Being an employee of Cisco, I've had the opportunity to use Cisco's Telepresence system about half a dozen times now. It's a truly remarkable way to communicate with customers and business colleagues while saving travel time and cost. But, as usual, Josh Bernoff noticed something interesting about the experience that hadn't occured to me. In his blog post Josh describes the persuasive effect that a realistic visual experience like Telepresence can have... "look someone in the eye and if you're right, they can see it. Telepresence can be persuasive." And if you're wrong the same thing is probably true. It's a powerful tool, probably more powerful than we have even begun to realize yet. That time we're saving in not having to travel to a meeting is likely to get redirected at making what we say on a Telepresence call more meaningful and better able to pass the "look someone in the eye" test.