Back in February we opened the Austin outpost of GotVMail. Besides being an awesome city with tons to do, Austin has an amazing--and growing--talent pool from which we were able to draw some very strong team members. But having a group located thousands of miles away from us presented some unique challenges, like finding a way to communicate in real time that still made the Austin office feel like a part of GotVMail, and not some far-flung satellite location.
We'd used email, IM, and GoToMeeting in the past to communicate with mobile members of the GotVMail team, but the Austin office was a whole group of people, not just one person, and they'd need to feel like they were a part of the teams in Boston because, well, they actually were. If that interaction felt awkward or one dimensional, it might impact productivity. And we didn't want that.
After a bit of searching, I came upon LifeSize, a company that was, coincidentally, based out of Austin, Texas. LifeSize allows people to teleconference remotely with any device--Macs, PolyCom, Tandem, all the way through free clients available via IM and similar applications. You might think, "Video conferencing is not new--why is LifeSize so special?" It's special because it is ridiculously easy to set-up and outputs in high definition, yet it's sold for less than standard definition systems. In other words, it wouldn't make sense to choose anything but LifeSize if you were looking for outstanding visuals. As an added bonus, it crosses over all of the aforementioned platforms.
We use LifeSize regularly to talk to our Austin people, and even set it up at our company meeting in Boston so that we could include our Austin office in the gathering. Our Engineering team meets every day with their counterparts in Austin using LifeSize. LifeSize's website describes the system as being as "natural as being in someone's office," and it's actually true. Even the sound quality is amazing because of the high end base station that uses about twenty microphones and noise cancellation. I don't really think there's any way we could be happier with our Life Size stuff--except maybe if they came out with a teleporting feature. ;-)
(And yes, that is a Nintendo Wii in the first picture that is connected to the 52-inch Sharp Aquos LCD televison. The local Austin team has gotten very good at tennis and golf. On my next trip to the office I will have to challenge them to a game of Mario Kart racing.)
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