"Just as the firm he set up with two other Hollywood moguls was being sold to Paramount Pictures, Jeffrey Katzenberg announced a new venture: a high-end videoconferencing system developed by DreamWorks Animation in partnership with Hewlett-Packard.

In an effort to cut down on travel and boost productivity, Katzenberg looked into videoconferencing in 2001 and found it clunky, unreliable and fiddly. So he asked his technical wizards to devise their own system. They teamed with HP, and the result is Halo, which launched this month.

Each Halo room costs $550,000 to create and includes four high-definition plasma screens. The lighting, camera angles, wall-color, acoustics and furniture are designed to make two Halo systems feel like a single room when linked together, and to do away with the 15 minutes of messing around usually required to set up videoconferencing gear.

HP manages the service, which costs $18,000 per room per month and runs the high-speed network that ensures natural, delay-free conversations.

""It's designed to create 'as-though-you-were-there' collaboration,"" Katzenberg said. Instead of traveling to his office in Britain every three weeks, he now goes every four months. Halo is, in short, the videoconferencing equivalent of flying in the corporate jet.

DreamWorks SKG now has nine Halo rooms, HP has 13, Advanced Micro Devices has two and PepsiCo has five. Procter & Gamble and Novartis also have signed up.

HP hopes to sell more than 100 Halo systems next year. Users say that while previous videoconferencing equipment was rarely used, their Halo rooms are in use around the clock.

Hector Ruiz, who runs Advanced Micro Devices, says Halo has cut travel between his firm's facilities in California and Texas. PepsiCo boss Steve Reinemund says that every chief executive to whom he has shown his system has decided to buy one also. Indeed, chief executives are proving to be an unexpectedly potent marketing tool for Halo.

Source: /www.startribune.com"">Star Tribune."