Cisco’s TelePresence systems are quite extraordinary. Cisco employees hold thousands of meetings every year via these high end video conferencing rooms, saving the company hundreds of millions in travel costs and significantly boosting productivity. Cisco managers recently invited me to give a presentation to a group of Canadian business executives via TelePresence. The day was devoted to the topic of innovation, so I was invited to present on the topic of my new book, The Innovation Secrets of Steve Jobs

The executives watched my presentation from an auditorium at a Cisco campus in Toronto while I was seated in a fourth floor Telepresence conference room at Cisco’s headquarters in San Jose, California. The photograph below is what the audience saw from Toronto. These photograph doesn’t do justice to the quality of the image. When you’re actually speaking via Telepresence, it looks and feels as though you are literally facing each other in the same room even though you are thousands of miles apart.

The following is a Flip camera recording at the end of the presentation. The organizer, Cisco’s Satoshi Takano, is thanking the audience for participating and explaining how the technology is used by Cisco employees every day. Now I what Cisco means when it says TelePresence allows you to experience the meeting, not the technology.