iLinc, is a 9 year old company that provides web and audio conferencing solutions for meetings, presentations and training. In January, iLinc launched iReduce, a program to encourage companies to reduce CO2 emissions through the use of video and audio conferencing. As part of this program, iLinc’s Web conferencing software automatically calculates exactly how much CO2 emissions are saved for every conference participant through a patent-pending feature they call the iLinc Green Meter™ . This press release stated that the iReduce program had saved a combined total of one billion pounds of CO2 to date through customers choosing iLinc Web and audio conferencing instead of traveling to a meeting. iLinc says that companies can monitor their savings on an account management page. As part of the program iLinc says that for every million pounds or more each quarter that a customer reduces their CO2 emissions by, iLinc will donate money towards a renewable energy source.

Sound familiar? The CO2 savings part sounded to me a lot like the promise that John Chambers made at Cisco last fall, during the launch of TelePresence. So I went onto the iLinc site, looked at the meter, and thought it was interesting, but potentially flawed in its output as it assumes that every meeting that is being tracked would have been a face to face meeting, which isn’t true. They talked about Global Knowledge Training, LLC – one of their customers that markets distance learning solutions. I would posit that a good portion of their customers would take training classes online that they wouldn’t consider doing in person because of time and expense, and the Green Meter has no way of calculating this. Also, making me think that the output could be skewed were the comments made in my talks with Cisco about the increase in the number of employee video meetings that happened due to social and work benefits that are gained from the use of video, not in place of travel. Many, of these just never would have been an in person meeting. This has been a huge increase in Cisco’s case.

So, what is up with tracking CO2 reduction? Hmm. I had to check this out, so I called them both. First, I talked to Mark Yeager, iLinc’s VPM. My basic impression from our call was that the Green Meter is just the start, and would be improved over time. My thought was that without doing a survey of X percent of their installed base to see what percent of web meetings really were in place of ones that would have been face to face, and what percent were because of the other benefits of video conferencing, you can’t get a truly accurate figure. So in my opinion, as a consistent baseline, the Green Meter is valuable, but leaves off the non-environmental value.

Once again, however, my sought after unintended consequences factor stepped in. According to Mark, many of their customers are using the meter to have contests to encourage the use of video over travel as these companies had committed to Green initiatives. Nice. Others companies have found interesting side benefits as well. For example, one company figured out that since employees tend to get sick more often when they travel, that they have been able to measure the amount of reduction in sick days taken by using conferencing instead.

Next, I called David Hsieh, Senior Director of Emerging Technologies at Cisco. We talked for awhile about the Kyoto Accord and tradable carbon credits, which, quite frankly, I’m not going to blog about here. He also said that Cisco is investigating how to properly quantify the reduction in CO2 emissions too, but that as I said, it’s not a simplistic issue when you think about meetings that wouldn’t have happened in person anyway, plus some other factors.

However, he pointed out the obvious in that the quality of life issues can’t be understated. For example, given the large amount of Cisco employees that are in India, TelePresence has been a boon for them. David said that even though there is an 11.5 hour difference between San Jose and Bangalore, making no time good for a conference call, that employees would much rather come into the office at 10 pm to have a TelePresence meeting with their India counterparts, and vice versa, than to hop on a plane. He also said that just for Cisco to be able to do things like let employees book TelePresence rooms during the holidays so that they can share time with their long distance family members is a benefit they wouldn’t have dreamed about years ago.

OK, I have to have a fun part here. Even though I’m a big proponent of conferencing for the reasons I have blogged about here and in the past doesn’t mean I’m all for it. I certainly don’t have a camera on my PC yet. If I had home conferencing in my home office I’d actually have to dress up for conference calls. Yikes! That would delete one of the benefits of working from home. Although I do understand that you can cure this problem with “a Business Bib”, but so far their web site only has suits for men. Shame on them!

I’m still intrigued by the whole social concept of video meetings. The environmental impact portion being investigated by companies adds a whole other dimension to this, however, I think we are far discovering the social possibilities, which is why I’ll continue to go back to iLinc and Cisco, plus other conferencing players to find out what other interesting user-oriented things they discover. Maybe one of these days someone will come out with a Quality of Life Meter to measure the true benefits of conferencing.