Continued from Page 1

But, imagine if they decided to stock a few models that could be picked up at the local airport? A client could pre-order the projector, pick it up in the arrival terminal, use it and return it before they fly home - like renting a car. Hey, wait a minute, what if car rental companies started renting projectors? Wow, what a thought. They rent mobile phones - why not mobile projectors…

Nah. Back to Projector Place, I mean Laptop Lane.

OK, so the way Laptop Lane does it now is with a national rental company - I wont tell you who as I don't think it's relevant and I sure don't want to give them all sorts of free press. But, Laptop Lane isn't the real owner of the inventory. The national rental company is.

But, watch this carefully as it could be some kind of a potential trend. Or, it could just be an experiment - like the one that Kinko's tried and failed with Videoconferencing…

Oh, by the way. I mentioned the price. Well, it is super-competitive. In fact, I priced renting a projector here, in North Carolina from three traditional AV rental firms versus the Laptop Lane rental partner. Laptop Lane's rental partner was less than half the price.

Gary Kayye is Principal of Kayye Consulting a firm that specializes in providing marketing consulting, telephony integration and training development to the professional audiovisual industry. He spent 12 years at Extron and AMX as VP of Sales and Marketing before founding his own firm. He can be reached at www.kayye.com or via e-mail at gkayye@kayye.com. He is also the chairman of the ICIA PETC and a member of the ICIA Board of Governors.

For more news and feature articles, return to PresentationMaster home page.

Keep up on the news with our weekly Pro AV newsletter!