Promethean World has had an eventful year, having been acquired by NetDragon of China in the Autumn and with technology and product developments, too, during the year since we last met at BETT (Takeover at Promethean Now Done).
We met with Ian Curtis, who looks after most of Europe (except the East), Africa and Australasia and Alistair Hayward, who is responsible for the UK market and Australasia. Promethean has done well in the UK in the last year and we heard that the number of resellers has increased by a factor of three over the last year.
NetDragon is a web services company that has its own Chinese-based education business and talks between the firms went on for 18 months before the deal was finalised. The attraction of Promethean was its brand, customers and channels. The takeover has helped to allow more investment in the business (which has had significant financial pressures since it had its IPO several years ago – Man. Ed.) and so Promethean is bullish.
Curtis admitted that from the hardware point of view, Promethean was a little later than it should have been in moving from projection to flat panel systems, but believes that its hardware is now a positive feature of the firm’s offering, while its ClassFlow software and content has always been an asset (and which the company has made free for UK teachers). The firm will continue with its projection products, and last summer acquired the touch and pen technology that was developed by UK-based Light Blue Optics (Promethean Takes LBO’s Touch Tech).
The new ActivPanel range of LCD-based systems is available in 55″, 65″ and 75″ (PID panel – VA – 400 cd/m² – FullHD) and 65″, 75″ and 84″ (PD panel – IPS – 350 cd/m² – UltraHD) and the panels use direct LED backlights. 10 point infrared touch is supported as well as simultaneous pen and touch input. The boards feature an “ActivGlide” surface for the comfort of intensive users (based on 4mm acid etched tempered glass with 7 Mohs hardness) and also have OPS support to allow an Android system to be installed. Alternatively, a micro PC can be rear-mounted. The standard CPU option is for an octa-core processor, with 16GB of Flash and 2GB of RAM.
The display supports Wi-Fi and can act as an access point to support the “explosion” in BYOD that the firm has seen and facilities include multiplatform mirroring of client devices.
There’s a “freeze frame” option for allowing a controlling system unit to be used “offline” and a screen black option. The support of OPS allows the Android system to be upgraded or replaced with an alternative. There are four HDMI inputs and an HDMI output with VGA, component video, ethernet and RS232 are also integrated. Audio is available through dual front-facing 10W speakers. A range of fixed and variable mounting systems are available. Lifetime is quoted at 50,000 hours and the firm supplies a three year warranty as standard, with two years of optional extension. The new ActivPanels will be on sale in Q2.
Promethean was promoting its ActivInspire Windows-based software as well as the ClassFlow and cloud-based software. We saw a demonstration of this, with one device acting as the teacher and two paired screens representing students. ClassFlow is the glue that holds them all together. Content can be shared between the teacher and students. In the demo, the ‘teacher’ shared content with the ‘student’ screens; students were able to interact with the content – for instance, annotating an image – and then send it back to the teacher for review. The teacher was also able to show the content on a larger screen.
