Telepresence Options - Industry News

Cisco to introduce video-chat feature for televisions

Tue, 07 Jul 2009 17:04:12 -0500

By Rochelle Garner

Cisco Systems, facing waning demand for networking equipment from businesses, is working with phone and cable carriers on products and services that let consumers hold video conferences through their televisions.

The offerings, which build on Cisco's TelePresence corporate-video conferencing system, will debut within 12 months. In addition to holding video chats, users will also be able to exchange messages and leave videos for friends, said Ned Hooper, head of the consumer business at Cisco.

Cisco, the largest maker of networking gear, is accelerating its push into the consumer market. In May, the company bought Pure Digital Technologies, maker of the Flip video camera, for $590 million. Cisco plans to use software from that company to expand in the market for home-networking gear, camcorders and video applications, which will grow 50 percent to $60 billion by 2013, Hooper said.

"There's a big opportunity for us," Hooper, 42, said in an interview. "You will start to see very big growth numbers on top of the base consumer business we report every quarter."

Increased use of video would also benefit Cisco's main business of selling routers and switches that direct Web traffic. Slowing demand in that business has resulted in back- to-back sales drops at Cisco in the past two quarters. Video, which Chief Executive John Chambers has called "the killer app," needs more bandwidth than voice and data, pushing service providers and consumers to buy more gear to accommodate the bigger loads.

Internet traffic will grow fourfold by 2013 as video consumption increases, Cisco said last month. Video now accounts for a third of consumer Web traffic and will jump to 91 percent by 2013, Cisco said.

"The consumer market is very critical to Cisco," said Erik Suppiger, an analyst at Signal Hill Capital Group in San Francisco. "Enabling consumer devices to connect to the Internet is more strategic for Cisco than being a provider of the device itself." Suppiger rates Cisco shares "hold" and doesn't own any.

The consumer TelePresence products will integrate software from Pure Digital, Hooper said. The Flip software automatically uploads video to the Web when users plug the camera into a personal computer's USB drive. Hooper, who also runs Cisco's mergers and acquisitions team, said Cisco may provide a product that includes a camera and allows two-way video conversations.

While Pure Digital had sold more than 2 million Flip cameras, Cisco bought the closely held company mostly for the software, Hooper said. Cisco will focus less on delivering devices and more on helping customers such as AT&T and Verizon Communications offer video conferencing to consumers, he said.

Verizon's FiOS television and Internet services can already deliver video chat on televisions, said Eric Rabe, a spokesman for the New York-based company. "We think there's some great potential there," Rabe said. "It's certainly something we're interested in."

AT&T, based in Dallas, is also studying video chat, spokesman Fletcher Cook said. Both AT&T and Verizon declined to say whether they are working with Cisco and said they aren't ready to announce a service.

Cisco may struggle to challenge services such as eBay's Skype, said Jayanth Angl, a Toronto-based analyst with Info-Tech Research Group. Skype, which lets people make voice and video calls from their computers, has more than 443 million users and increased its revenue 21 percent in the first quarter.

Cisco will also face competition from consumer brands such as Apple, which offers videoconferencing through its iChat service, and Google, whose Gmail program includes video chat.

[via Mercury News]

Bringing Down the Conference Walls: Telepresence Q&A with Bob McCandless, CEO of BrightCom

Thu, 02 Jul 2009 13:30:30 -0500

By Amy Tierney, TMCnet Web Editor

Telepresence is quickly becoming a "must-have" IP technology for companies looking to lower travel costs and improve business operations. Beyond that, participants favor the solution for its ability to create "face-to-face" meetings across the globe, far beyond the confines of a conference room setting.

/form>To learn more about telepresence, its applications and the future of the market, TMCnet spoke with Bob McCandless, chief executive officer of BrightCom, pictured below, about the topic.

How do you define telepresence? What makes it stand apart from video conferencing?

For me, the difference is a simple one. Telepresence is the created illusion that all the participants are in the same room or environment. Video conferencing is one or more participants being broadcast into the receiver's environment. That is the basic difference. The "shared illusion" of telepresence makes communication much more natural. It removes the emotional separation that is part of the video conference experience. So, in any situation where person to person communication is important, telepresence is going to provide a much more enjoyable and productive experience.

How much has video conferencing and telepresence grown in popularity?

The market for both video conferencing and telepresence is growing at a phenomenal rate. Ira Weinstein at Wainhouse (News - Alert) Research is forecasting 50 percent year-over-year growth for the next five years for video conferencing and 100 percent year-over-year growth for Telepresence Systems. This kind of growth is simply amazing considering the current global economic slowdown. At BrightCom, we are currently seeing growth rates that are significantly exceeding these industry predictions for both our video conferencing and telepresence solutions.

What seems to be fueling the growth?

A major issue driving this growth is a need for corporations to reduce their expense budgets, and an obvious way to do that is to deploy video conferencing or telepresence systems. This also has the additional benefit of significantly reducing the carbon emissions associated with air travel. This is a great benefit for firms who are interested in lowering their carbon footprint.

Telepresence has a bigger benefit here though. Once a firm deploys a Telepresence solution, the ease of use, frequency of use, and quality of the experience can help a firm make key decisions faster and more accurate. This can help a company to be more competitive in today's challenging business landscape.

What potential exists for telepresence applications?

We are just starting to scratch the surface of how this technology can transform the world. The largest opportunity currently is to help business people communicate more quickly and accurately without traveling. This will have a major impact as more and more firms deploy telepresence solutions. Already, customers are coming to us constantly looking for telepresence and video conferencing because a firm they do business with has it and wants them to join their conferences.

Future potential includes technology advances that can make the Telepresence experience more and more real are on the horizon. The ability to bridge mobile devices such as theApple ( News - Alert) iPhone and desktop computer users into Telepresence meetings will make it simple to bring in a subject matter expert, in real time, regardless of their physical location. We have seen in the past how technologies that can drive the speed and value of communication garnered high adoption rates such as e-mail, instant-messaging, Twitter, etc. Telepresence is the ultimate expression of the human need to communicate with another person.

In what applications is video conferencing most used?

The most common use we see for video conferencing and telepresence is to reduce the costs and time loss associated with business travel. Another factor is the need to communicate in real time with video and data information. For instance, one of our customers is a large municipal police force that needed to have a method of linking all of their police chiefs across a large county with real time video communications. They also wanted to link their conference rooms with the police chiefs and to allow for the broadcast of all types of data from across the county, whether it was screen sharing, live or recorded video feeds, documents, etc. The BrightCom solutions were a perfect fit for this with our advanced data conferencing capabilities.

How does BrightCom stand apart from its competitors?

BrightCom is keenly focused on the "in conference room" experience. This means that anytime you step into a BrightCom enabled conference room, you will experience the simplest to use, and most advanced technology available. For most business people today, if they want to hold a meeting with conference room attendees and external participants, you would first start with the speaker phone; dialing into a conference call that was previously set up. Inevitably, one or more participants may not have received the dial in information. This can cause delays while "side calls" are made to get everyone on the audio call. Once that is accomplished, the Web conference fun begins; e-mail invites, pass codes, log-ins, downloads and a whole host of challenges that ultimately result in these dreaded words on the audio call: "do you see my screen? What do you see?" By now, you may be nearly 15 minutes or more into the allotted conference time. It is unlikely that the participants will now endure the additional hardship of turning on the video conference system in the room to allow attendees to see each other. his is why traditional video conference systems have such low utilization. Tragically for the company, the video conferencing system was the most expensive of the tools to purchase and gets almost no utilization compared with the speaker phone and Web conference tools.

At BrightCom, we approach things a little differently. When you enter one of our conference rooms, you simply push what we call the "big green button" on our remote. This starts a meeting which all users can join from their personal laptops by opening a web page. Audio calls can use the same speakers and microphones as the video conference so there is no additional conference call set up. Users love this experience as they can now share content in the room more easily even if there are no external participants. If an external participant wants to join in, they can join instantly with no additional steps. All conference tools are already on, including video conferencing, audio conferencing, screen sharing, document sharing, white boards, and many other features.

You recently launched a community forum for video conferencing and telepresence products, solutions and services. What is the forum's goal, and what do you want users to take away from it?

The forum is a place where people can share what they love and what they can't stand about the conferencing experience, whether it's Web or data conferencing, video conferencing, or Telepresence. Our team can answer questions and provide information while learning from our customers new and creative ideas to make our products more powerful and easier to use. We are a very customer centric organization. We listen intently to what our customers tell us and strive to incorporate their ideas into our product vision. The forum is another extension of that desire to listen.

Where do you see the future of telepresence solutions headed, and where does BrightCom fit in?

I firmly believe that Telepresence will more and more become part of our daily lives. We will all grow to expect that there is a room at our place of business where we go to be with other business associates that may be a world away. We will expect to be able to join into Telepresence meetings no matter where we are, if we so choose. BrightCom's vision also includes amazing ways to bring data and information into this meeting experience. Sharing documents, presentations, engineering diagrams, and other data at the same level of experience that Telepresence brings to video conferencing. The bottom line is making you feel that the other people are right there with you, in the same room, seeing the information you are sharing... a world where your conference room has no walls.

Amy Tierney is a Web editor for TMCnet, covering unified communications, telepresence, IP communications industry trends and mobile technologies. To read more of Amy's articles, please visit her columnist page.

[via TMCnet]

Polycom Solution Helps Power Regus Telepresence Suite

Tue, 30 Jun 2009 12:57:40 -0500

By Amy Tierney

The Regus Group, a provider of workplace solutions, has tapped a Pleasanton, Calif.-based company that offers telepresence, video, and voice solutions to equip its first publicly available telepresence suite.

Regus, which recently opened the Regus Telepresence Suite, has equipped the location with Polycom's RealPresence Experience High Definition telepresence system. The effort is part of a contract with Cable&Wireless Worldwide, an international communications company.

The deal, according to Polycom, is worth more than $44.9 million over five years.

Regus celebrated the launch of its Berkley Square location in London, including its first global telepresence suite. The site is the first in a larger roll-out that will include Polycom RPX telepresence suites in 14 cities. Following London, Regus plans to open Regus Telepresence Suites in Paris, Singapore, New York and San Francisco this summer, the company said.

"We are redefining the world of work, offering business of all sizes flexible, innovative and inspiring locations in which to meet, work and collaborate," said Mark Dixon, chief executive officer of Regus plc. in a statement. "In response to rising demand from these organizations we are augmenting and expanding our existing business lounge network around the globe, as we look to better enable the workers of today and tomorrow. The telepresence solution will play a fundamental role in helping us achieve this."

Regus currently offers a network of publicly accessible video conferencing rooms with more than 600 studios worldwide featuring Polycom video conferencing solutions. Polycom's RealPresence Experience technology gives companies a new level of intimate meeting experience. Specifically, it's designed to help helps people in different locations work as effectively as if they are in the same room, the company said.

"Adding Polycom immersive telepresence suites to Regus facilities provides a powerful combination of services available for businesses looking to extend their presence and support an increasingly dispersed and mobile workforce," said Bob Hagerty, chairman and chief executive officer at Polycom. "Because Polycom systems are based on established standards for video communication, Regus customers can use telepresence to connect with other Regus facilities, their own offices or with their customers, vendors and partners anywhere in the world."

Telepresence solutions are becoming more popular as businesses look to tighten costs in an economic downturn. They also help organizations better compete and address the so-called "green trend" by reducing the corporate carbon footprint, Polycom said.

To show the importance the technology is playing in the global environment, Polycom recently hosted an 'UltimateHD Fest,' in which customers and partners had the ability to interact with Polycom executives on a show floor of an industry event in Orlando, Fla. using telepresence solutions. The fest linked participants from regional events in Austin, Texas, New York, Sao Paolo, Brazil, and Santa Clara, Calif., the company said.

[via TMCnet]

Airlines adjust as demand slides

Wed, 24 Jun 2009 12:47:26 -0500

By Jorn Madslien

With industry officials and journalists flocking to Paris for this week's biennial airshow, British Airways flight 314 from Heathrow was overbooked.

Some passengers were told there were no seats available, though with compensation on offer, along with seats on later flights, this is a common practice that leaves many travellers happy, according to BA's duty manager.

These days, though, the tactic of turning away customers from flights they have paid for is one the airlines are rarely able to resort to.

Increasingly, as the recession continues to bite, BA and other airlines are flying with ever more empty seats, particularly in business class.

"Business travellers are flying much less," observes Chris Wills, aviation analyst with Ascend Worldwide.

"And when they do travel [they] are downgrading classes and moving towards the back of the aircraft."

This "massive decline in premium traffic" is bad news for airlines, who have long relied on business travellers bolstering their bottom lines and in some cases even subsidising those seated "behind the curtain".

"It has long been the fundamental truism of traditional airline economics that the majority of revenue comes from the front end of the aircraft," says Mr Wills.

November: down 11.5%
December: down 13.3%
January: down 16.7%
February: down 21.1%
Source: IATA. All figures year-on-year.

Sharp falls

Such cuts in families' and individuals' travel budgets have compounded the problems for the airlines.

"It's a very difficult environment for all airlines," says Willie Walsh, chief executive, British Airways.

Global passenger travel has fallen sharply this year, according to the International Air Transport Association (IATA).

IATA predicts passenger demand will contract by 8% to 2.06 billion travellers this year compared with 2.24 billion in 2008.

"With each day of the recession, the challenges for the air transport industry are mounting," says IATA's director general and chief executive, Giovanni Bisignani.

"Any time you go into a downturn, it's about getting the backlog in place, rather than acquiring new orders Randy Tinseth, vice president for marketing at Boeing's commercial planes division"

Less trade

The recession has also resulted in a sharp reduction in cargo demand, down 21.7% in April - a fifth consecutive month at more than 20% below previous year levels, according to IATA figures.

And although "business confidence is improving", air freight volumes are expected to remain low "until inventories adjust to more normal levels", IATA reasons.

"We have not yet seen any signs that recovery is imminent," says Mr Bisignani.

The airlines have responded by grounding planes and closing down routes. IATA predicts capacity will be reduced by 6% this year.

This should enable airlines to improve the match between supply to demand, and thus fly with fewer empty seats. The average passenger load factor stood at 74.4% in April, an improvement over March when it was 72.1%.

Nevertheless, IATA expects passenger yields to fall by 7% this year and cargo yields to decline 11%.

Fewer orders

Airlines are expected to clock up almost $9bn in losses this year, IATA predicts.

This does not bode well for the aircraft makers, most notably Airbus and Boeing. At previous air shows, both these two aerospace giants and other aircraft makers have routinely announced hundreds of fresh orders from airlines.

This year, expectations have been lowered.

Airbus last month said it expects to deliver "up to 300" aircraft in 2009, down from its earlier forecast of 300-400 orders, while last week Boeing - for the first time in more than a decade - lowered its 20-year forecast for the commercial aircraft market.

"Any time you go into a downturn, it's about getting the backlog in place, rather than acquiring new orders," says Randy Tinseth, vice president for marketing at Boeing's commercial planes division.

"This is a tough year for orders," agrees Airbus chief executive John Leahy.

"There will at least be a few announcements, but I can absolutely assure you it will be nothing like the 400 orders we had at last year's air show."

[via BBC News]

Panel on connecting Inter-company telepresence and videoconferencing networks at Telx CBX - NYC, June 25th

Tue, 23 Jun 2009 10:31:15 -0500

Telepresence Options Publisher and Human Productivity Lab President Howard S. Lichtman will be moderating a panel on Advanced Enterprise Video at the telx Customer Business Exchange (CBX) in New York City on Thursday, June 25th at the Marriott Marquis in Times Square. Information on the Telx CBX can be found here: http://www.telx.com/?q=media/telx_cbx

The panel will address how carriers and telepresence & videoconferencing managed service providers will be solving the problems of securely connecting disparate enterprise networks together at high speeds and low latencies for effective inter-company telepresence and videoconferencing.

Panelists Include:

Howard S. Lichtman - Moderator, Publisher, Telepresence Options & President, Human Productivity Lab

John Bartlett, Principal, NetForecast

Chris Carr, Global Director, Masergy

Rose Klimovich, VP of Product, Telx

Jason Redisch, Principal Architect, Virtela Communications

Monty Richardson, Business Development Specialist, IPV Gateways

Marc Trachtenberg, CEO, Teliris

3D Conferencing System Allows for Virtual Light Saber Duels

Mon, 22 Jun 2009 17:26:38 -0500

By Priya Ganapati

If your Wii boxing buddy or Star Wars light saber duel partner moved to a different town, technology can help bring you together for just one more game. Researchers at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign and Intel have created a system that can support collaborative physical activities from different geographical locations.

"We can capture motions of the human body in real time and bring them together on a big screen," says Ahsan Arefin, a doctoral student currently involved with the project.

The project called 'Tele-immersive Environment for Everybody' or TEEVE hooks up two off-the-shelf 3D cameras to a PC with a Firewire port. A gateway server at each site sends and receives the different video streams using standard compression techniques. A renderer is used to project the virtual interactions on a big screen monitor, creating a real-time virtual 3D effect. It's like web conferencing, but with a virtual reality twist.

The system was on display Thursday at an Intel Labs "research day" in Mountain View, California. At the event Intel showcased technologies the company is working on.

In their demonstration of the TEEVE idea, Arefin and his colleague stood in two opposite corners of a room with light sabers in hand. They had 3D stereo vision cameras called BumbleBee 2 pointed at them. As the duo dueled, they could see their 3D images captured and reflected on screen.

The idea has applications beyond gaming. It can be used in business, sports and medicine, says Arefin. An experiment by the University had two dancers from different locations dancing together on a large screen.

The system is part of the quest towards more visual computing, says Jack Gold, principal analyst with consulting firm J. Gold Associates.

"Moving to a visual environment, from the text heavy one we are in right now, is one of the most important issues that we have to deal with in computing," he says. "As they say, sometimes a picture is worth a thousand words."

The biggest challenge in the application for the researchers comes from the demand on computational and network resources that the system imposes. TEEVE uses real-time 3D reconstruction algorithms that are necessary to convert 2D frame images to 3D frame that also includes the depth information. To optimize it, researchers have used multi-threaded computation and Arefin says TEEVE can work on PCs with high-end Intel processors.

"Our goal is to make the system portable and easily deployable because of its use of off-the-shelf components," he says.

[via wired.com]

A Full-Color Screen That Bends

Sun, 14 Jun 2009 22:33:22 -0500

A new way to mass-produce flexible OLED displays could mean affordable commercial products.

By Prachi Patel

Flexible, full-color video displays could be closer to market because of a new advance by researchers at Arizona State University's Flexible Display Center (FDC) and at Universal Display, in Ewing, NJ. The researchers have made bendy organic light-emitting diode (OLED) displays employing processes and tools that are used to make today's flat-panel LCD screens. They demonstrated a new 4.1-inch video-quality display at the 2009 Society for Information Display conference last week.

Flexible video: The electronics behind a new flexible OLED display are made on tools used to manufacture LCD backplanes. The development brings bendable color video displays closer to being commercial products.
Credit: Mark Martinez

OLED displays, which are lighter and less power hungry than LCDs, are used in cell phones and MP3 players. OLEDs can also be printed on plastic and offer the promise of bright color screens that can be rolled up and stowed in gadgets, worn on wrists, or plastered on clothes. Electronics makers Sony, LG, and Samsung Mobile Display have unveiled small flexible prototypes over the past two years. But these are very expensive, mainly because there's no simple way to make high-performance flexible electronics that go behind OLED pixels.

Researchers at FDC have adapted the process used to make LCD electronics. A transistor acts as the switch behind each pixel, turning it on or off. Transistors for LCD pixels are made on glass screens at high temperatures--a tricky process for plastic substrates, says Nicholas Colaneri, director of FDC. "We've found a novel means of handling the plastic so it can be fed into conventional manufacturing equipment," he says. This should make flexible displays almost as cheap as LCD displays, Colaneri notes.

The faster the transistors work, the better for video-quality displays. The transistor material's mobility determines how much current it can carry and how fast it switches. Previous flexible display prototypes use either organic thin-film transistors that have low mobilities or exotic metal-oxide materials that are hard to work with.

In the new display, the FDC researchers use amorphous silicon, the material of choice for current LCD electronics. Amorphous silicon has a higher mobility than most organic semiconductors, and transistors made from the material are more reliable. But its mobility isn't as high as that of polysilicon, which is used to make transistors for ultra-high-performance LCD screens, and OLEDs need high current to emit brightly. So the researchers use Universal Display's phosphorescent OLEDs, which are four times as efficient as conventional OLEDs, converting nearly 100 percent of electricity into light.

The researchers use the same equipment that is employed to make electronics on glass screens for LCDs. They glue plastic on a piece of glass, make the thin-film transistors on the material, and then peel off the plastic. "We've only added two extra steps: gluing and peeling," Colaneri says.

LCD electronics are processed at temperatures of above 300 °C, which can melt plastic. The FDC process works at a relatively low temperature of 180 °C. The process has required a lot of fine-tuning. The temperature is low enough that amorphous silicon transistors typically don't perform well. "A lot of people have not been able to get good-quality amorphous silicon transistors at low temperatures," says Mark Hartney, chief technical officer at the FlexTech Alliance, a display-industry consortium. "That's really unique about what [FDC] have done."

Yet at temperatures above 100 °C, "plastic tends to melt or stretch or wrinkle, so there's distortion," says Jennifer Colgrove, an analyst with the consulting firm DisplaySearch. "What's significant here is that they can build amorphous silicon transistors on plastic with almost no distortion."

Hartney says that this is a good starting point for manufacturing bendable OLED displays on a commercial scale. "Amorphous silicon is a mainstream tech for LCD manufacturing around the world today," he says. "This opens the doors to being able to utilize any LCD fabrication facility. There has been billions of dollars of investment in LCD manufacturing capacity. You could go into any other LCD fab around the world and do the same process to get a flexible OLED product."

[via Technology Review]

The Display That Watches You

Sat, 06 Jun 2009 11:01:59 -0500

Researchers in Germany have created a display that doubles as a camera.

By Kate Greene

For decades, engineers have envisioned wearable displays for pilots, surgeons, and mechanics. But so far, a compact wearable display that's easy to interact with has proved elusive.

Researchers at Fraunhofer Institute for Photonic Microsystems (IPMS) have now developed a screen technology that could help make wearable displays more compact and simpler to use. By interlacing photodetector cells--similar to those used to capture light in a camera--with display pixels, the researchers have built a system that can display a moving image while also detecting movement directly in front of it. Tracking a person's eye movements while she looks at the screen could allow for eye-tracking control: instead of using hand controls or another form of input, a user could flip through menu options on a screen by looking at the right part of the screen. The researchers envisage eventually integrating the screen with an augmented-reality system.

"We can present an image and, at the same time, track the movement of the user's eye," says Michael Scholles, business unit manager at Fraunhofer's IPMS. "This is of great interest for all kinds of applications where your hands are needed for something else, like a pilot flying an aircraft or a surgeon wanting to access vital parameters while performing a surgery."

Eye-tracking technology is nothing new, of course. Over the years, researchers have developed a number of systems that follow a person's gaze to allow him or her to interface with a computer. Often, the applications are for physically impaired people, but they can also be designed for a general computer user.

Additionally, researchers have been developing wearable display systems for years, but for the most part, these have been clunky, power hungry, and not entirely practical to use, says Alexander Sawchuk, a professor of electrical engineering at the University of Southern California. "Anything that can be done to make [wearable displays] more compact or lighter weight and low power is important," he says. And integrating a display and a camera on one chip is a step toward this, he says.

[via Technology Review]

AVI-SPL Teams Up with TelePresence Technologies

Thu, 04 Jun 2009 02:12:45 -0500

By Pro AV Staff

AVI-SPL has teamed up with TelePresence Technologies, a provider of 3D telepresence solutions, to advance collaborative systems and solutions, and expand the options available for effective, worldwide communications over an array of markets, according to company officials.

"This relationship represents a full complement to AVI-SPL's services, now with the distinct advantage of fully customizable solutions through highly valued telepresence communications," said John Zettel, CEO for AVI-SPL, in a statement.

According to AVI-SPL, but integrating TelePresence Tech systems, clients can receive the benefit of aligned eye contact and exceptional quality, with direct viewing of life-sized participants appearing in a 3D setting.

"With the production capacity of our 200,000-square-foot manufacturing facility, we have chosen to team up with the largest integrator in the U.S. to achieve our goal of delivering a high volume of telepresence systems at competitive pricing," said Duffie White, CEO of TelePresence Tech, in a statement.

[via proavmagazine.com]

Telstra E&G makes big push into telepresence

Thu, 28 May 2009 13:53:18 -0500

by Stuart Corner

Telstra Enterprise and Government gathered about 500 customer representatives at a breakfast briefing in Sydney to promote the benefits of high definition videoconferencing.

The host of the meeting, Telstra's executive director for convergent sales, Paul Geason, told the gathering that Telstra E&G would be making a big push into high definition videoconferencing, generally known as telepresence, in response to market demand "video, video, video is what we are hearing," he said.

For the event Telstra set up a three way telepresence conference using technology from strategic partner Cisco, in what for many of those attending may well have been their first encounter with the technology. The conference linked a Cisco executive in San Jose and one from Telstra's other strategic partner, Microsoft, in North Sydney.

Geason told iTWire that Telstra E&G how had about 20 customers in various stages of installing their own telepresence facilities and that, in July Telstra would launch a 'business-to-business-exchange that would enable different customers to set up telepresence conferences between their respective facilities.

He told the audience "in Telstra we have deployed a significant amount of high definition telepresence and it is becoming fundamental to the way we work." He added that his travel budget had been cut by 50 percent, "I'm lucky to be here today." (Luckier certainly than another Telstra executive at the meeting who complained to iTWire that his travel budget had been cut to zero!)

While the travel cost savings and 'green' benefits of videoconferencing are well known, Geason claimed that the technology actually improved meetings. "What is most exciting about this is that the quality of the interaction is enhanced. There is nowhere to hide in an immersive high definition telepresence experience."

Other, global, carriers such as Tata Communications have recently launched videoconferencing services based around Cisco TelePresence technology and have gone further in setting up a global network of public telepresence meeting rooms which can be hooked into meeting rooms in customer premises.

Geason said that Telstra E&G had telepresence rooms in Sydney and Melbourne which customers could hire by the hour but that this was more a courtesy service and sales tool than a full commercial offering, and that Telstra had no plans to launch a full commercial telepresence service. "Providing that first experience to potential customers is very important, but our focus at the moment is on customers deploying themselves," he said.

He also played down the possibility of Telstra interconnecting telepresence facilities with those operated by overseas carriers in order to facilitate a global teleconference. "That is technically possible the question is whether it is strategically or commercial sensible is another matter."

However he said Telstra did face the challenge of providing and supporting telepresence facilities overseas for its multinational customers. "We are thinking now about how we support our customers in Asia and the US and in Europe in terms of the deployment and management of [telepresence]. That will be our first investment. How that plays out in terms of bilateral arrangements with other carriers is not something we are focussed on at the moment."

[via itwire.com]