A new study exploring how the UK can cut back on its annual carbon dioxide transmissions by focusing on the transport sector has been published, predicting how the use of technology such as video conferencing as well as financial and behavioural changes could help create a near 100% reduction in CO2 emissions from transport.

“Towards a Zero Carbon Vision for UK Transport”, written by researchers at the Stockholm Environment Institute, looks at what steps can be taken to cut back on the 27% of the UK’s CO2 emissions that stem from transport. This number is predicted to grow faster than any other sector of the economy with increased use of cars, road freight and aviation.

The report compares the predicted outcome for carbon reduction by 2050 under a “business as usual” scenario, where little to no changes are made, with that of a “Maximum Impact (MI)” scenario. This is a slightly implausible scenario where all possible interventions are made to achieve a target goal of “near zero carbon” transport system for the UK.

Whilst many aspects of the report are concerned with freight and local travel, section 4.4 “Aviation” details how the substitution of information technology can help contribute towards reducing the 14% of all travel conducted by business, in turn reducing the amount of overall air travel.

One report cited, Pamlin & Szomolanyi 2008, suggests that if European companies cut their business travel by 20% and used video conferencing in its place, “We would save 22 million tonnes of CO2 each year, equivalent to taking one third of the UK’s cars off the road.”

Another survey cited, ‘Travelling Light’, by the WWF-UK found that many companies have a “green” corporate policy that incorporates the use of telepresence and video conferencing services in place of business travel. This same survey indicates that the major obstacle to greater use of video conferencing is a lack of interoperability between different systems and a need for investment in broadband infrastructure.

In the “Maximum Impact” scenario detailed by the researchers based on these previous reports, aviation business travel activity is assumed to have fallen by 20% by 2050. 2.8% of this – a statistically significant figure equivalent to 1.7 million tonnes of CO2 - is due to video conferencing being used in substitution of air travel.

Also, though the report is clear that video conferencing and other technological substitutions could only lead to a small reduction in CO2 emissions from the aviation industry in and of themselves, they are an important part of an overall strategy. When taken together with other measures such as railway substitution, air traffic management and improvements in aircraft technology, the overall reduction in the MI scenario is -56% relative to the 59.9 CO2 emissions seen in the 2050 ‘business as usual’ scenario.

The first virtual dance rehearsal between Shanghai and New York was held last month, thanks to telepresence technology.

According to an official statement from Cisco, young dancers from the Children’s Palace in Shanghai, and young dancers in New York, held a virtual rehearsal to prepare for their joint performance in the U.S.

“Dance allows these students to express themselves fully through both music and movement,” said Jacques d’Amboise, former principal dancer of New York City Ballet and founder of the National Dance Institute, which is spearheading the joint performance.

He added: “As they have performed with some of our dancers here in New York, these dancers embody two beautiful stories – one story they tell through their movements on the stage, and the other story is the one that they will tell their family and friends about this journey.”

“TelePresence technology lets them begin sharing that story before they even return home,” concluded d’Amboise. “They share it through their smiles and laughter and pictures – elements of expression that would be limited by other forms of communication.”

“Today’s technology has the power to connect people in ways that were unimaginable 10 years ago, and Cisco TelePresence offers users and unparallelled real-time video collaboration experience,” explained Benny Lee, managing director of Unified Communications and Collaboration, Greater China, Cisco.

It’s part of Cisco’s initiative to reunite families separated by distance through telepresence, which will allow families into telepresence studios for two Sundays in Shanghai so they can have virtual exchanges with relatives living abroad.

The telepresence industry needs to develop a set of unified standards for interoperability in order to help drive the market for video conferencing forward, says the International Telecommunications Union (ITU).

The ITU has announced that it wants to help different telepresence companies work together to allow the market to grow. Currently video conferencing services are broadly divided between older standards and the “evolution” of telepresence, with many products based on established communications protocols lacking interoperability due to proprietary extensions.

Whilst Cisco, one of the largest developers of video conference technology, has been working on interoperable standards for some time, the ITU has called for the industry as a whole to work together to prevent proprietary systems from becoming commonplace in the market.

“We don’t expect each end of a phone call to be dependent on the manufacturer of the phone being the same,” says Malcolm Johnson, Director of the ITU’s Telecommunication Standardisation Bureau. “The same should be true for telepresence.”

“Anyone who has used a telepresence system will testify to its remarkable quality…however, proprietary solutions have stifled the market. ITU’s standards initiative will allow us all to profit from this remarkable technology.”

According to the ITU’s press release, their standards initiative will be focused upon improving interoperability between telepresence technology from different manufacturers. It aims to make sure that multiple video and audio streams can be presented coherently so that eye contact, gestures and other aspects of a life-like, face-to-face experience are conveyed properly even when set-ups differ on each side of the conversation.

The Scottish government has committed to reducing a fifth of business flights within the next five years, reports Public Sector Travel.

They have signed up to WWF-UK’s One in Five Challenge, which helps companies and public sector bodies reduce their carbon emissions and costs generated by business travel. It asks them to pledge to reduce business travel by 20%.

The scheme was only launched last year, but already 12 companies have signed up to look for alternatives to flying for business meetings. The majority of these save money and carbon emissions by using video conferencing and using other methods of transportation that are low carbon, such as rail.

“The Scottish government is proud to be the first government organisation to sign up to WWF’s One in Five challenge.” said Stewart Stevenson, minister for transport and climate change, in an official statement. “As an organisation, we are taking action to ensure that, where business journeys are necessary, we travel sustainably.”

He said the government flew half a million miles less in 2008/09 and have considerably reduced their air travel costs, which dropped by almost a quarter. “We are also making increasing use of video conference facilities, when appropriate, instead of travelling to meetings in the UK,” said Mr Stevenson.

WWF-UK says that businesses can remain competitive and cut back on travel “demonstrating that in the future, those companies that change their working practises will be better adapted in a carbon constrained world.” They also explain that members have made massive carbon savings and improved their work-life balance of staff who spend more time at home.

Another company to sign up to the challenge is Sky. Fiona Ball, head of environment at Sky, said: “Sky has been taking action on climate change for five years now and through embracing technology such as video conferencing, we cut our business air travel emissions by 35% over the past three years.”

Relying on emails to conduct business communications may be a fast way of operating but it’s not an effective one, claims a new study from the University of Illinois.

According to a study by Gregory Northcraft, a professor of executive leadership who specialises in workplace collaboration, speaking face-to-face is a vital part of building an effective relationship. Time magazine reports that Northcraft’s report indicates that reliance on “lean communication” such as email, where only one form of information is sent between correspondents, strips away the personal interaction that builds trust.

In a business setting, trust is a vital component of an effective team effort, particularly where colleagues are working independently towards a shared goal.

The researchers, Northcraft and Kevin Rockmann of George Mason University, studied the productivity and interaction of 200 students divided into different teams and given set tasks. The study revealed that those using email were the least able to get together and complete their task, whilst those who had spoken face-to-face via video conferencing were more productive and more likely to meet their responsibilities.

Northcraft thinks this is because e-mail doesn’t let participants see how engaged their colleagues are, encouraging mutual negligence. “If I don’t think you are taking a task seriously, then I won’t either. And email doesn’t allow us to verify that you are taking it seriously”, he says.

Seeing the other participant generally led to more honesty, say the researchers. “We found that in both video conferencing and in face to face interactions, people were not willing to lie”, said Professor Rockmann.

Strikes could bring chaos to business travel in Britain as members of the Unite union voted to strike following disputes over pay.

As reported by The BBC, the strikes would force all six of BAA’s airports to shut because essential staff, such as firefighters would partake. BAA owns and operates Heathrow, Stansted, Southampton, Edinburgh, Glasgow and Aberdeen airports.

Unite and BAA have agreed a meeting to discuss the dispute, with a possible strike date to be announced if talks are unsuccessful. The union only has to give a week’s notice of strike action, however analysts predict it will be the bank holiday weekend in August.

This further highlights the uncertainty experienced by the travel industry and could encourage more businesses to  adopt video conferencing to reduce their reliance on travel.

Video conferencing would allow businesses to hold virtual meetings without facing the risk of cancelled flights or travel chaos disrupting meetings or even forcing them to be cancelled. It also eliminates the risk of an employee, if they manage to reach their destination, being stranded there. That can prove costly, either in terms of trying to get them home, paying for temporary accommodation, or a loss in business output.

The threat of strike action centres on a pay dispute, reports Reuters. Unite said members voted three-to-one in favour of industrial action.

However, a BAA spokesman said that fewer than half of those eligible to vote had done so. “We do not believe this result provides a clear mandate for strike action,” he said. The strike was condemned by the prime minister, who said it would do “nothing but harm”.

A British casino chain has successfully reduced business travel between locations thanks to video conferencing.

According to an official statement, Aspers Group adopted video conferencing services across its HR, finance and business development teams in London, Newcastle, Northampton and Swansea.

“We examined the cost of group business travel; particularly the cost of personnel commuting between our London HQ and our regional sites,” said Nick Snowden, IT director at Aspers. “We were already spending a lot on flights and rail travel up and down the country, and this was rapidly increasing with our geographic expansion. In a bid to make better use of technology to help control our growth, we looked at the video conferencing market.”

Aspers Group uses video conferencing during board meetings. According to the statement, in the coming months video conferencing could be implemented for nationwide training.

Terry Dwyer, who helped Aspers Group choose video conferencing facilities, said that, although the technology hadn’t been in place long, they were already saving a lot of time and money when it comes to business travel. ”Aspers Group had implemented an authority-to-travel policy that involved employees having to apply for permission to spend on transport,” explained Dwyer. “This was designed to engender cultural change and encourage people to consider video conferencing first. In reality though, once users have experienced video meetings they have spontaneously evangelised it internally.”

The scheme was piloted between the head office in London and the office in Newcastle. It immediately saved 2-3 journeys every week between the two cities, and was then rolled out across the main offices.

Cisco has added two new video conferencing facilities to the network of inter-operable telepresence systems, as the company introduces video conferencing to Casablanca and Tunis.

According to ITP.net, a Middle East technology news site, this is the first time that video conferencing services across Cisco’s telepresence platform have been available in both countries. The new facilities are based at Cisco’s own offices and according to Cisco’s North Africa division, are a key step to increased deployment of telepresence technology in the sub-saharan African region.

The telepresence studio at the Casablanca office is perhaps slightly more impressive than that at the Tunis office. Cisco’s Casablanca office has been equipped with a Cisco Telepresence System 3000, which has three 65-inch plasma screens and a stand-alone lighting array in addition to the cameras, microphones, speakers and specially designed table which form key components of a video conference system. 

Meanwhile the Tunis office has been equipped with the 1300 series, a smaller system which has one screen, three cameras and a built-in lighting system. The set up at both facilities allows up to six participants to virtually collaborate and conference with up to six participants at any of the other Cisco telepresence studios around the world.

Anthony Vonsee, managing director for Cisco North Africa said that the use of video conferencing in the region was likely to see rapid growth over the next few years with the arrival of submarine broadband cables, which offer higher bandwidth at lower prices than previously seen in the region.

Video conferencing and networking giant Cisco surprised many at its recent Las Vegas conference by unveiling its latest product – an enterprise focused tablet computer.

The Cisco Cius aims to extend the productivity benefits of the company’s collaboration applications to a mobile platform. Running on a variation of the Android operating system, the tablet offers mobile computing and content sharing capabilities as well as full interoperability with Cisco’s Telepresence technology.

An open platform, the Cius is targeted at linking individual employees more effectively with central departments over a real-time, secure connection. Although users will be able to video conference through the small tablet device’s HD camera and audio pickup, the tablet also has the useful ability to physically dock or connect via Wi-Fi to existing video conferencing facilities, as well as a desktop PC.

This means that users could record videos and photos or work on files or documents on their Cius tablet, then share them with other participants directly during a video conference held at a Cisco Telepresence Studio. The device will go on trial with customers in the third quarter of 2010 with a view to becoming generally available in the first quarter of 2011.

Tony Bates, the senior VP and general manager of Cisco’s enterprise, commercial and small business arm said:”Cisco Cius epitomises how the network is changing the way we live, work, learn and play.”

The most important thing to have in the workplace is good communication skills, reports The Chartered Management Institute.

That’s according to half of business leaders who were questioned in a study by Orange. Over a third added that keeping up with, and using, new innovations such as video conferencing services to their advantage made a successful business leader.

In fact, according to a statement published by Orange, good communication skills top their list of the most common characteristics that appear to be conducive to running a successful business.

Martin Lyne, SME marketing director at Everything Everywhere said in a statement: “A desire to keep abreast of the latest innovations and technologies has given entrepreneurs access to new tools to help run their businesses.”

Video conferencing services can prove a significantly useful tool to entrepreneurs who are touting for new business. Instead of surrendering a multiple days out of the office to hold lengthy meetings, entrepreneurs can hold virtual meetings which are just as powerful as face-to-face, without losing so much time in travelling.

Video conferencing services also present the opportunity to save on overheads; holding a virtual meeting is significantly more cost effective than travelling to a meeting. As every entrepreneur knows, cashflow is vitally important so wasting cash on non-essential travel can be seen as wasteful.

This was reiterated by Mr Lyne, who pointed out that communication among teams doesn’t have to involve face-to-face contact. He said that tools such as video conferencing services, social networking websites and email can be used to bring workers together.