Virtual Conferences on the Rise?

One of the things I track on this blog is the growing occurence of virtual conferences.   Today there is a nice article in Business Week about how Cisco recently had a virtual conference alongside a physical conference in Hawaii.  They used a special-purpose virtual world system made by Unisfair.  One interesting quote from the article (talking about Unisfair and their conference events):

The Menlo Park (Calif.) company has arranged more than 400 events since it started in 2002. "It took us almost four years to get to that first 200, and in the last 12 months we've basically doubled in size," says Brent Arslaner, vice-president for marketing at Unisfair.

Cisco also has a substantial presence in Second Life.  They were one of the major sponsors of the Life 2.0 Summit in March.