Don McNay is a Richmond, Kentucky-based financial columnist, who noted recently [http://richmondregister.com/lifestylescommunity/x1760888633/Baby-boom-professionals-embracing-video-conferencing] that in 1988 he read an obscure book by John Watts, titled “The Financial Services Shockwave: Survival Tactics for Wall Street and Main Street.”

In that book, McNay said, Watts predicted that financial advisers would someday communicate with their clients via video conferencing. That struck a chord with McNay, who lives in Central Kentucky. As he says, “many of the attorneys and claims professionals I work with are in places such as Washington, D.C. or New York City. It’s expensive and time consuming to visit them.”

Hello, videoconferencing. Not that it saves you a trip to New York -- trips to New York, even business trips, can be fun if you do them right -- but it saves you from trips to Terre Haute, Indiana. Which are rarely described as “fun,” this reporter says from experience, not merely coastal snobbery.

Even though McNay grasped the possibilities video conferencing presented, as he says, he “didn’t have the technological resources to take advantage of it.” It must have been frustrating for someone as tech savvy as McNay -- “I was the first person I knew to use email. It took me a while to find a second person.”

After a few false starts with insufficient technology he found his answer in Skype (News - Alert) television, “video conferencing on a 50-inch screen with perfect sound. I felt like a news anchor on CNN or Fox. I could talk to person on the screen like they were in the room with me.”  

Video conferencing, as he says, is not a new technology, “but being able to do it easily and efficiently, with good quality, is new to me. It opens up new ways to communicate and grow my business.”