Hewlett-Packard Development showcased its Halo studio in Taipei yesterday -- a videoconferencing system that enables multinational executives to talk to their business partners abroad.
"The Halo studio is a collaboration between HP and DreamWorks Animation, providing life-size and real-time video," HP corporate marketing manager Emily Chang (張紫珮) said.
MARKET SHARE
The world's largest computer maker said it would continue to double sales of Halo as it tries to gain market share from rival Cisco Systems Inc.
Hewlett-Packard has sold 140 of its Halo videoconference studios, each of which sells for about US$250,000, Darren Podrabsky, marketing manager for Halo, told reporters yesterday from Corvallis, Oregon, during a videoconference with reporters in Taipei.
Halo competes with Cisco's TelePresence in the video conferencing market, which was worth an estimated US$6.7 billion last year, researcher Global Industry Analysts Inc said.
DEAL
Hewlett-Packard last year signed a deal with Tandberg ASA, the world's second-largest teleconferencing provider, to make the two companies' systems communicate with each other.
"Every year we have doubled our install base and we expect to continue that kind of growth rate," Podrabsky said.
More than 30 percent of customers have also bought a US$40,000 server that makes Halo compatible with Tandberg equipment, he said.
HP has more than halved the cost of installation for its videoconference studios since the product was first released in 2005 at a cost of US$550,000 each.
FEATURES
The Halo studio allows customers to communicate with users from three cities and countries in 150 languages, including sign language, she said.
While accelerating business decision-making, the Halo studio will also greatly reduce companies' travel costs.
"HP itself saved at least US$300,000 annually on travel by resorting to Halo studio," Chang said.
In addition to the 30 or so Halo studios that HP uses internally, Chang said 140 studios had been installed worldwide so far, which were being used by clients from 22 countries such as ABN AMRO Bank, AIG Financial Products Corp and PepsiCo.
‘SWASTICAR’: Tesla CEO Elon Musk’s close association with Donald Trump has prompted opponents to brand him a ‘Nazi’ and resulted in a dramatic drop in sales Demonstrators descended on Tesla Inc dealerships across the US, and in Europe and Canada on Saturday to protest company chief Elon Musk, who has amassed extraordinary power as a top adviser to US President Donald Trump. Waving signs with messages such as “Musk is stealing our money” and “Reclaim our country,” the protests largely took place peacefully following fiery episodes of vandalism on Tesla vehicles, dealerships and other facilities in recent weeks that US officials have denounced as terrorism. Hundreds rallied on Saturday outside the Tesla dealership in Manhattan. Some blasted Musk, the world’s richest man, while others demanded the shuttering of his
ADVERSARIES: The new list includes 11 entities in China and one in Taiwan, which is a local branch of Chinese cloud computing firm Inspur Group The US added dozens of entities to a trade blacklist on Tuesday, the US Department of Commerce said, in part to disrupt Beijing’s artificial intelligence (AI) and advanced computing capabilities. The action affects 80 entities from countries including China, the United Arab Emirates and Iran, with the commerce department citing their “activities contrary to US national security and foreign policy.” Those added to the “entity list” are restricted from obtaining US items and technologies without government authorization. “We will not allow adversaries to exploit American technology to bolster their own militaries and threaten American lives,” US Secretary of Commerce Howard Lutnick said. The entities
Minister of Finance Chuang Tsui-yun (莊翠雲) yesterday told lawmakers that she “would not speculate,” but a “response plan” has been prepared in case Taiwan is targeted by US President Donald Trump’s reciprocal tariffs, which are to be announced on Wednesday next week. The Trump administration, including US Secretary of the Treasury Scott Bessent, has said that much of the proposed reciprocal tariffs would focus on the 15 countries that have the highest trade surpluses with the US. Bessent has referred to those countries as the “dirty 15,” but has not named them. Last year, Taiwan’s US$73.9 billion trade surplus with the US
Prices of gasoline and diesel products at domestic gas stations are to fall NT$0.2 and NT$0.1 per liter respectively this week, even though international crude oil prices rose last week, CPC Corp, Taiwan (台灣中油) and Formosa Petrochemical Corp (台塑石化) said yesterday. International crude oil prices continued rising last week, as the US Energy Information Administration reported a larger-than-expected drop in US commercial crude oil inventories, CPC said in a statement. Based on the company’s floating oil price formula, the cost of crude oil rose 2.38 percent last week from a week earlier, it said. News that US President Donald Trump plans a “secondary
RSS