While that's novel, I predict it will be a bit of a letdown for him personally. A robot with a video screen of your face and relatively-limited field of view is going to make for very poor interaction on both sides.
Until/unless that technology gets a lot better, I suspect it will be like the "cell phone lag", only 100x worse.
We already know what it will be like for him because Trevor and I both tried being QA for a while at the last YC dinner to test it out. It's much better than being on a speakerphone-- you can actually roll up to a group of people and join their conversation-- but not, obviously, as good as being there in person.
It feels roughly like being in a cardboard box with a small, smudged little window to look out of. Which tells me the most important thing for Trevor to improve: the cameras.
Again, Gartner was saying the technology would take away $3.5 billion from the airline industry - this year. And that's just airline tickets. The total figure of corporate savings would also include room, board and other travel-related expenses.
All of this adds up to a persuasive return on investment (ROI). "Most telepresence systems pay for themselves within a year," said Erika Schroeder, senior marketing manager of Cisco TelePresence.
http://www.popularmechanics.com/blogs/technology_news/429862...
which actually bear more than a passing resemblance to him...