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The statement is completely wrong. No information in the sense understood by laymen is transmitted at superluminal velocity by quantum teleportation; if that were possible causality could be violated.

There is a sleight of hand involved here. What is done is that the state vector (colloquially, and less correctly, called a "wave function" by some) of a photon at distance is entangled with the state vector of a nearby photon. By manipulating the state of the near photon, a change in the state of the remote photon occurs. Because photons (actually all quantum particles) are indistinguishable, the state change reflected in the remote photon is identical to the appearance of a "new" photon with the same state.

However, since an observer at distance cannot know the state of our "nearby" photon (which is remote from his point of view) without exchanging state descriptions with us, there is actually no information being transmitted until an ordinary radio transmission (or pony express rider, or some other conventional information process) actually verifies the content. Roughly, the particles "know" they have been changed ("spooky action at a distance," in Einstein's words) but this knowledge cannot do anyone any good until ordinary messages can be exchanged.

This is the position of orthodox physics. It is not controversial, although there are a few (actually respected) dissenters who claim information can be exchanged in this way. But they have never constructed an experiment that shows how.

This article http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Quantum_teleportation does not completely suck, even though it is from Wikipedia. If you are very interested, also have a look at the Einstein-Podolsky-Rosen Paradox which is the original paper that got people thinking about the question of quantum entanglement. Both of these articles are accessible to an intelligent layman. The article on the EPR paradox is the better of the two. Interestingly, Einstein, Podolsky, and Rosen believed their "paradox" would overthrow Quantum Mechanics.

They were mistaken; it is not a paradox. It is the way the universe actually behaves.

If you want to follow this rabbit quite far down the hole, the issue was resolved (to the current state of our knowledge) by Bell's Theorem. Have a look there if you are an economist with a decent mathematical background and some time.

Umm.... I think I understand why I went into Econ and not Physics ;)

That pretty much went right over my head.

“However, since an observer at distance cannot know the state of our “nearby” photon (which is remote from his point of view) without exchanging state descriptions with us, there is actually no information being transmitted until an ordinary radio transmission (or pony express rider, or some other conventional information process) actually verifies the content. Roughly, the particles “know” they have been changed (”spooky action at a distance,” in Einstein’s words) but this knowledge cannot do anyone any good until ordinary messages can be exchanged. “

How do particles “know” if they are not sentient?