OVERVIEW

TelePresence World 2007
A landmark summit on the emerging technologies of Telepresence, Presence, and Unified Communications

“The future is already here. It’s just not very evenly distributed.”
-- William Gibson

Over the next decade, virtually every Global 5000 company will adopt a technology allowing them to interact with people, no matter how far away, as if they were in the same room. The technology is called telepresence, and a variety of Fortune 1000 organizations already use it, reporting both satisfaction and a strong return on their investment.

Telepresence meetings make remote participants life-size, with fluid motion, accurate flesh-tones and flawless audio. The experience feels remarkably natural and comfortable for almost any size meeting from two people to large classrooms. Telepresence solutions are easy to use and surprisingly handy for collaborating on spreadsheets, slide decks, documents or even physical objects with minute details. Specialized telepresence solutions for specific industries already exist, for settings as diverse as pharmaceutical research labs, movie and television studios, university-level distance learning, and neurological operating rooms.

Most importantly, telepresence solutions create a “business-class consistency-of-quality” between companies, universities, publicly available telepresence facilities, and other organizations on the same effective visual collaboration networks. This consistency-of-quality between locations when combined with the improved end-user acceptance and usage of telepresence solutions is creating a platform for effective Inter-company business connecting vendors, suppliers, customers and joint venture partners together for natural, comfortable, instantaneous global collaboration.

These networks are already growing rapidly. The Human Productivity Lab estimates that the number of deployed telepresence group systems more than doubled in 2006 and predicts that the number will more than double again in 2007. As more and more organizations join effective visual collaboration networks, the utility, value, and ROI of being connected to these networks grows, creating the same potential for exponential growth that characterized telephony and the Internet.

There is a killer on the loose under the covers of instant messaging, and no, it isn't malicious; it's a killer application that has the potential to revolutionize the way companies collaborate and communicate. The killer app is presence. - John Fontana, Network World

Complimenting and accelerating the telepresence revolution is an equally important revolution in Presence, the ability to know colleagues’ and partners’ availability and connect to them instantaneously, and Unified Communications, the integration of communications to a single in-box for voice, email, fax, webconferencing, video, and ultimately telepresence.

When combined, these technologies have already demonstrated the ability to dramatically improve workflow, save time, and accelerate time-to-market advantage through the ability to: • Reliably reach co-workers on the first try • Manage voicemail, email, and faxes from the same inbox • Instantaneously escalate IM sessions into collaborative    video and/or webconferences • Simplify the calendaring of meetings, webconferences, and    videoconferences/telepresence • Improve the ability of roadwarriors and teleworkers to stay    connected to colleagues

In the flat world, more and more business will be done through collaboration within and between companies... The next layers of value creation - whether in technology, marketing, biomedicine, or manufacturing - are becoming so complex that no single firm or department is going to be able to master them alone... - Thomas Friedman, The World is Flat

TelePresence World 2007: A Critical Summit

This landmark summit, a high-level conference and trade exhibition, will bring together telepresence, presence, and unified communications industry leaders and major end-users from around the globe. Each will have the opportunity to debate and discuss the revolutionary technological developments that have brought telepresence from the realm of science fiction to the reality of everyday business. Through your sponsorship of this event, we invite you to be a catalyst, as, for example, corporate CEO’s and CIO’s exchange ideas, counter challenges, and shape a vision for implementation throughout the business and consumer worlds. Don’t miss this opportunity to elevate and set your company apart, by becoming a key player in helping to set the course for these key industries.

Concurrent Exhibition

To demonstrate the power of Telepresence, Presence and Unified Communications to bridge distance and bring people together, TelePresence World 2007 will include a concurrent public exhibition, to be held on the university grounds.