For Immediate Release

Contact:
Howard S. Lichtman
Human Productivity Lab
+1-512-828-7317
HSL (at) HumanProductivityLab (dot) com

Ashburn, Va., August 9^th, 2006 – The Human Productivity Lab, an independent research firm and consultancy specializing in the emerging telepresence industry, recently published a landmark paper on telepresence and effective visual collaboration.

The paper, Telepresence, Effective Visual Collaboration, and the Future of Global Business at the Speed of Light, written by the Lab's President and founder, Howard S. Lichtman, examines the technologies, ROI, vendors and future of telepresence, a technology with revolutionary implications on global business, outsourcing, distance learning, business travel and telecommunications.

Telepresence is a conferencing technology the makes participants feel as if they are in the same physical space even if they are actually separated by thousands of miles. Telepresence group meeting and distance learning environments usually feature combinations of the following improvements over traditional videoconferencing: life-size remote participants, fluid motion, accurate flesh tones, studio quality acoustics and lighting, true eye-contact or the approximation of eye-contact, and immersive and/or mirrored environments that establish a consistency-of-quality among disparate locations.

The paper comes a little over a month after Cisco Systems' CEO John Chambers announced he expected telepresence to be a multi-billion dollar product line for Cisco alone in the coming years. While Cisco has yet to release their product offering, HP recently upgraded its Halo Collaboration Studio with multi-location capabilities and access to interpretation services in over 150 languages, while the leading supplier of traditional videoconferencing equipment, Polycom, launched the Polycom RPX group telepresence system in May, and MedPresence launched a telepresence operating room and conference room for surgical education, physician consultation, and surgical device development in January.

The paper which predicts the accelerated adoption of telepresence and effective visual collaboration technologies due to dramatically higher oil prices and the higher cost of physical travel seems especially prescient with the price of London Brent crude having hit an all-time high this week of $78.64. The paper, finished in mid-June when oil was trading at $71.76 per barrel, addresses the effect of higher oil prices on commercial aviation and the potential effects of Peak Oil, Terrorism/Asymmetrical Warfare against Oil Production, and Expanded War in the Middle East.

The paper provides fascinating revelations into the telepresence industry:

• The industry has deployed or has "on-order" almost 300 group and distance learning telepresence systems with an average price the Lab estimates is greater than $250,000 per room. These rooms are being used for both intra-company collaboration and inter-company business with partners, vendors and customers on the same networks globally with systems deployed in at least 15 countries and growing.
• The companies deploying group telepresence solutions represent some of the world's best known firms, universities and medical facilities including: AIG, AMD, AOL, Barrow Neurological Institute, BHP Billiton, BP, CapitalOne, Cigna, Deloitte, DreamWorks, Duke University, Euronext, General Electric Commercial Finance, General Electric Healthcare, GlaxoSmithKline, Lazard, Novartis, Pearson, PepsiCo, PricewaterhouseCoopers, TGen, Vodaphone, The Royal Bank of Scotland and The University of Arizona among others.
• Specialized telepresence solutions have been developed for diverse applications such as neurological operating rooms, pharmaceutical research and film production.
• Whereas traditional videoconferencing systems average ~15 hours per month, per end-point whereas telepresence group systems are averaging from 120-275+ hours per month, per end-point with greater reported end-user satisfaction.

The Paper is available for free download at:
http://www.humanproductivitylab.com/telepresencepaper

This paper was sponsored by the following telepresence providers: ATK Services, Destiny Conferencing, Digital Video Enterprises, HP Halo Collaboration Studio, MedPresence, Polycom, Telanetix, Teliris.

About the Human Productivity Lab

The Human Productivity Lab is an independent research firm and consultancy covering the telepresence and effective visual collaboration industries.

With over 110,000 hits per month from over 65 different countries, the Lab's website at http://www.humanproductivitylab.com ranks as the number one site for news, research and analysis on the emerging telepresence industry. The site continues to grow at a rate of over 20 percent per month.

In 2007, the Lab will co-sponsor Telepresence World 2007, a landmark series of CXO-level conferences dedicated to the global telepresence revolution. Visit The Telepresence World 2007 Website for more information.

Though unequivocally pro-technology, the Lab tempers its enthusiasm with a firm understanding of technology's limits with respect to the all-too often neglected "Human Factors" of implementation.

While Productivity is our middle name we always put the Human First.

About the Author

Howard S. Lichtman (HSL) is a productivity-focused technologist and consultant with specialties in Telepresence and Visual Collaboration and Organizational & Personal Productivity. Prior to founding Human Productivity Lab in 2005, Mr. Lichtman was the Vice President of Business Development at TeleSuite, the world's first commercially successful telepresence provider and an innovator in visual collaboration.

Prior to TeleSuite, HSL was a founder, President, and Chief Product Officer at Powwow Networks a visual collaboration start up looking to improve the human factors, effectiveness, reliability, and cost of both visual and data collaboration. Before he developed his interest in telepresence and visual collaboration, HSL started and ran the financial vertical sales organization at Savvis Communications which specialized in managed networking and managed service solutions for trading floor technology and market data applications for Wall Street.

Download this press release as a .pdf file:
> 2006-08-09_whitepaper.pdf

Purchase bound, color hard copies of Telepresence, Effective Visual Collaboration and the Future of Global Business at the Speed of Light Here.