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Meeting Jets
"In preparation for landing, please check to make sure your seat belt is securely fastened, and your seat back and tray table are in the full upright and locked position, and shut your pie hole and turn off the videoconferencing system."
Have you ever called someone on your cell phone while you secretly walked up to him or her? Surprise! What a fun trick! Oh the laughs! ...Well, it seems a cloud-computing analyst from Gartner wants to do that with jets. That's right: instead of making a cell phone call and walking up to the called person to surprise, an analyst from Gartner, we'd conject, wants to hop on a jet, have a videoconference meeting with someone, then go surprise them with his face-to-face presence. Oh the fun! The Gartner analyst demanded of John Chambers of Cisco at a recent conference, saying, "I want to be on a plane and have TelePresence in front of me," to which Chambers replied, "Well, the answer is, you are probably going to."
We don't make this stuff up. Here's the title and link, folks: Cisco CEO sees videoconferencing on planes within 18 months Maybe this cloud-computing stuff is getting a little too literal for some. We can see the report for $2995: Cloud-Meetings - An Emerging Market. Or the webinars: Hosting Effective Web Events in the Sky.
Let's see here... Burn more jet fuel and increase carbon emissions? CHECK. Increase ticket prices for expensive TelePresence systems? CHECK. Create annoyance for other passengers? CHECK. Provide awkward self-consciousness and privacy issues for the person videoconferencing from the ground? CHECK. What a great idea!
Maybe our idea we "gifted" to Cisco about Telattepresence isn't so bad after all. The "third place" of Starbucks just might be followed by the "fourth place" of gathering on planes to have videoconferences. To get the ball rolling, we'd suggest putting Telepresence monitors on the back of every seat in this plane.
Can't we just get cell phone and web access first?
October 15, 2008
