Webware

Hewlett-Packard is announcing two projects Wednesday at the Web 2.0 Summit that it hopes will give new life to print--books and magazines in particular.

BookPrep and MagCloud let content that's been too expensive or difficult to print reach readers more easily.

Andrew Bolwell, director of new business initiatives at HP, told me these products are based on an understanding that the publishing industry is undergoing a fundamental shift--which he sees as the move away from printing items ahead of time, distributing them to locations in the hopes that people will buy them, and then disposing of the products that are unsold--into the more contemporary model of printing on demand. Each year in the U.S., 2 billion magazines, or 62 percent of all those printed, end up unsold and in landfills, Bolwell said.

Books are printed in advance in the same way, for the most part, and unsold copies are likewise destroyed. Furthermore, most of the books ever printed are unavailable to buy: Bolwell said only 4 percent of the 90 million books ever printed are available to purchase.

BookPrep

HP is set to rescue old books, making them fit to print again.

(Credit: Screenshot by Rafe Needleman/CNET)

HP's BookPrep is built to address that. The service takes in scans of book pages, cleans them up automatically, and preps them for sale as print-on-demand paperback editions.

The service, which has been in testing for about a year at a university library, is getting some high-profile partners and a business model. The service now gets scanned books from Google and from the Internet Archive, and sells its books on Amazon.com.

The books are printed by various on-demand book printing houses. The covers are done on HP Indigo printers, but the book pages themselves are created on who-knows-what printer. Bolwell doesn't care, as the revenue comes from the sale of the books via Amazon royalties. HP said it will share a portion of its revenue with the source of each book's scan--in most cases, a library.

Unlike the Archive's more disruptive Book Server project, which is about making current books available online, BookPrep is about older, public-domain books. And the BookPrep service does not index the actual text in books--it leaves that to Google, Amazon, and the Internet Archive. All BookPrep does is take crufty scans of old books and make them presentable enough for print. It also can create nice covers for print editions.

So if you want a print edition of the 1887 White House Cook Book, this is how a surviving, aging copy of the book can appear new again.

MagCloud

The company also has a way for today's magazine publishers to print for less.

(Credit: Screenshot by Rafe Needleman/CNET)

The MagCloud business addresses magazine printing. It's a custom magazine printing site, like Lulu but for glossy magazines, that's been live since February. The service lets people create their own print publication and customize single copies for users based on location or other factors. When a reader buys an issue, MagCloud prints a copy at a printer as close to the person's location as possible to save shipping costs and time.

The new addition to the product is a link into Wikia community sites. Users can now print "magazines" of Wikia pages, and the service will format them so they look nice. It reminds me of Offbeat Guides to an extent.

MagCloud isn't a complete magazine publishing system in the sense that it helps people create periodical publications. It doesn't do subscription management nor does it automate print advertising. But it does look like a nice way to get a fancy-looking color magazine-like publication created and distributed easily.

MagCloud publications are printed on HP's Indigo printers.

Taping up old pages

Bolwell has a modern yet conflicted appreciation for print, which is not surprising for someone who works at a one of the largest printer manufacturers. He believes that people will continue to love and want printed products and that, "especially for rich four-color content, the experience of the printed page is the preferred way of reading content." However, he also believes that the process for creating a printed product must change: "It's only a matter of time until the entire (magazine) industry moves to print on demand," he adds.

Both BookPrep and MagCloud seem to be Band-Aids for likely terminal patients. The demand for printed books and magazines won't vanish tomorrow. Nor will the demand for newspapers evaporate suddenly, though that's an industry even Bolwell doesn't think printing technology should try to fix.

The question is to what level the book and magazine printing industries, even streamlined, will decline, and how fast they will get there. I hope Bolwell has exit plans for this business, and I don't mean selling it to Google.

ORLANDO, Fla.--Cloud computing? It's got its place, but apparently not one very close to the heart of Hewlett-Packard Chief Executive Mark Hurd today.

At the Gartner Symposium here, Hurd said cloud computing has promise but that he and customers he speaks to are leery of moving important applications to another company's infrastructure outside the company's own firewall.

"I think it's a very attractive model, but there will be challenges," Hurd said. "At the end of the day, if you tell a CEO, 'Put our e-mail in the cloud,' a certain amount of CEOs will tell you not (to). If (HP Chief Information Officer Randy) Mott told me, 'Put the general ledger up in cloud,' I'd say go back to work, we're not doing that."

The cloud is real for many consumer services, he said. So why isn't it suitable for HP's core financial records stored in the general ledger? Security, for one thing.

"We get about 1,000 hacks a day. They're more sophisticated every month," Hurd said. "Security and reliability is a huge thing. It's unlikely we'd put anything outside the firewall that's material in nature that we couldn't 100 percent secure."

HP CEO Mark Hurd explains process re-engineering.

(Credit: Stephen Shankland/CNET)

Hurd also said cloud computing has a branding issue among CEOs he speaks to. In one gathering he was doing fine until he raised the issue.

"I got a lot of boos after that...From a nontechnical CEO perspective, 'cloud computing' does not sound very clear to them," he said. The message he gets from those CEOs: "If this cloud computing is so cool, try to break this down into simple clear services that help my business be a better business."

Moving beyond services
In an onstage interview, Hurd also described HP's overall strategy, starting with building blocks of servers, PCs, networking equipment, and storage at the foundation, working up through software and putting services at the top.

Well, at the top for now. HP is headed for another layer: specific services packaged for particular customer segments, or "verticals" in industry parlance.

"The natural outgrowth for us will be more focus for us on vertical solutions," he said. HP won't get into practices for human resources or executive compensation, but will work in areas in which it can extend its computing technology ingredients.

Hurd said that spanning this range of products and services means that scale matters, for example in bargaining with component suppliers. Here, he dinged competitor IBM for selling its PC business to Lenovo, though without mentioning Big Blue by name.

"When a company would sell off its PC business, for example, you would have a problem because you would no longer be as big a customer to all those people who supply products to that supply chain," Hurd said.

He also took a potshot when asked about how HP's strategy differs from IBM's.

"I don't follow them very closely," he wisecracked. "It sounds like they're trying to chase us."

Beefing up sales
Gartner analyst Donna Scott said big customers find HP easy to deal with, but for others, the company is fragmented.

Hurd acknowledged there are problems, but said HP is working on them.

"We have a strategy to sell more. If somebody is interested in buying more, our strategies are aligned," he deadpanned.

In particular, when it comes to revenue growth, HP is aiming at smaller companies, he said. At present 70 percent of spending on IT comes from HP's top 2,000 biggest accounts.

Hurd pointed to an emphasis on sales as one area where he's trying to shift HP's culture.

"(Company co-founder David) Packard used to say, 'If we build great products customers will find them,'" Hurd said. "We actually want to sell them too."

Revamping HP's own IT
Hewlett-Packard has focused on cutting costs of its own computing infrastructure. In 2004, the year before Hurd took over as CEO, "We had $79 billion in revenue. We made $3.5 billion (in net income). We spent $75.5 billion." So, he asked the company's staff, "What do you spend it on?"

IT was a big part of it, accounting for $4.2 billion. Of that 82 percent was just to keep things running.

"One of our big spends was IT. We had more IT professionals in the company than we had salespeople," he said.

"We had IT spread out. Everybody had a little bit of ownership," Hurd said. There were 87 data centers, 6,000 applications, 19,000 people, 24,000 servers, 20 petabytes of data stored at 700 data marts.

The company "flipped the model," cutting expenses and redirecting funds to the future instead. "Our spend is down 40 percent and our innovation is up 2X in dollars."

It was painful and HP made mistakes on the way, but it was a personal priority for Hurd.

"I get a lot of CIOs who show me how bad their IT is," Hurd said. When he sees it, "My first reaction is it's because of a bad CEO."

Update: Google has since added Toshiba to the list of partners.

Though many PC makers were quiet about Chrome OS earlier Wednesday, Google has now named the companies it's working with to bring its operating system to Netbooks next year.

We may see an Eee PC running Chrome OS next year.

(Credit: Asus)

In a post to the Chrome blog Wednesday afternoon, Google vice president of product management Sundar Pichai said the company is working with a variety of PC and chipmakers, and another software company. Those include Acer, Adobe, Asus, Freescale, Hewlett-Packard, Lenovo, Qualcomm, Texas Instruments, and Toshiba.

CNET News reported earlier Wednesday that Asus and Lenovo were thought to be working with Google on Chrome OS. Asus was an easy one to guess since it's the pioneer of the Netbook category and has shown its willingness to work with other operating systems outside of Windows.

Acer also sounds right since it's the fastest growing laptop maker, and has shown a lot of flexibility in pricing models to move Netbooks off store shelves. HP, of course, is the world's largest provider of PCs and should be part of any conversation about consumer computing OSes.

The one that is notably missing is Dell. Dell is the second-largest PC maker in the world (though Acer is close at its heels), but didn't indicate it was actively working with Google on this when contacted earlier today. The company would only say that "Dell constantly assesses new technologies as part of managing our product development process and for consideration in future products."

Hewlett-Packard, maker of printers and other stuff that sits in your office not being terribly interesting, is working on an intelligent social-network application for your mobile phone, called Friendlee.

Friendlee keeps track of who you interact with the most, and organizes your friends list in that order. Status updates show what those contacts are up to, as well as the local time and whether their phone is on, off, or set to silent. You'll even be able to see where your contacts are, similar to Google Latitude. You, like your contacts, will be able to control who can see your information. The idea puts us in mind of Xobni, an e-mail plug-in that shows all sorts of fascinating--i.e. useless--stats about your e-mail contacts.

A BlackBerry prototype of Friendlee was previewed at this year's Wireless Enterprise Symposium, and the app is currently being tested at HP's Palo Alto, Calif., social computing lab, according to the BBC. The research team, headed by Professor Bernardo Huberman, analyzed interaction via Facebook, YouTube, and Twitter, and came to the conclusion that your phone is more interested in direct, reciprocal contact than building a giant circle of friends. We could have told you that--can we have a research grant to mess about on Twitter as well, please?

Huberman and friends will present the app at the Mobile HCI conference in Bonn, Germany, in mid-September. Friendlee currently runs on Windows Mobile and Google Android. One of the most interesting-looking features is a recommendation engine that lets your close contacts recommend and give advice on businesses and people. Yes, people, "both socially and professionally." Now that sounds like fun.

(Source: Crave UK)

Hewlett-Packard is killing the online backup service Upline. It's a pity, not because Upline was a great service itself--it had reliability issues--but because Upline was built primarily with technology from Titanize, a company HP acquired. Titanize was a great unknown online storage app, offering not just backup, but Web-based access to files, and computer-to-computer file synchronization. Now both Upline and Titanize are gone.

The online storage space is crowded, so one can't really fault HP for withdrawing from a competitive market where it didn't stand out. For online backup, I recommend Carbonite or Mozy (colleague Tom Merritt swears by JungleDisk). For Web storage and sharing, there's Box.net and Dropbox. For computer-to-computer sync, I like Windows Live Sync.

Upline users have until March 31 to recover any files they want from the system. HP will be giving users a full (not pro-rated) refund of fees paid to the system.

Previously: Hands on with HP's online backup application, Upline.

HP MediaSmart Server

(Credit: HP)

Hewlett-Packard announced Monday that it is upgrading its MediaSmart server lineup with new, more powerful hardware and, more importantly, with software support for Macs and improved over-the-Net streaming of users' media files. (A software update will allow users of existing MediaSmart boxes to access some of the new features.) Also Monday, 9to5Mac speculated that one of the Macworld announcements in January will be an expanded Time Capsule product with similar features.

Currently, HP's MediaSmart servers, running Microsoft's Windows Home Server software, cannot serve as backup platforms for Macs running the Time Machine backup software, and data stored on a WHS product is available only in a very limited fashion over the open Internet. Similarly, Apple's current Time Capsule backup appliance does not come with backup software for Windows PCs, and does not support media sharing over the Net.

The time is right for products like these, and more so for those that don't presume that families are running homogeneous environments. Any household with more than one computer and one digital camera is likely suffering from confusion in organizing and finding media, and centralized home hubs could be a big help. The living-room side of the equation still needs to be figured out, though. People want to get their photos and videos onto the big screens in their living spaces. While there are several decent digital media options for the home media center, many are too expensive or too complex for the mainstream audience (the Xbox 360 being perhaps a notable exception, as my colleague Josh Lowensohn has reminded me repeatedly).

My personal take: I own a first-generation HP MediaSmart server and have been very frustrated to find that my new MacBook couldn't access it to do a Time Machine backup. I blame Apple for this, primarily--without a hack, its software will only back up over the network to its own overpriced Time Capsule appliances. So I'm glad to see support coming for my particular configuration. I'm also really looking forward to having better access to my media files when I am not at home.

There's an in-depth review of the new HP MediaSmart server on the fan site MediaSmartServer.Net.

Bernardo Huberman, Hewlett-Packard's director of the HP Social Computing lab, and fellow researcher Gabor Szabo have published a highly detailed report (PDF) on "predicting the popularity of online content." Focusing on content submitted and popularized on popular social sites Digg.com and Google's YouTube, the two concocted not one but three ways to predict how much traffic and overall user interaction a story or submitted video will receive well after it hits its initial popularity.

To do this the pair kept an eye on 7,146 videos from YouTube's recently added section, and every digg from registered digg users between July 1, 2007, to December 18, 2007. From this data, they found that stories on Digg got more votes and views during peak traffic hours than those at nights and on weekends (duh), and that YouTube videos tended to get more and more views a month into being submitted--and in many cases well beyond the initial 30-day evaluation.

HP's research shows the usual daily spikes in Digg traffic compared with story submissions and promotions.

(Credit: HP Labs)

To dig a little deeper into this data, they were able to figure out which time of day story submissions on Digg had the most chance of getting attention, right down to the hour. The data also showed how many diggs a story would get after being promoted to the front page depending on both what time that story hit and when it was originally submitted. The lesson: submit, and hit the front page early.

The prediction models, which you'll have no problem understanding if you paid attention in your grad school numerical analysis class, outline three different ways to guess any one submission's popularity. All three depend on any number of variables, as dictated by Huberman's research, including what time of day you're submitting compared with how many others are submitting at the same time.

One thing that slightly outdated the research done on the Digg-side is the somewhat-recent introduction of the recommendation engine. Digg has been quite vocal with the success of its engine, both in terms of additional traffic and higher user interaction levels.

Also, at the time of the survey Digg was just two weeks out from a redesign that put more emphasis on friends activity--a precursor to the mid-September overhaul of user profiles, which made the site resemble a social network. Neither of these things changed Digg's overall method of having popular stories roll off the front page in a matter of hours--something that hasn't changed during the lifetime of the site, but it's worth noting nonetheless.

I've embedded the paper after the jump. You can also track some of HP Labs' other projects on this page.

I sat in on a group breakfast with HP Labs' Bernardo Huberman last week. He's the director of the Social Computing Lab. The press function was called so HP could tell us how the company is using modern social-networking tools to enhance its business.

Modern tools, that is, for 2005.

While Huberman has done innovative research showing how novelty and popularity interact on social sites (PDF) such as Digg and Facebook, the impact of this research on HP is notably old-fashioned.

First, we learned, HP uses algorithms derived from its research to juggle the product offerings presented to buyers on HP's commerce sites at checkout. Second, we were told of an internal HP app called Watercooler, which monitors HP employees' blogs (not blogs outside of HP) and presents the "zeitgeist" of what's happening on them to people inside HP.

HP could do more with Bernardo Huberman

(Credit: Rafe Needleman/CNET)

What amazed me was how little of Huberman's brainpower was being applied to the real world of social media. I asked if any of these social tools were being used to engage HP's customers at a level beyond transactions or beyond HP's firewall--if, for example, the company was helping customers share knowledge with each other.

No, not yet. Everything is still running through knowledge gate keepers within HP, to be doled out, it appears, via sales pitches and service contracts.

Meanwhile, Dell is using a Digg-like service, Ideastorm, to collect the wishes of its customers. Lenovo runs a surprisingly transparent blog about its PCs and laptops, with a small but devoted readership of ThinkPad fanboys. Comcast has a guy monitoring Twitter who will step in and problem-solve, if you start to kvetch in public about your service.

At least HP isn't Apple-like in imposing restrictions on the flow of information between its most involved users and developers.

HP is not doing badly as a technology company right now. It has dominant positions in PC and printer market share, and it is releasing interesting and experimental home PCs, servers, televisions, and mobile phones.

If I were an HP shareholder or a blind consumer of HP products, I wouldn't be disappointed. But I left the meeting worried about the company nonetheless. Instead of just mining its customers for ideas and revenue, HP could be turning some of them into loyal fans. I don't know why it is not.

HP has entered the online backup space with a new product called Upline. It's a decent cloud-based backup product at a good price point, but it has a few frustrating limitations.

The good news first: The software is simple to get started with (critical for a backup application) and the paid plans provide unlimited storage for your documents, photos, music, and video files (also critical--who wants to count bits when signing up for data insurance?). The system checks for new files by default every 15 minutes, and uploads your data to the HP-run servers in a quiet background process.

Upline's desktop widget.

There's a free version that gives you 1GB of online storage for a year, but if you're serious about backup you'll want one of the paid versions. The least expensive $59/year Home plan gives you the unlimited storage and allows up to three PCs to share the online storage pool. Family plans and small office plans give you individual storage bins, and the business plans also give you an administrator's dashboard.

The product allows for Web-based access to your backed-up files, which is very nice if you want to grab a something when you're away from your PC. You can also share files via e-mail (recipients get links, not the files themselves) or publish files for public access.

Upline can also back up files to a local device, such as a second hard drive, a server, or a PC on the local network. I don't know of any other products that handle both local and Web-based backup. It's a very cool feature.

The product is based on Titanize, which HP acquired when it bought the company Opelin last year. I've always thought Titanize was an underappreciated backup application. Perhaps HP was listening.

Now, the flip side. The biggest turn off is that Upline does not backup e-mail files. That's planned for the future, according to HP, but backup users will need it now. Imagine losing your e-mail archive. Enough said.

Another missing piece: System restore. Upline is a document and media backup product. It won't store your programs or system settings. So if your hard disk crashes, you can't use it to rebuild your system.

The application doesn't offer PC-to-PC sync (see FolderShare, BeInSync, SugarSync), which to many is an obscure feature, but I think it's one of the most valuable data safety and convenience applications you can have on a personal computer. There's no virtual drive, such as XDrive has, which makes using the service just a little more tedious than it needs to be. Also, it's PC only on the backup side, although any machine with a browser can view Upline archive pages. There's also no mobile client. Finally, the search feature seems to only search file names, not files' contents.

Upline is neither a perfect backup tool nor a complete integrated online storage suite. However, at this price point, given its unlimited backup space and its straightforward sharing options, it's a good deal.

The desktop application is pretty straightforward for a backup product.

See also: Mozy and Carbonite.

This review has been updated from the original: Information was added on backing up data to a local device.