There was a fun article in the Pioneer Press this weekend (Live from (wherever)! It’s your 9 a.m. staff meeting!) on videoconferencing starting to come into its own.

As the article points out the time is right for videoconferencing – gas prices are sky high, there’s a focus on reducing our carbon footprints with less travel and terrorism scares make travel inconvenient. And videoconferencing vendor have stepped up their game to take advantage of the opportunity.

The article takes a look at Telepresence, a concept I’ve read about for almost two years but never seen. The idea is that Telepresence will make it feel as if remote meeting attendees into the room with you. I know that Bernadine Joselyn mentioned it after his trip to the Killer App conference in May, 2007 and she was impressed.

Video Guidance is a company in Eden Prairie that sells video conferencing systems. Telepresence is the very high end of their offerings. It sounds as if it’s pretty expensive and new – but the popularity of other videoconferencing systems in places such as Target Corporate gives me the impression that the high end systems are just around the corner. The system costs $200,000 but for a large company it would be easy to recoup that costs.

Just for the heck of it I checked to see what roundtrip flight to Chicago (from St Paul) would cost tomorrow – $822. So my expenses for the day would easily be $1000 add in salary and you can see how it would add up.

The article also mentions that broadband has made this all possible so the assumption is that users on both ends would have ready access to broadband- and we’re working on that.