I have written about the virtual trade show company Unisfair before
SAP has been hosting a marketing community meeting and over 2,000 folks have registered, and by attending the meeting virtually are estimated to have saved over 12,000 travel hours and over 450,000 miles - or 72 tons of CO2.
Several Enterprise Irregulars were among the presenters.
The HP Halo Room and the Cisco Telepresence 3000 (photo below- click to enlarge) are already starting to
change the way groups of people meet. As a Cisco exec puts it "“This is life-size, with 1080p video resolution,..... The technology melts away and you feel you’re in the room with
the people on the other side of the table, down to the smallest facial
expression (on the 3 60 inch TVs)”
HP's is a cool $250K plus a monthly fee, Cisco's around $ 300K. Cisco also sells a smaller version for one-on-one meetings for $ 80K.
Not cheap, but neither are business class airfares, especially international. Not to mention the wear and tear and time away from office.
Expect folks like Kinko's, and likely hotels to also jump in to the opportunity. And if airlines are smart they should get in to their own telepresence centers. Can you imagine the loyalty is dad can come home for dinner and still get miles to take to faraway places on vacations?
Update: March 24: At VoiceCon I saw telepresence products from Polycom - in a larger theater setting. I also heard Cisco and HP are in discussions with hotel chains (HP with Marriott) and chains such as Kinko's to buy telepresence as a hourly "service". Finally, I saw the Siemens offering, which could be disruptive to this young market. While the others are offering A380s and 747s which work fine for "trunk" routes Siemens may be offering the 737 for the market to cover a much wider market. See my write up on Siemens offering here.
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