on Airtame.

We support most end-user platforms (Apple, Windows, Chromebook, Linux, plus mobile platforms like iOS and Android) and, together with the infrastructure powering our Cloud, we need to maintain environments with many different requirements and challenges.

To make all that happen, Airtame needs a committed tech team. That’s where we come in.

The name is structure. Infra-structure

The Infrastructure team at Airtame is made up of 2 people – Peter and I – and a lot of automation.

While the developers do the actual work of creating the application, firmware, or the Airtame Cloud product, we’re concerned with making sure this can happen continuously, automatically and in a secure environment – on all platforms and in the Cloud.

To be able to upgrade your devices remotely with the Airtame Cloud, we need to run the platform (the services it consists of) somewhere – keeping your data secure and making sure you and the Airtame device can always talk to Airtame Cloud. We recently transformed our Cloud service, which you can read about here.

For this to work, we need to manage all the requests that Airtame Cloud receives and respond appropriately – your device connecting to Airtame Cloud needs to be handled differently than you opening Airtame Cloud in the browser.

We need to run databases that handle queries, proxies that handle requests and services that replicate, scaling automatically when people use our product at high volumes so that Airtame Cloud works fast and is always reachable.

In short, we make sure that all the good work done by the rest of the Airtame team works well with you, our users.

Platform-to-platform

Just like you need a Windows, Mac or Linux machine to run the Airtame application, we also need a Windows, Mac and Linux machine to turn the source code our developers wrote into airtame.exe, airtame.dmg or airtame.tar.gz.

To be able to create these packaged applications, our machines need to be configured in a specific way. They need to have other applications pre-installed, be able to download the source code and they should automatically create airtame.exe when a developer sends code to our code review platform.

At your service

We have services running both internally and externally, so either hosted in-house or running somewhere else:

• Internally to offer a code review platform, collect analytics or crash data, or run an automation server that tells other machines what to do (so we don’t have to)
• Externally to host the Airtame Cloud platform including supporting infrastructures like additional automation servers, the airtame.com website, and servers where you or your device get our software from

All of this needs to come together. Software needs to be on some version and configured with certain options, and only select services should be able to talk to each other, but those do need to talk. If something stops working, it should ideally fix itself, or at least let us know.

People working at Airtame also need an airtame.com email address; some VPN access to our internal network (which we manage, too) when working remotely; our source code needs to live somewhere and we also host and/or develop services that make other employee’s lives easier.

This support materializes in many forms. We make bots that make sure someone brings breakfast to team status meetings, or a directory software where we can give people access to machines by running a script. If it’s technologically possible for us to optimize our workflow, it’s down to the infrastructure team to synthesize it.

While our primary focus is to keep things running, we spend a lot of time automating creating the services we need, so that even when the Airtame HQ burns down, we can go buy some other servers and be back in business within days, in theory.

Fortunately, no such crisis has happened thus far but, just in case, we also continuously back-up our important data. We’ll share how we try to achieve all of this in an upcoming post.

Curious about more Airtame teams? Check out how we established our friendly customer success team

The post Introducing the Airtame infrastructure team appeared first on Airtame.

Our Cloud is fully backed by AWS services. Airtame devices communicate with the Cloud via secure websockets. Usage of websockets results in a large number of active connections, usually around 10k. Websockets are used to synchronize settings between the Cloud and Airtames.

The size of the exchanged data is relatively high. Devices send pictures of dynamic dashboards, which are displayed while the Airtame device is not streaming.

If we gather all these facts we start to see that Cloud costs are related to the increasing number of users. This was a good starting point for us.

The problem

Our infrastructure hasn’t changed much over the last few months, the only change was the number of users – which is, of course, a great problem to have!

We discovered the problem quite quickly: we were running server instances in multiple availability zones (AZ) inside one region. From our billing information, we could see that we were transferring around 2200 GB per day. 1900 GB inside AZs and 300 GB to the internet. Prices for transferring to the internet are 10x higher than between AZs. Costs for transfer between AZs should be zero.

 

 

Finding a solution

We started exploring our internal Cloud network in AWS Console. As an entry point to our Cloud, we use Nginx public proxies. Only our public proxies are accessible from the Internet, and they purpose is simple: They serve static data and proxy API request to a backend instance. Public proxies were running in AZ 1b.

The backend does the heavy lifting and processes API requests. Unfortunately, the backend instances were hosted in AZ 1a. This means that all API requests were transferred between AZs.

To handle requests, the backend additionally connects to MySQL and Redis. And only to make things worse, MySQL and Redis were in AZ 1b, resulting in additional transfers to the first zone and then sending results back the same way requests came in.

Once we figured out the root cause of our problem, we came up with a plan to move everything to the same AZ. Moving so many servers between AZ wasn’t easy, and we caused only a few outages along the road.

We were able to move RDS from one AZ to another without downtime with this neat trick: First, we enabled multi-AZ deployment and then used reboot with failover to switch primary DBs. AWS guarantees that DBs in multi-AZ are consistent and can be used interchangeably.

We took advantage of an interesting side effect of a reboot with failover, which is primarily used for DB updates. It first switches primary RDS to failover DB and then performs a reboot, resulting in zero downtime.

dbtechno.blogspot.com

Now the real question: how did this happen? Terraform, our infrastructure as code software, is a good servant, but a bad master. Its defaults can be dangerous. We didn’t specify AZs in Terraform’s configuration and as a result, it has chosen random AZs. The easy fix was to define AZs for all resources.

We’ve successfully minimized costs of inter-AZ transfers to zero. This significantly reduced the cost of our Cloud network cost by 63%. This price reduction – not to mention the resource and time surplus – will be fed back into our production line; creating an even more sustainable Cloud environment for our growing user base. 

Watch this short video showing how the Airtame Cloud management works:

This piece was written by Peter, with additional writing from Raghav Karol and Jakob Bauers from the Airtame infrastructure team

The post How we reduced Cloud network infrastructure costs by 63% appeared first on Airtame.

And now we are ready to launch a few new features to make that Airtame Cloud experience even more heavenly.

URL refresh rate for background content

Our website application allows you to display a public URL on your Airtames’ Homescreen – transforming the blank or otherwise turned off TV screens around your workplace. Nothing new there, but we have just launched the ability to manually set periodic refreshing of your configured and presented URL. That’s up-to-the-minute content from a website or intranet, straight to your standby screens!

The Airtame Cloud Website App now allows users to specify an interval for the periodic refreshing of their configured URL. As of now, you can set the refresh to 10-minute, 1-hour, 12-hour or 1-day intervals.

How to set it up:

1. Enable Homescreen view on your Airtame.cloud account
2. Select the device/devices that you want to show the Website app on
3. Click on Switch App
4. Select Website
5. Enter the URL you want to display and select Page Reload Interval
6. Save and Apply settings

Discover more opportunities for your homescreens with our World Clock, Google Slides, Trello and Unsplash apps.

✋ Current limitations with URL background content

Airtame’s background web browser cannot show all website content. Additionally, please keep in mind that Airtame loads URL in iFrame. These are the current things it does not work with:

• Video playback
• Java, Flash, Silverlight, WebGL not supported
• Sites that requires login, like Facebook (due to lack of ways to provide input)
• Animations
• The refresh only works with HTTPS based pages at present

Note that this feature is only available from the cloud, and not the “Homescreen Background” selector in the desktop app.

User roles and Group permissions

A lot of our customers have multiple locations and campuses in which they are using Airtames. Sometimes that calls for local admins and supporters, who just need to see and administer Airtames in their own local environment.

To help with this we’re now launching user roles, meaning that you as an Airtame Cloud organization owner can define what groups of devices that your Airtame Cloud account users can see and what level of permissions they will have.

There will be 3 roles that you can assign your users under:

Administrator:

The admin is a role that has access to all options and groups of devices in the cloud. This role can also create more groups, invite users and set permissions for other users.

Manager:

The manager role can access all settings to devices and add new Airtames to his/her groups, but you can specify what groups the manager can access. Managers cannot add groups, invite users or change user permissions.

User:

Users only have access to the Airtame devices via the Homescreen tab in the Cloud. Users can change what apps and Homescreen settings that are set on Airtames, but not access settings, add Airtames, invite users or change user permissions. You can specify which groups users can see.

☝️ Owner:

This is not a selectable role. There can only be one owner of an organization and they hold the exclusive rights to delete the organization account, once all other users have been deleted, as well as the ability to move the ownership role to another user.

The post Powerful new updates to the Airtame Cloud appeared first on Airtame.

Product

Airtame is a wireless streaming device which helps people work better. It’s powered by embedded Linux on custom-built hardware, with a diverse software stack ranging from our carefully-tuned firmware and high-performance C++ streaming engine, to our cross-platform Electron/React desktop application and Golang Cloud platform.

Technology

How do you make video streaming with high quality and low latency work in poor network environments? How do you integrate four different operating systems? How do you scale cloud backend to support tens of thousands of concurrently connected devices? These are just some of the many difficult challenges we face every day, and we work hard together to solve them. It’s an exciting opportunity to work alongside software, hardware and firmware deliverables with tasks that aren’t repetitive.

We have experts across the entire spectrum of technology. It gives everyone the chance to learn what they don’t know and challenge their own way of thinking. More than that, it’s a unique spread of technical knowledge, something we put it to good use every day working with the complexity of the product. Team structures are fairly flexible, and we’ve had several people start working in a specific range of activity, then gradually move to other areas of problem-solving.

Our talented engineers work with different tools, languages and types of infrastructure, and they are driven towards producing high-quality, maintainable code and software. Frequent code reviews, linting, and pairing are all integral components of our engineering culture. Significant ownership and responsibility over projects is key to our organization. Every developer is able to have a an impact on the direction of the product, and the company as a whole.

Our engineering teams

Streaming team:

In charge of the high-performance streaming pipeline, written in C and C++. And our cross-platform Application, made in Electron and JS.

Cloud team:

Working on the cloud-based administration portal for the Airtames and our upcoming internal digital signage platform called Homescreen. The tech stack here is Golang, React, AWS.

Firmware team:

Leading the efforts on the OS running on the Airtame. They cover everything from the bootloader, Linux kernel, to networking and graphics.

Infrastructure team:

Making sure our internal and external services are up and running. They do Docker, AWS, Ansible, Puppet and Jenkins.

QA team:

Ensuring the quality of our releases. They focus on both automated and manual testing. The tech stack is Python, JS and Jenkins primarily.

Community

In the past, people have relocated to work with Airtame’s Engineering team, and we pride ourselves for our sense of community.

Work is a nice mix of laidback and laser-focused. We know when to work hard, but we make sure to have fun along the way as well. Once per quarter, we host internal hackathons to get the creative juices flowing. No idea is too big, wild or crazy, and some of them might even be implemented afterwards. We value a relaxed environment where socializing is encouraged, but never mandatory. Sometimes, we even pack our toothbrush and go off-location. Here’s the Airtame team at the last offsite event, Workathon 2017 in Corfu, Greece.

Flexible work hours make all the difference to balancing work/life. That’s why 20% of an engineer’s working hours can be used to work on anything they want. It fosters creativity and independence, and we know for a fact that hobbies can lead to solid ideas of implementation.

We’re remote-friendly, something that has been put to good use by several engineers in the past. Airtame is made up of many different nationalities and clever minds, and no one should feel weighed down by the fact that they’re far from home.

Check out this Favro board we made about the Airtame culture.

What does the team say?

“Airtame is a great place for engineers who thrive on learning. I really enjoy our team breakfasts and roundtable discussions, where I can level up my knowledge in areas ranging from hardware design and kernel development to browser APIs and frontend frameworks, plus lots more in between. With 20% time, quarterly hackathons and flexibility to move between projects, I’m constantly developing my skill set, which helps keep my work fresh and engaging.”

Andrew Keating, Lead Software Engineer

Join the team!

See the full list of job openings here. To learn more about what others think of us, take a look at our company overview.

Ready to join our ambitious team? Send your CV and application to tech-jobs@airtame.com letting us know why you would be a great fit. We can’t wait to meet you!

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