Who wants to go down to the copy shop to make a videotelephone call? We can imagine that Mums and Dads with their offspring away at university might well like to see how awful their cherished one looks, but doubt that said offspring would be easily constrained to be in the campus copy shop at the appointed hour – but Sprint Corp and Kinko’s Service Corp believe there is a market, and Kinko’s, the big operator of copy shops, plans to build a huge public videoconferencing network, enabling customers to make a video call from any of its 650 copy centres world-wide; Kinko’s says it is repositioning its copy centres to be branch offices for people away from the office or working at home, and intends to provide the service to business customers and consumers within two years; some 100 centres will be equipped by April, making Kinko’s the largest provider of public videoconferencing in the world, it reckons; it also believes that This business will be a rocket ship similar to how fax business took off; Kinko’s will be using the system developed by PictureTel Corp, and will enable customers to use videoconferencing equipment connected to a personal computer to hold an individual video call with someone at another location including any company on the Sprint videoconferencing network; and for group video calls, Kinko’s plans to install a booth in each of its centres with room for five people; Kinko’s says it wants to use the Christmas season to spur demand, keeping its stores open and offering calls for $20 per half hour.
