Carol Daunt from LearnTel discusses how recent advances in telepresence technologies are helping companies create a sense of shared presence among distributed teams, and points to likely next steps, including teleimmersion that will radically alter our concept of time and geography in the workplace.

Believe it or not, telepresence is not new. It has been more than a decade since the first telepresence solution was introduced to the public. For most of that time, the telepresence market consisted of a handful of small technology companies providing relatively unknown solutions to a small and exclusive list of clients.

Telepresence: An exciting new solution raising some very old concerns

While telepresence solutions have been around since 1999 or even earlier, the telepresence industry really cleared the launch pad in 2006 when HP and Cisco entered the market, creating much fanfare, huge amounts of publicity and piquing the interest of senior level executives. And while some marketing materials would lead you to believe that telepresence is not videoconferencing, in reality telepresence is simply the Rolls Royce of videoconferencing.