Thanks to an insightful post from colleague Irwin Lazar, I found the story below based on John Chamber's Interop keynote address.

Cisco's Chambers Predicts Dawn Of 'Telepresence
By Dan Neel
Courtesy of CRN

An advanced form of teleconferencing dubbed "telepresence" will become common in a year, Cisco Systems President and CEO John Chambers said Tuesday in a keynote speech at Interop Las Vegas 2006.

Telepresence blends high-bandwidth IP communications into a high-resolution video- and voice-conferencing system. Such solutions will be so refined that users will be able to detect subtle nuances in the responses of other participants and follow them around a room, according to Chambers.

Chambers’ prediction stems from his vision of "the rise of the empowered consumer and employee." Consumer entertainment technology is creating a culture of people accustomed to getting whatever content
they like whenever they want and on the devices they choose, he said. As employees, people also are demanding such capabilities in business technology, and the IT industry will respond by delivering high-end forms of business collaboration, he noted.

"Collaboration is going to be the productivity term for the next decade, and the empowerment of the employee base will drive this," Chambers said

For those of us who pay close attention to the blossoming criticality of issues like presence on the net, Chamber's thoughts on telepresence, especially the statement I bolded above, signal Cisco's understanding of some key needs business users face.