Features: Magazine | Literary Review | Life | Metro Plus | Open Page | Education Plus | Book Review | Business | SciTech | Friday Review | Cinema Plus | Young World | Property Plus | Quest | Folio |

IT TRENDS

— photo: Anand Parthasarathy

Soon in India: The HP Photosmart self-operated photo printing kiosk will soon be seen in India.

And for millions, a second ‘avatar’ on Second Life. Web 2.0, the Internet’s Second Coming is already here — and pushing almost every sector of the personal computer-driven business into reinventing itself for a new ‘conne cted’ era.

Contrary to the naïve predictions of a ‘paperless future’ that technology pundits made a decade ago, the volume of printed documentation has only gone up, year on year — and digitally generated prints may soon form about 10 per cent of over 50 trillion pages that the world’s users churn out every 12 months.

Interestingly, about half of all prints made at home by lay users of printers are downloads from the Internet… which gives the world’s number printer player, Hewlett Packard, a clue to what it should be doing to stay ahead in the business.

The answer it has come up with something it calls (with a blinding flash of originality!) ‘Print 2.0’ — a new wave of imaging technology which will see consumers seamlessly switch between their own printable assets and a whole lot of stuff that the Net offers, doing a mix-n-match that gives them exactly what they want. The message for printer players seems to be: Web-enable or perish.

At its annual technology showcase for the Asian markets , HP gave enough pointers to the way things will be shaking out in the consumer printing and imaging arena as the industry hastens to making IT happen, on the Web and on your five thousand rupee budget PC printer.

One key message is that wireless is the way to go: almost all of the over dozen new printers being launched in India from next month, are wireless-enabled.

For those still stuck with legacy printers of the pre-wireless era, HP is offering wireless upgrade kits which help ‘unwire’ the PC-printer connection by a combo of wireless ‘dongle’ and a WiFi connection. Up to five users — PCs, laptops — can share one of these connections.

Another Print 2.0 feature that existing users can access with a free download is Smart Web Printing utility that addresses a major user hassle: the inability of most Web pages to print without key areas getting chopped on the right hand margins and the wastage involved in not being able to selectively print portions of different web pages, without doing a complicated cut and paste routine.

All upcoming printers from the company have this utility by default… indeed you may soon be able to use a single printer driver that works across dozens of printers.

One ‘touching’ example of the industry’s new found zeal in making print operations less of a technical challenge is just that: the addition of touch technology to new printers which will make the selection of printing material and the basic picture enhancement and editing functions something ‘made for dummies.’

Indeed new all-in-one print-scan-copy machines like the C 8180, allow photos captured by a digital camera on a Flash data chip to be directly inserted into the printer, individual photos previewed and tweaked using a touch screen and the full set transferred to a DVD writer.

It might come as a pleasant surprise that a crucial, ‘cool’ new application is the product of Indian ingenuity. In 2000 Bala Parthasarathy co-founded Snapfish , a startup with a unique value proposition — a largely free web resource which allowed registered users to store their pictures online, organise them into personal albums — and crucially to print them at minimum hassle in the form of albums or sheets.