Meet you on the web
Home » Magazine » Good, issue 2 » The goods » Meet you on the webIn a case of happy timing, videoconferencing technology has come of age just as climate change leads many to question the need for business travel. Chris Keall looks at the options
Business travel is no fun anymore. The last time I flew out of San Francisco, a bomb threat—quickly identified as a hoax, but which presented Homeland Security with an excellent opportunity for a drill—meant every passenger, and piece of luggage, on my flight had to be taken off the plane and re-checked. Several hours later, we were re-planed while the Homeland crew clapped each other. My fellow passengers and I were mad enough to kill.
Despite persistent dreams of poolside, post-convention cocktails, I’m usually pretty grumpy with business travel. My eyes going raw as hotel air conditioning follows aeroplane air conditioning; the security delays (“my shoes and my belt?”); that dehydrated jet-lag feeling as I stare at a hotel room that looks nothing like the one on the website; the office politics passing me by as I wrestle withan overpriced hotel internet connection, wiling away an ocean of down-time.
Now, of course, there’s also the green dimension. Let’s relive my trip as it affected the planet.
The carbon cost
First, the drive from my central Auckland home to the airport: half an hour, at an average of 40kph, produced 6.8kg of CO2—repeated by the cab home a week later (another 6.8kg).
Once on the aeroplane, five minutes of taxiing burned about 45 litres of fuel, of which 0.3kg of CO2 emissions were produced for moving just the Keall butt (for how fuel burn per passenger is worked out, plus an emissions calculator for many routes and plane types, see the International Civil Aviation Organisation website, www.icao.int).
The intense first five minutes of ascent burned about 650 litres (my emission share was 9.9kg); 12 hours of cruising to San Francisco about 31,000 litres (206kg); the final ten minutes of landing around 1,300 litres (19.8kg); and five more minutes of taxiing 45 litres (0.3kg). Once in San Fran, I was environmentally friendly enough to take the train into the city, but on the way back, I had to take a one-hour connecting flight to LA (another 37kg of CO2).
All up, my trip produced 287.9kg of emissions. That’s a lot of carbon to go and watch some PowerPoints.
Of course, if I’d chosen to stay at home, Air New Zealand could well have sold my seat to somebody else. But if enough people choose a virtual alternative like videoconferencing, it could make a difference. Let’s check out the non-travelling options.
The virtual alternative
Desmond Morris types reckon around 90% of communication is through body language. For the first serious wave of videoconferencing software—born out of 9/11 stay-at-home hysteria—this was often a problem (and it still is, for most products). Poor resolution and poorer bandwidth meant it was sometimes a challenge to see someone’s lips moving, let alone pick up non-verbal cues that would be obvious during a face-to-face meeting.
Cisco’s TelePresence 3,000 videoconferencing product gets around this problem by using three giant 65-inch plasma screens to display life-size images of the people you’re talking to. The images are high-definition (1,080p) and participants at each location sit at an identical half-table sold as part of the deal, forming a virtual round—or at least oval—table.
An overhead camera can be used for close-ups on an object, like a garment sample. For more meet-and-potatoes tasks like PowerPoint sharing, both sides get a slideshow or document projected onto the table.
At a demo, I found the quality mind-blowing. The video—streaming from San Jose on a 40Mbit/s leased line into Cisco’s Auckland office—was silky smooth. You can literally see the sweat on somebody’s brow, or the time on their watch. It’s an alluring preview of our future … sometime when everybody can access, and afford, mind-blowingly fast broadband connections.
How to video call with Skype
1. Install
Download and install Skype from skype.com (just click the download tab) and run the set-up application as instructed. You’ll need to choose a Skype username (your actual name is fine). If you already have Skype installed, upgrade to the latest version (open Skype, click Help then Check for updates).
2. Enable
In Skype, click Tools, then Options, then go to the Video Settings tab. Tick the box for Enable Skype video. You’ll need either a built-in camera (many new laptops have these) or a webcam (Skype recommends Logitech, a reputable brand available at Noel Leeming for around $80).
3. Call
Add as a ‘contact’ the person you want to video call (click Tools then Add a contact, enter their full name or email address and click Find). Of course, the person you want to video chat with will also need Skype and a webcam. Start a video call by clicking the video icon on the right of the contact’s name.
4. Smile
If video doesn’t start automatically when they answer, click Start my video at the bottom of the call screen. Position yourself in front of your webcam and smile. Webcams are notoriously unflattering: don’t sit with light behind or above you; face a window so natural light hits your face and reduces shadows.
5. Go large
Under the main video window showing your friend’s face (or favourite stuffed animal), click the Menu button. Go to View, then choose Full Screen Video for a life-size conversation.
For simple conversations, the quality is breathtaking. So is the price: you’ll pay up to US$500,000 for the full three-screen set-up at each end. That’s big money of course, and in its first couple of months on sale in New Zealand there have been no takers. But Cisco has sold more than 500 units in under 18 months worldwide, outstripping a similarly spectacular product from HP called Halo, which was co-designed with DreamWorks (not yet available in NZ … though HP could probably work something out if you had the cash).
Cisco NZ says Auckland’s Westin hotel may join an international scheme that sees Telepresence rooms rented for around $500 an hour, which would definitely make good economic and environmental sense for a small business.
Cisco NZ’s country head Geoff Lawrie is already using Telepresence to avoid his previous schedule of monthly trips to Sydney (like so many New Zealand businesses today, Cisco’s NZ office is an extension of the company’s Australian office). As well as the carbon benefits of Geoff staying put, it’s a much more economic use of his highly paid time. He’s previously travelled to Sydney for a single hour-long meeting, the trans-Tasman travel turning the rest of the day into a lost cause.
Free with Skype
If you don’t have half a mill burning a hole in your pocket, then try the free alternative. You’ve probably heard about Skype, the software that lets you make free voice calls over the internet to another Skype user or, if you take an $8 subscription, call any regular phone number in New Zealand for free, and make international calls at local rates.
Skype 3, the most recent release (download it from skype.com) adds support for video calls, usable with a regular webcam ($30 to $100) and any PC. Resolution and performance is so-so, and highly dependent on the bandwidth at both ends.
The major media company I work for won’t let me use Skype for my job, citing security concerns (not that I can imagine a rival publication assembling a Mission Impossible crew of hackers to overhear my ramblings), but I do use it for video calls to my brother in London.
It’s very easy to set up, and easy to use (see box, left). Skype also comes with a chat utility, plus the ability to send files to each other as you conference. Along with the simple video call programs that come with Microsoft Messenger, Yahoo Messenger and Google Chat, Skype could be your best option for simple videoconferences with different branches of your own company—or any caller who’s comfortable with occasionally dodgy quality.
Skype says the popularity of its video calls has doubled recently, with video now accounting for 28% of its traffic. Version 4.0 of Skype, which is still very much in beta (I wouldn’t recommend installing it yet) adds more video features, such as a big video window by default.
Mac users get video call capability out of the box with iChat, but the built-in camera also works with Skype for Mac-to-PC conversations.
Live Meeting
The next step up the video conferencing food chain is a product like Microsoft’s Live Meeting. One big advantage over Skype is that Live Meeting supports ‘multipoint’ videoconferences—or people joining the video call from more than two locations (known as point-to-point in geek-speak). Another is that Live Meeting lets everybody see the same document on their screen, alongside the video, and even collaboratively work on it—or at least annotate it with a virtual marker pen.
Like Skype, Microsoft Live Meeting is designed to work with a bog-standard 640×480 webcam, so the video quality is functional, not Spielbergian. Microsofties say that given today’s bandwidth—or at least what all but the biggest corporates can afford— Telepresence-level quality is pointless.
For the full Live Meeting effect, you have to use the product in conjuction with Microsoft’s Unified Communications suite of products, which are included ‘free’ with the Pro version of Microsoft Office.
Set-up is not for newbies, but a number of companies have sprung up that specialise in ‘unified communications’ such as videoconferencing, including Zeacom and IPFX, and larger IT outfits like Gen-i and HP now have teams that specialise in Microsoft Unified Communications (as well as an equivalent mid-level product from Cisco).
Part of me does wish I was on Microsoft’s latest press junket (Paris … le sigh). But until somebody invents Star Trek-style teleportation, videoconferencing has emerged as a very workable, environmentally friendly alternative.
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