teleXLR8 Project News - a telepresence community for cultural acceleration

We have been running the teleXLR8 project, a telepresence community for cultural acceleration based on Teleplace, in semi-stealth beta mode for a few months since the first talk by Anders Sandberg on Neuroselves and exoselves: distributed cognition inside and outside brains on April 18, 2010. We have produced some great events, talks by well known experts of futuristic technologies, meetings of closed working groups, and a two day "mixed reality" satellite workshop with the Singularity Summit 2010.

teleXLR8 has been running as a free, invitation-only beta on the Teleplace servers and network infrastructure since March 2010. Due to the limited resources available we have only promoted teleXLR8 in the relatively small community of future studies and "Singularity" enthusiasts. Even so, we have received many more requests to join than we could handle, and the project has been frequently covered by the blogosphere and the online press. The current beta group has about 80 members. Each talk has been recorded on video and posted to the video sharing site blip.tv the day after the talk. The videos have been seen by several thousands of viewers and covered by important technology oriented sites including internetACTU, IEET, KurzweilAI, H+ Magazine, Next Big Future and Slashdot.

We have now reached an agreement with Teleplace, which will permit running the project in fully operational mode our own dedicated servers, network and support infrastructure, and opening it to everyone for a very reasonable membership fee. The current beta will continue until the start of the next phase, and all members of the current beta group will receive extended free membership. Sponsor slots are available.

We will produce great and frequent online events, featuring first class speakers with world-changing ideas, available in interactive realtime telepresence. teleXLR8 can be thought of as an online open TED, using modern telepresence technology for ideas worth spreading, and as a next generation, fully interactive TV network with a participative audience. In the pictures, participants are watching the recent talk by Ben Goertzel on TV. At any moment, they can step in to comment, discuss and ask questions.

For a more detailed description of the project's goals, see our mini-manifesto Telepresence Education for a Smarter World on the IEET site and the interview MIND and MAN: Getting Mental with Giulio Prisco, by Natasha Vita-More, on H+ Magazine.

Besides the existing Facebook Group and Linkedin Group, we have created a teleXLR8 mailing list on Google Groups. Please feel free to join the mailing list to discuss the project.