HP Halo — A better way to do business

Dec. 2005 -- It's 9:30 p.m. on a rain-driven New York City night. After a day of non-stop strategy meetings you're peering through streams of water on your windshield, looking for a parking spot at the airport. Ahead of you: 24 hours of distracted work and interrupted sleep in a noisy capsule hurtling 550 miles per hour. Then, five days in Singapore trying to collaborate creatively and strategically despite crushing jet lag.

You're thinking: If only there were a better way. If only you could be 'beamed' to another place like a Star Trek® (1), meet with colleagues to solve business challenges, and then be 'beamed' back to your own office.

Now, thanks to HP Halo, you can.

Halo is a person-to-person collaboration solution that lets you meet with colleagues 10,000 miles away as if they were in the same room with you. With Halo, specially designed studios are installed at your company and connected by a dedicated network that enables any Halo studio to connect to any other Halo studio — anywhere in the world — with just a few mouse clicks. HP makes it simple for you by managing the network and the Halo studios, so you can focus on connecting with the people in front of you with no distractions.

All businesses, no matter how large or geographically dispersed, depend on human-to-human interaction. Sometimes personal contact is the only way to make things happen. Halo helps companies bring people together to reach their ultimate goals of accelerating decisions, bringing products to market sooner, integrating distant teams, improving efficiency, and staying ahead of the competition.

Until now, video conferencing and conference calls have been the only way to attempt to meet without traveling. But Halo is as different from video conferencing as your new laptop is from a 1970s-era calculator. No other technology can come close to bringing people together and accelerate business the way Halo can.

When you visit one of our Halo studios for a demonstration, you'll see images that are full size and clear, so your colleagues' table appears to begin where your table ends. They raise their eyebrows, you see it. They speak, you hear instantly — there's no delay.

It's as if you're all sitting at the same conference table. But instead of traveling across the globe to collaborate with your colleagues, you only have to walk down the hall.

What makes this so special? Much of the way we communicate with each other is nonverbal, which is why we go to such great lengths for business travel. In face-to-face meetings you can see people shrug, smile, even roll their eyes. Halo is the only technology that can completely embrace the nonverbal aspects of your meetings.

Because Halo makes it so easy to meet, you're more apt to meet. You can speed up project development. Hear suggestions. Make approvals. Streamline decisions. And shrink gaps in understanding between team members of different cultures — a boon in our ever-flattening world. Halo makes it possible for you to do business in an entirely new way.

Suppose you've got a shrinking window of time to get a groundbreaking new product to market. You need the biggest lead possible to gain market share before your competitors catch on and try for a piece of your pie.

Despite the fact that your design team is in San Francisco, the marketing group is in Atlanta, and the factory is in Asia, they're going to need to meet frequently. Luckily you've got Halo, which lets the team connect and collaborate whenever they need to.

Halo studios are designed to create the seamless effect of being in the same room. The soothing wall colors, natural lighting, and furniture are the same whether it's a Halo studio in New York, Milan or Tokyo.

Because many meetings require some sort of 'show and tell,' whether slides or product samples, Halo includes a way to share what's on your laptop or your tabletop with amazing clarity and detail. The high-definition collaboration screens display the same data or images simultaneously in both Halo studio locations.

Need to see the stitching on the prototype sneaker the factory is showing you so you can give the go-ahead to start production before your competitors? You can, thanks to the overhead high-resolution, high-magnification zoom camera. Want to share the circuit design you just thought of and sketched on your napkin? No problem. Is that a chocolate croissant the product manager in Paris has in front of her? Yes, and it almost seems like you could reach out and snatch it when her back is turned.

Halo allows the natural side conversations that often spring up during face-to-face meetings. So the person with the loudest voice isn't the only one contributing ideas and directing the discussion.

Despite the miles, you won't notice any delay in the voice signal, so it's easier to interrupt — and aren't the most productive collaborations full of interruptions? Halo lets the conversation flow naturally, in tune with your thought processes. And just like real life, there are no mute buttons.