ATCP, LLC

A colleague turned me on to an article here that talks about 5 stunningly awful mistakes for demos. I don’t think these are all that bad, and certainly not stunning, but I’ll include the 5 here, as we have a few more practical ones to add after:

1. Misunderstand the customer’s needs: “Harbor Cruise.” Don’t make a demo in the hope that your customer will eventually see something of interest. Inexperienced salespeople often inflict these demos on their customers as a replacement for doing their homework. Jaded sales engineers offer these demos when they receive little or no pre-demo information from their sales colleagues. Do the research to figure out what your customers need in advance. More »

A Sales Engineer is always on the road, and always has her/his laptop. We often need to make calls that aren’t company calls that we don;t want showing up on the company’s bill. We also find ourselves needing to call work discretely in areas where there is Internet (client site) but no cell phone coverage.

And what about those of us that receive calls from all kinds of people throughout the peak hours of our cell carrier, yet don’t want those minutes taken off our allowance?

What is an enterprising Sales Engineer to do?

I was always frustrated at how Skype was too bulky (kills your battery), and was open to government inspection of content. I don’t use it. Like Gizmo, they get paid for “Skype Out” at a hefty fee. There had to be a better way. Other services I have, like GTalk, don’t even allow for calling land lines. Well, there is a way. More »

I bought a Slingbox Pro on August 24th, 2007, at Best Buy. I have used it with my PDA (long since gone), which amazed everyone I showed it to, as well as on the road in hotel rooms and even from different parts of the house. Neat idea, and way ahead of Hava at the time. Still no support for my Dish Network VIP 612 DVR (HD) yet, but good enough.

I did a firmware update the other day, long after the 1 year warranty was up. It bricked my box, along with hundreds or even thousands of others.

My initial email:

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I’m usually a brand name shopper, so it was uncommon for me to order an Asian no-name IP camera from geeks.com. Ends up it came from Taipei from a company called Edimax. But the mystery is just starting.

The phone is referred to by several confusing models:

-gcj51w (alleged manufacturer’s model number, per geeks.com
-MJPEG Internet Camera (on the app/doc CDROM)
-IC 1500 (in the on-board web configurator)
-IC-3010WG (from the company website picture, not features)
-IC-1500WG (from the website features, not picture)

So what is this thing? It appears to be a scaled back version of the IC-1500WG in that it doesn’t have all the bells & whistles, such as 2-way audio, etc. Check out the features pages above to see what I mean.
I got this one as it was the cheapest 802.11b/g self-contained camera I could find. I surprisingly am not disappointed.
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Part of being a Sales Engineer is knowing how to display a product/service in any setting-even trade shows. The best Sales Engineers have no boundaries on their imagination, and use all their tools in ways that were not thought of previously. This is why it is important to own all your own software. If you are waiting for your next appointment (or worse yet consulting), you will get rusty fast.

In this article I discussed easy glass with V-Ray. In the article above, only one image from this project was included. Since I get so many hits to that article (where the tutorial is), I thought it might be nice to include all the renders I did for that client.

I’ll just post all the pictures here, with links to the larger versions by just clicking the thumbnails below. But first I should set this up.

The client asked for a modern trade show component (not the whole booth) that would allow prospects to play with the futuristic controls. These controls and displays are for super-yachts, so it had to look good. You’ll see the PC driving everything underneath, as these exhibits need to be designed completely, with all aspects of their operation taken into consideration.

As an aside, this type of glass (with the reflective falloff) is my absolute favorite! It effectively conveys not just futurism, but realism.

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