PERSONAL TOUCH

Touchscreens and kiosks will be central to cloud computing - a new way of accessing personal information on the move.

HP HAS always prided itself on invention. And while the company has often been seen primarily, by the general public at least, as printer manufacturers if you take a look at its logo it has the bootstrap "Invent" beneath the legendary two letters.

The company has a number of labs throughout the world where propeller heads try to decipher the future of the IT world and invent accordingly. In an effort to concentrate its collective R&D mind, the company has recently announced that these disparate labs will now refocus their energies on five different areas: information explosion, dynamic cloud services, content transformation, intelligent infrastructure and sustainability.

While Ireland has no lab, the nearest one to us is Bristol in Britain and it has developed strong links with HP Ireland primarily due to the printing manufacturing facility in Leixlip. "They would be on of our biggest internal customers," says Huw Robson, the Bristol-based director for the pervasive computing lab.

Robson says the labs will continue to play to their strength, straddling the world of blue sky and commercial research. "The point about being more commercial and flexible is really based around the phrase 'open innovation'.

"You can't expect with the complexity of technology these days, to do it all in house and HP labs traditionally never tried to do this anyway. So we will be partnering with companies small and large, universities and academic groups to bring the research to a more focussed commercial realisation."

Most of this extensive brainpower at HP's disposal will be tested on some of the more complex challenges that will face the IT industry and indeed IT users (both corporate and consumer).

John Manley, director of the automated infrastructure lab, believes one of the main challenges HP and other IT companies face will be getting the right information to the user at any particular moment. "The phrase in the past of 'anything, anywhere, anytime' is not good enough because wherever you are, you get deluged with all this data. A lot of the tech being invested in at Bristol is about trying to make sure that we get, as flexibly as possible, the right information to people at the right time. We can only give you that material if we understand your personal context.

"We need to give you the right thing in the moment. And that's where the tech meets the user," he says.

These ideas all stem from the idea of cloud computing wherein all applications and services can be accessed from the internet instead of from an in-house server configuration or PC. Ideally, though, the user won't be focussed on where the content is being kept rather concentrating on the service being received.

In a lot of cases, however, the users will still need to have a lot of power and functionality outside the cloud.

One of the lynchpins of this new form of computing is, of course, security. It is absolutely critical because it involves getting the trust of people to allow their data and tasks to disappear somewhere into this global fabric and then eventually it all comes out again. "People are not just going to send their intellectual property down the wire and not know where it's going, if it's secure and who will have control over it. They will want very strict guarantees in place so security needs to there right from the start at the bottom up," says Manley.

The company believes cloud computing will be the norm with numerous providers offering different levels of extraction and contribution, all linked together in some market based economy. The future of IT could be more organic in the sense that the information provider will, in essence, know you and your surroundings and be able to make choices or suggestions for you. For example, if you were taking a flight and your information provider knew the distance to the airport, hints could be sent to you suggesting the quickest route. In addition, you could also be told to take your time if the plane had been delayed.

Another interesting aspect of the way this data will be received is that you won't necessarily get it on a mobile device such as a phone, PDA or laptop.

"I would say we get overly fixated with mobile devices. I think delivery will mainly be on devices you come across in your environment, such as touch screens or kiosks which can effortlessly become yours for the moment you're with them," said Robson.

Security for this type of interaction will most likely be biometric such as a fingerprint, eye or other unique identifier. When your session is complete all the information is wiped. "So it's not just about mobile technologies because the real mobile component is you. So it either has to be the tech you take with your or what you encounter that will help you access this cloud computing environment."

If some of the above rings a bell then it's probably because you might have seen the Steven Spielberg film Minority Report, with its omnipresent technology. It's a reference that Robson and Manley often use.

"The idea of pervasive screens and displays will be one of the things that will be the revolution of the next five to 10 years, mainly because the technology for displays will explode," they believe.