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.
Stephen Garrett, a 27-year-old graduate student, always thought he would study in China, but first the country’s restrictive COVID-19 policies made it nearly impossible and now he has other concerns. The cost is one deterrent, but Garrett is more worried about restrictions on academic freedom and the personal risk of being stranded in China. He is not alone. Only about 700 American students are studying at Chinese universities, down from a peak of nearly 25,000 a decade ago, while there are nearly 300,000 Chinese students at US schools. Some young Americans are discouraged from investing their time in China by what they see
Taiwan Transport and Storage Corp (TTS, 台灣通運倉儲) yesterday unveiled its first electric tractor unit — manufactured by Volvo Trucks — in a ceremony in Taipei, and said the unit would soon be used to transport cement produced by Taiwan Cement Corp (TCC, 台灣水泥). Both TTS and TCC belong to TCC International Holdings Ltd (台泥國際集團). With the electric tractor unit, the Taipei-based cement firm would become the first in Taiwan to use electric vehicles to transport construction materials. TTS chairman Koo Kung-yi (辜公怡), Volvo Trucks vice president of sales and marketing Johan Selven, TCC president Roman Cheng (程耀輝) and Taikoo Motors Group
MAJOR DROP: CEO Tim Cook, who is visiting Hanoi, pledged the firm was committed to Vietnam after its smartphone shipments declined 9.6% annually in the first quarter Apple Inc yesterday said it would increase spending on suppliers in Vietnam, a key production hub, as CEO Tim Cook arrived in the country for a two-day visit. The iPhone maker announced the news in a statement on its Web site, but gave no details of how much it would spend or where the money would go. Cook is expected to meet programmers, content creators and students during his visit, online newspaper VnExpress reported. The visit comes as US President Joe Biden’s administration seeks to ramp up Vietnam’s role in the global tech supply chain to reduce the US’ dependence on China. Images on
New apartments in Taiwan’s major cities are getting smaller, while old apartments are increasingly occupied by older people, many of whom live alone, government data showed. The phenomenon has to do with sharpening unaffordable property prices and an aging population, property brokers said. Apartments with one bedroom that are two years old or older have gained a noticeable presence in the nation’s six special municipalities as well as Hsinchu county and city in the past five years, Evertrust Rehouse Co (永慶房產集團) found, citing data from the government’s real-price transaction platform. In Taipei, apartments with one bedroom accounted for 19 percent of deals last