The Pond, an Octopz blog on communication, collaboration and coworking online.

This wonderful image popped up earlier this week in a BoingBoing post about a French collection of illustrations from 1910 depicting the year 2000. The caption (loosely translated from French) reads “communication using a film projector, phonograph and telegraph”.

A more current illustration of teleconferencing or “telepresence”, to use the mot du jour, showed up in a New York Times article back in May. It shows Cisco employees in two different geographic locations meeting virtually using the company’s high-end TelePresence 3000 system, which sells for a hefty $300,000 per installation (you’d need at least two to use it).

But fear not the big price tag. According to a recent announcement by Cisco, the price of such progress is expected to trickle down within two or three years to a more consumer-frendly $1000 for a home version that uses the large high-definition TV that’s already hanging in the living room. I can only begin to imagine the possibilities of running Octopz on such a system.

Now if you’ll excuse me I have to go and collaborate online with some colleagues to sketch out that vision, using the webcam and whiteboard in the current version of Octopz. Technology is great, especially when you don’t have to wait for the next big thing to get some work done here and now.

Technorati Tags: cisco, communication, Octopz, online collaboration, teleconferencing, telepresence

This entry was posted on Friday, September 14th, 2007 at 5:43 pm and is filed under Communication. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.