I’m blogging from Hewlett-Packard’s HP Labs research event this afternoon. Look for posts on an introduction by HP CEO Mark Hurd as well as a bunch of tech demos. Shane Robison, chief technology officer, will join Hurd on stage and chat about what cool, including what he calls the next wave of technology: “everything as a service.” That means that HP is betting on “cloud computing” technologies, where storage and applications reside in Internet servers and not on desktops. Robison has talked about this theme before and will elaborate on it at the press event.
Google is the biggest proponent of cloud computing but HP’s rivals such as IBM have also made a big deal about it in the past months. Even Microsoft is on the bandwagon. As this transition accelerates, Robison says in a press statement, “the IT industry has an opportunity to drive a quantum leap in the user experience.”
He anticipates cloud services that are intelligent enough to anticipate your needs, based on a real-time understanding of your location, time of day and preferences.
“The search for information will be done for you, not by you,” he said.
The demos include HP BookPrep, for printing books on demand. Conversa, a mobile video conversation system that operates like an online discussion group. CloudView, a web-based service that can configure and display information on mobile devices. BRAIN, a tool that taps into the collective expertise of employees.
Watch this space. I’ll be blogging more from the event today.
