Last week, Dave and I were approached by the Technology Director of Gorham Public Schools, in Gorham, Maine, Dennis Crowe, with a problem he was trying to solve. Dennis, a longtime customer and friend, was concerned about a student in his district who was homebound due to illness, and he was trying to find a way to have her education and life at school continue as normally as possible. He said he had tried using Skype or Facetime, but was having audio issues coming from background noise. He tried different software online for video conferencing, but honestly, nothing was working and it was just becoming frustrating for the teacher and the student. So Dennis asked us if we knew of anything that might work that he could buy, any way to separate the audio from the background noise, or any advice we could give.
Dave and I left the event wondering what we could do to help, trying to think of possibilities or solutions to help Dennis, the teacher and the student. Then Dave remembered something he had seen a few years back at Infocomm – a robot from a company in Nashua, NH called VGo. VGo specializes in telepresence robots – ideal for distance learning – or just anywhere that you might have a remote person needing to be a part of the conversation or presentation as well. It’s a really cool company – and their office has tons of iterations of previous VGo robots in it, so you can see the evolution of the product.
After a bunch of back and forth with their sales team, we were able to get a robot to donate to Gorham Public Schools! The more exciting part though was seeing Dennis and the rest of the schools reaction – they were truly floored that we were able to do it for them. It’s fun being around cool technology all day, but it’s even better working for a company that wants to help people and do the right thing; at the end of the day it’s about how the technology helps the people around you.
See more about VGo here: http://www.vgocom.com/
