Hi everyone, welcome to the A6 and Z podcast. I'm Sonal and today we're talking about telepresence,

which is a really ugly word and really old-fashioned word for something that's actually very

relevant and interesting and it has to do with the technologies for how remote and distributed

workers and even people in the same office talk to each other using conferencing and other

tools. And today we have three guests joining us to talk about this trend. First, we have Scott Hassen,

who was the key software architect of Google back in the early days and also Alexa and the Stanford

Digital Library. He was also the co-founder of E-groups, which is now Yahoo Groups, and later was the founder

of Willow Garage. Now he's the

founder and CEO of suitable technologies, which makes the beam robots, which are basically

these really cool, you're probably seeing them on TV, robots for conferencing. They're like

people's heads that roll on wheels, but they're basically robots. I personally don't like my devices

be called robots. We should actually talk about that. Because they are not robots.

Because robots, if you ever watched any of the documentaries coming out of Hollywood, robots usually walk around and they usually kill off the human race.

And these are nothing to do with. These are just remote-controlled little devices.

No killing of the human race.

Yep. No killing, you know, and just friendly people.

Like, you know, there's some of Walking Dead. They never call them zombies either. It's always

walkers or avoid the hot words. Yeah, but, you know, it's so easy for people to call them robots

for some reason. Okay, so speaking of walkers, although not the Game of Thrones kind, we also have Craig Walker, who is a co-founder and CEO of Switch Communications, which is a communication service that's integrated with all of the cloud-based productivity apps that people already use at work.

So things like Google apps and Office 365.

And one of their other products is the

voice conferencing system Uber Conference. And finally, we have Sean Sinha, who's the co-founder and CEO of

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