Last week I virtually invited Ray Konopka to speak at my user group about his components. As we met in Italy and this is a small group, flying him over would have been a nonsense, so we arranged for a remote presentation. He used GoToMyPC and Skype and everything worked perfectly. We could hear him speak and ask questions (I was collecting them from the audience) and we could see his compuer screen projected full size from within my laptop, as if he was local and with no noticeble delays.

This made me think a lot. Over the last few years I had to reject many offers for speaking at user groups around Europe and around the world, as they could not afford the cost of flying me at their location and I could not afford devoting a few days of my time to travell and give a free presentation. Now, if for presenting an hour session it takes me an hour of my time from home, it is quite a different issue. So if anyone is interested in inviting me, I'm willing to figure out if and how this works.

On a separate side, I'm starting to consider remote training (although this is harder as you need a lot of interaction with the attendees, still hard to obtain with todays' technology). For now, I'm thinking about giving a class to people all sitting in the same room, but different options might become available in the future. Again, if you are willing to experiment I'll like to give it a go, offering reduced fees for remote training while we are in an experimental phase.