Video conferencing rooms available to public by Zuzana Zelenakova

Cisco System Inc., a multinational corporation designing and selling networking and communications technology and services, has come to the market with quite an interesting offer for the broad public. It began renting video conferencing rooms, also called TelePresence rooms. Conferencing rooms use high-definition cameras and monitors in order to create the illusion of a face-to-face meeting among users in different locations. You can currently find such public suites in Taj Hotels, which is a worldwide chain of luxury hotels and resorts and part of Tata Group, one of India´s largest business conglomerates, also in Boston, London, Santa Clara in California. The use of the conferencing rooms will be charged on an hourly basis, so that those of us who cannot afford to spend from $34,000 to $300,000 on these wonders of modern communications technology will pay from $299 to $899 an hour according to the size of the room. The largest of them can take 18 people. By the end of the year the company plans to have another 100 rooms available to the customers including in Pierre Hotel in New York. It is a great advantage also for businesses, because it brings the chance to use TelePresence conferencing for those companies which do not use it often enough to justify building its own suite. Thus the companies will save money on travel. “It’s not just the cost and it’s not just the time,” David Martella, vice-president of retail TelePresence services for Cisco, said. You can avoid the frustrating security and check-in queues at the airport, money for the accommodation and cabs, and so on. There are also social and environmental benefits. The suites “greatly expand the capability of keeping in touch with loved ones on the road” according to Peter Quinlan, director of managed TelePresence services with Tata Communications.


related story: http://news.yahoo.com/s/nm/20081015/tc_nm/us_cisco_telepresence;_ylt=AqYuK1VKnOlgbGuB5sLW2eus0NUE

by Zuzana Zelenakova for PocketNews (http://pocketnews.tv)

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