TAKING TELECOMMUTING TO THE NEXT LEVEL: Beam Yourself to Work in a Remote-Controlled Body.

The tech boom in the San Francisco Bay Area has created intense competition for software engineers. Kids straight out of college can start salary negotiations at six figures, and rents are rocketing.

Scott Hassan, an early Google engineer and now an investor and entrepreneur, thinks he has the solution for companies that think they’re wasting time and money chasing new hires: make it more practical for engineers living in cheaper places to telecommute to work. His company, Suitable Technologies, has developed a roving telepresence system that is five feet, two inches tall, placing its 17-inch screen at roughly the right height for a hallway conversation. It is not the first mobile telepresence system to hit the market, but Hassan says it has features that will make it more practical and less awkward to use than previous systems.

Like Sheldon Cooper’s robot-surrogate, however, it lacks hands.