<http://online.wsj.com/article_print/SB118296927964850452.html> The Wall Street Journal H-P Designs 'Digital Signature' Against Forgeries U.S. Firm Takes Aim At Emerging Markets Like India, China By JACKIE RANGE June 28, 2007 BANGALORE, India -- As anyone who does business in India knows, you can't get very far without the right piece of paper. That makes forgery a big problem and one of the most common types of fraud. In a research and development laboratory here in Bangalore, India's tech hub, Hewlett-Packard Co. is researching a way of marking new paper documents with a bar code that helps prevent forgeries. Trusted Hardcopy, H-P's internal name for the project, is one of several innovations that are part of a big push by the computer maker to devise products for specific markets that will also have broader use. The aim: To help capture what it calls its "next billion customers" -- a reference to massive emerging markets such as India and China. With Trusted Hardcopy, which is just one of the tailored efforts, rather than requiring holograms or watermarked paper, the system uses equipment no more complicated than some software, a scanner and a computer. The bar code is designed to act like a digital signature, "thus bringing network level security to the world of paper," says H-P in a company document. H-P envisages government entities, public offices and companies as potential users, such as for the registration of land ownership. "India is one of the largest growing markets for H-P," says Anjaneyulu Kuchibhotla, a department director at H-P Labs India, though he adds that India is "starting from a fairly low IT base." The Asian-Pacific region, which includes India and China, accounted for $4.5 billion of H-P's total revenue of $25.5 billion for the three months ended April 30. But with an increase of 16% over the year-earlier period, the Asian-Pacific region was the company's fastest-growing geographical area. H-P, based in Palo Alto, California, declined to provide results just for India. India's technology industry is expected to grow dramatically in coming years. In 2011, India's tech industry is likely to be worth more than $110 billion in annual revenue, says research and consulting firm IDC (India) Ltd., up from $48.5 billion in 2006. Now there's a computer for only one in every 50 people, a total of 22 million, IDC says. But that is expected to grow significantly as India's economy expands at an annual clip of about 9%. Already H-P is India's biggest seller of PCs in terms of units sold, with a 21% market share, according to IDC, ahead of India's HCL Technologies Ltd., which has 14%, and China's Lenovo Group Ltd., with 10%. H-P employs more than 29,000 people in India, its second-largest single-nation work force after the U.S., with a business that spans areas including outsourcing, manufacturing, technology services and customer support. By focusing its research in India, as well as at its labs in Russia, China, and elsewhere, H-P aims to invent products that fit a particular local need but can also be used in other markets. The time from conception to market can be as long as three to five years. Some of them might never see the light of day. "Not everything we work on makes it to a product, but the ones that do tend to have a very significant impact," says Ajay Gupta, the director of H-P Labs India, in an email. At the company's lab in Beijing, H-P is researching new databases that can handle very large amounts of information. H-P says some of its biggest customers, in terms of the number of transactions and customers, are in the world's most populous nation, and the company is working with them to build information systems large enough to handle that. Given the huge number of people in India, the results of the research could have application here, H-P says. H-P's Indian labs, in downtown Bangalore, are staffed with employees with advanced degrees in computer science and engineering. The majority of employees are of Indian origin. Rooms are named after scientists such as Galileo and Marconi. H-P reckons that the potential market in India -- those who may buy computers or are customers of companies that use computers -- could number 900 million. Yet India also is famously bureaucratic and forms-ridden. So the company has focused some of its efforts on trying to bridge the gap between tech and paper. "We sort of assume that paper's not going to go away," said Mr. Kuchibhotla. "And we say that if paper's not going to go away, what technology do you need to bridge what's happening in the paper world with what's happening in the IT world?" H-P's goal was to make a product that allowed paper to be read by a machine and secure against forgery. An early version of Trusted Hardcopy puts a bar code on paper that is similar to the bar codes on groceries. It contains the data that are also printed on the document and can be read by a scanner. It also encodes the data in the bar code to prevent tampering. Because the bar code contains the authentic data, any changes to the document should be identifiable. The bar codes can't be easily copied. The bar code is printed at the bottom of a page of regular size copier paper. Another product H-P is developing is TVPrintCast, which sends data over television networks. A set-top box receives the data, and the consumer can then print out the information. TV penetration in India is far higher than computers -- in 2005 India had 500 million TV viewers, compared with 6.5 million Internet users. The product would mean, for instance, that while watching a cooking program, the recipes featured could be broadcast and printed out. H-P isn't the only one in the running: An India company, Chennai-based Novatium Solutions Pvt. Ltd., is already selling a product called Nova netTV that enables desktop computing on a TV. -- ----------------- R. A. Hettinga <mailto: rah@ibuc.com> The Internet Bearer Underwriting Corporation <http://www.ibuc.com/> 44 Farquhar Street, Boston, MA 02131 USA "... however it may deserve respect for its usefulness and antiquity, [predicting the end of the world] has not been found agreeable to experience." -- Edward Gibbon, 'Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire'