Five years ago Ivan Bowman moved 800 miles away from his office.

First he & his coworkers tried email, phone calls, IM but it all felt very detached. ‘Out of site, out of mind’, they found.

Then they set up a ‘video portal’ in his old cube. This seems like a cool idea of giving the telecommuting person a physical home w/in the office. People can still drop by for chats. Meetings can easily be held there. The problem they found was the ambient watercooler conversations he couldn’t partake in. (although apparently he could hear very well – enough to hear those hallway conversations but not be able to contribute. how frustrating that must have been!).

The 3rd solution seems to be the winner. Now having a year’s worth of usage – ivan’s robot is working. A coworker put together a robot with webcam, laptop and enough batteries to last the work day. the robot can roam the halls, go to meetings, etc. it sounds like the perfect match of virtual & physical.

link: http://www.telepresenceoptions.com/2008/05/send_your_robot_to_work/

i haven’t been posting to this blog – work has been overwhelming but the project i’ve been working on for about 8 months finally went live this past week – so pulling out a few items i had socked away…

cisco & musion teamed up to create this holographic video conferencing. how insanely cool!!

i do a fair amt of work over the phone. while we have a video conference with one of our other offices – it’s not very good. the video doesn’t show body language very well but the biggest issue is the audio. wonder how these 300k systems sound?

more here:
http://www.humanproductivitylab.com/archive_blogs/2007/11/15/cisco_experimenting_with_an_on_1.php

and an article on other systems

the other week i had to put together an operational plan for my department. as i was in the middle of a massive project and already overworked, i did it the evening before i had to present it. and i knew a powerpoint was kind of expected.

i put together a pack of photos. headings, yes. relevant images, yes. other words, no. bullet point lists, no (unless you count the TOC). it was definitely a first draft (and something i need to go back to) but i’m struggling with the visuals communicating all i spoke about. especially if someone else needs to talk about the plan.

tonite i stumbled upon garr reynolds slidepack on john media’s book brain rules. slides below. i think ill have to go back to that pack based on the excellent tips w/in the pack (ie the content) and the ideas i’ve gotten from just watching the slides.

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Science Daily has an article re: use of IM is good for reducing interruptions (which we know is good for productivity).

It seems IM created conversations which were shorter than if the person had called or had a face to face conversation. People who used IM felt they were interrupted less. Finding out when people were available to have a longer conversation or to get quick answers were some of the IM uses mentioned.

Quite a great finding for those companies who still block IM b/c it’s seen as a productivity drain.

The study, by researchers at Ohio State U & U of California, has been published in the Journal of Computer Mediated Communication. It involved 912 randomly selected participants from 12 metro areas who worked at least 30 hours per week in an office and used a computer for at least five hours in a workday.