“Mr. Watson. Come here — I want to see you.”

On March 10, 1876, Alexander Graham Bell made the leap into the world of telecommunications when he “talked through electricity” to his assistant Thomas A. Watson.

“Mr Watson!  Come here — I want to see you.” was the first request sent through the beginnings of the telephone.

But today, there’s ways to make that same request REALLY come true, especially the part “…I want to see you“.

A new site, Tokbox.com just might be the Tivo of video conferencing.  The free service has simplified the sometimes convoluted act of video conferencing with no downloads or software installations.

Recently, I was 70 miles away from a regularly scheduled group meeting.  Instead of missing the meeting or rescheduling becuase I wasn’t available, we just hopped onto tokbox.com and connected live via voice and video.



The beauty of this service is that if you have more then two parties, Tokbox.com still does the trick.  Instead of two side by side video frames, it throws up a BradyBunch like grid of webcam windows and the video CONFERENCE can really begin.

You can go full-screen to maximize the video size, you can manually text chat, and of course you can mute the audio or video (go audio only on your side if you wish) feed at anytime.

You can send video mail just as easily as well if the other party isn’t around to take your video call.

And just in case, you don’t really believe me, you can try it out and leave me a video message right now!