H-P Designs 'Digital Signature' Against Forgeries

R.A. Hettinga rah at shipwright.com
Wed Jun 27 15:51:55 PDT 2007


<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 at 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'





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