While advancing a broad imaging initiative that seeks to facilitate the creation, scanning, sharing, printing, and transmission of electronic documents, Hewlett-Packard has built a universal protocol to serve as a key piece in that puzzle.
HP's new "device-to-device" communications technology, JetSend, is designed to let documents jump between PCs, digital cameras, PDAs, printers, and set-top boxes with an ease that only electricity does now. It's a grand plan with obvious appeal, but like any protocol, its success depends on widespread adoption.
Calling JetSend a "negotiation protocol," HP says its new technology is not designed to usurp or compete with existing image, text, or markup formats - be they TIFF, JPEG, PDF, HTML, or others - but to help two communicating devices choose among such formats for an optimized exchange. One device tells the other which formats it can work with, and vice versa; when a good match is found, the document is sent.
HP says printers, scanners, and PCs are likely to be the first "appliances" where JetSend shows up - emphasizing that it wouldn't replace an already-optimized printer or scanner driver, but rather provide a similar function where drivers may not even exist.
Beyond scanners and printers, imagined scenarios have JetSend allowing a wonderfully seamless exchange of images and documents between any two devices. "The ability to pick up your PalmPilot, aim it at your laser printer, shoot photos over to your laptop - all of these things are really nice and really desirable," said Chris Shipley, editor of DemoLetter. "It's like Esperanto - if you speak JetSend, we can communicate."
Today, says HP alliance programs manager Jim Hammons, "We end up [manually] negotiating formats and applications until I can get this document to you so you can read it." Rather than verbally negotiating, Hammons says, "I just enter the [network] address of your device - and click Send." The devices work out the formatting issues themselves.
Of course, devices have to take up the language first, necessitating that a wide range of electronics manufacturers evaluate and commit to JetSend support.
Vendors already incorporating the protocol into their products, HP says, include Canon, Encanto Networks, Genoa, Xionics, and Microsoft. "Microsoft support is key," Shipley said, "and I'd really love to see some of the set-top-box people commit to it, too." Also adding significantly to JetSend's momentum, she says, would be makers of devices like the PalmPilot. "A company like that would give it a whole lot of leverage."
Dataquest analyst Paula Bursley agrees. "Really, the key is how many companies HP can get to sign on." Pushing that support along entails making the specification publicly available and providing a developer's kit at a nominal fee, Shipley says. HP expects to include JetSend technology in its own future products, but as Shipley notes, HP isn't yet saying much about its own internal commitments.
Alistair Banks, Microsoft's senior program manager for the Windows OS, starts off by saying the company has no doubts surrounding the potential benefits of protocols like JetSend. "This is good news for us all, since today almost every device has a unique protocol, requiring a unique driver," Banks said via email. "We've been working with [HP] for some time on making their JetSend support for Windows 95 and Windows NT4 as good as possible."
Still, he wouldn't want to bank on one particular protocol at this point. "I think it will be some time before any such protocol will prove to be truly universal," he said. "There will most likely be more than one, since consumer devices range from the 'incredibly dumb' to the embedded computer device."
HP is also making JetSend scalable, hoping to maximize its appeal to device-makers with limited memory overhead, such as smart-phone and digital-camera makers. A camera, for example, would only need to carry image formats in its JetSend portfolio, not text. A PC, on the other hand, would need - and could afford - to build in support for a spectrum of format types.
Microsoft's Banks provided one interesting JetSend-enabled scenario, of course playing out around the bureaucracy of PC Central: "A handheld computer 'squirts' an HTML page, or maybe only the URL, at a printer: The printer doesn't understand HTML or URLs, so it send the data on to the PC, which translates it into a language the printer understands, and sends it back."
Any such Microsoft vision is certainly welcomed by HP, which acknowledges that heavyweight support is critical. "Our wish is absolutely that it would be a standard part of the Windows OS," Hammons said.
Indeed, few would detract from the vision of JetSend's open, simplified communications world. Now all HP has to do is make it a reality.
