Money for Nothing…And My Cisco TelePresence for Free?
For the Cisco family (customers, partners, suppliers and partners), TelePresence reached the “must have” technology category in the past year. Many have called it “Cisco’s iPod,” as it defines a new market around rich video collaboration.
Although the primary use case for TelePresence is business collaboration, in the past few years we also used TelePresence to facilitate a global dialogue around climate change with former Vice President and Nobel Prize winner Al Gore and we positioned it to bring the NBA, NHL and now the NFL and sports fans a little closer.
Now we are asking the world why they want TelePresence. In fact we have made this a contest and offered $3000 and 5 hours of TelePresence to the winner.
This offers draws some pretty lofty goals, as one respondent wrote in:
“I want Cisco Telepresence to do transcontinental medical research. We will assist willing terminally ill patients in the US in experiencing many different ancient healing visual and auditory tele-medical procedures (from certain Asian and South American countries), that do not require touch, to help them live longer. When this research work is proven to be effective (if it is), then the results can be generalized to the entire global population, starting with us. This could save a lot of money expense on drugs in the terminally ill, and hopefully benefit others as well. The huge benefit will be the recording of the TelePresence of each patient.”
Others have decided that a fun angle would provide the winning entry.
Posted by Alan Cohen at 03:34PM PST
Tina Shakour Sep 24, 2009
I remember once asking someone if I had ever actually met them in person. We had “seen” each other over Telepresence and video for a year as co-workers, but never actually met face-to-face, though it took a minute for both of us to realize this!