Xerox PARC seeks collaboration partners
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(InfoWorld) - After two chance experiences collaborating with innovative new companies, Xerox's fabled PARC (Palo Alto Research Center)Â lab has decided to launch a formal program in hopes of participating in more such projects. About 18 months ago, a couple of researchers from the Palo Alto Research Center met two entrepreneurs at a conference. After they had lunch together, the solar energy aspirations of the two entrepreneurs captured the imaginations of the PARC researchers enough that they pursued a new type of relationship with the entrepreneurs, said Mark Bernstein, president and center director of PARC. After three months of hammering out the legal details, the two entrepreneurs moved into space at PARC, where they collaborated with PARC researchers on technology. The team gradually grew to 50 people and now has moved into its own offices as an independent company, SolFocus. SolFocus paid PARC for the space in the lab as well as resources such as Internet access. As they worked together, the two parties also distinguished between PARC IP (intellectual property), SolFocus IP, and joint IP for revenue-sharing purposes. Throughout the collaboration, there wasn't any "tussling for advantage," Bernstein said. "We both want SolFocus to be successful, and we share in their success," he said. PARC had a similar but structurally different experience with another startup, Powerset, a company working on a natural-language search engine. That came about when an entrepreneur came to PARC, which already had about 100 patents related to natural-language research, and promoted the idea of starting a business around a natural-language search offering that could scale and perform well, Bernstein said. One of PARC's lead researchers ended up leaving the facility to become the CTO of Powerset. Researchers from Powerset and PARC currently have offices in each other's facilities, and they continue to collaborate on the technology. "These were two unique but similar experiences in that they were fundamentally about finding a good match between PARC's competencies and a value proposition for a startup," Bernstein said. Now PARC has decided to become more "purposeful" about seeking out other similar collaborations, he said. The new program is called Startup@Parc, and interested partners can submit a collaboration proposal on PARC's website. "What we're really looking for are unique ideas that have the potential to be really significant disruptive innovations in the world," he said. PARC will also be looking for people who "think big but in a grounded fashion and avoid those that represent a me-too offering," he said. PARC has already received a few inquiries from entrepreneurs who saw publicity from the Powerset arrangement. PARC will probably concentrate on one or two new projects over the next couple of years, he said. PARC was started in 1970 as part of Xerox Research and is credited with commercializing or innovating the mouse, the graphical user interface, and the laser printer.
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Xerox Corp. introduced color printers and ink products Monday that it said will cut the price of color copying by two-thirds, sweeping away a major hurdle for customers seeking to enter the profitable and growing color market.
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Technical and legal pact calls for product interoperability and legal protections for common customers.
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Data Center Markup Language Organization joins XML body to broaden industry adoption.
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InfoWorld - A Web services partnership will allow U.S. users of Adobe Systems software to send documents via the Internet to FedEx Kinko&#39;s centers for printing.
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(InfoWorld) - Microsoft will participate in a meeting later this month with vendors and organizations that are backing several different identity management systems, an indication thatÂ cooperation between the software giant and its peersÂ is improving. The meeting, part of an initiative called the Concordia Project, strives to improve interoperability between Microsoft's CardSpace and OpenID, two identity management systems, and protocols for identity management supported by an industry trade group, the Liberty Alliance, said Roger Sullivan, president of its management board. Vendors will hear from companies such as General Motors, Boeing, and AOL about how they're trying to integrate various identity management systems into their operations, Sullivan said. "Many of these protocols today are very geek-centric," said Sullivan, who is also vice president of Oracle's identity management section. "They're not very people-friendy." A major issue is how vendors can use different authentication mechanisms in their operations. For example, a financial planning Web site could allow users to forecast how much their retirement fund may be worth in 30 years. Eventually, the user may want to buy a service from the financial planner and migrate that same data to an environment that uses stronger authentication, Sullivan said. This means there would need to be more interoperability between the protocols used by OpenID, CardSpace, and Liberty-enabled applications. "I would more expect that we will have nuanced changes or extensions to existing protocols to enable the interoperability," Sullivan said. The Concordia Project, set up by the Liberty Alliance, hopes to release its first set of open standards by the end of the year, Sullivan said Microsoft said in February at the RSA Conference it wouldÂ integrate CardSpace and OpenID, an open-source standard for logging into Web sites. The work would help mitigate potential security risks, such as so-called "man-in-the-middle" attacks, where a hacker can intercept identity information as it's in transit to a Web site, officials said. NovellÂ is also working with Microsoft on InfoCard Selector, a so-called "digital wallet" for handling identity information. Microsoft's commitment to the Concordia project shows it has realized the importance of interoperability, said Graham Titterington, principal analyst at Ovum. "Microsoft has already come a long way in terms of 12 months ago," Titterington said. "It's not a surprising development as a year ago I think it would have been." The meeting will take place on June 26 at Catalyst 2007, an enterprise IT conference in San Francisco. Â
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Palo Alto Research Center (PARC), the legendary XeroxÂ institution that pioneered graphical user interfaces, Ethernet and laser printing, is set to announce on Tuesday a multiyear research and development agreement with Fujitsu.
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(InfoWorld) - A Web services partnership will allow U.S. users of Adobe Systems software to send documents via the Internet to FedEx Kinko's centers for printing. The deal was announced Wednesday, the same day that Adobe released its Reader 8.1, which includes a "send to FedEx Kinko's" button on the main toolbar and that same option in the file menu. The free Adobe Reader is available now for download at the company Web site. Acrobat 8.1 will be available later this month and will have the send option in the file menu. "This is a great example of our strategy to provide customers with more points of access," said Richard Maranville, senior vice president and chief information officer of FedEx Kinko's, a division of the FedEx shipping and business services company. The partnership is aimed at making it more convenient for Adobe software users, many of them small and midsize businesses, to get documents printed. "This [option] is going to be a much better workflow for them," he said. FedEx Kinko's launched its Print Online application in October of last year, allowing users to upload files for printing and other services at FedEx Kinko's stores. The partnership integrates that service into Adobe's PDF (Portable Document Format) software. In terms of numbers and reach, Print Online has 133,000 registered users, while FedEx Kinko's has 1,600 total stores in 11 countries, with 200 opening in the last year and 300 more planned for the next 12 months, Maranville said. Adobe doesn't break down its user numbers by nation, but its Reader software is on more than a half a billion desktops worldwide, according to Michele Turner, Adobe vice president of product management and developer relations. The partnership, which is new, had its genesis in discussions between FedEx Kinko's CEO Kenneth May and Adobe CEO Bruce Chizen. Chizen "had a lot of excitement and a lot of vision about exploring software as a service with FedEx Kinko's," Turner said. After the two CEOs got revved up about the possibilities, their ideas for the first step in the partnership trickled down and about six months ago the software development for the Web services got rolling. "It happened very, very quickly," Maranville said. His team is confident that it is ready to handle the onslaught of PDFs that could come with the new option in Reader and Acrobat. Although the Web services pairing will initially be just for the U.S., expansion could be something the companies will contemplate in the future, he said.
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Companies will demonstrate how their technology will work together.
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Taking a page from OSS for improving interagency collaboration.
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FUJIFILM U.S.A., Inc. introduces a new software application that expands  its pro lab and on-site retail photo print solutions to create photo  books, photo calendars, greeting cards and other customized photo  products, using Xerox Corporation (NYSE: XRX) digital color printers.
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Microsoft Corp. and conferencing technology maker Polycom Inc. are teaming up to develop ways for people using PCs and other devices to hold virtual meetings with those using more traditional conferencing equipment.
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Adobe may already own the market for electronic documents thanks to PDF, but the company knows that Microsoft has a habit of showing up late to the party and stealing the crown. In turn, Adobe is beta testing a new project it calls "Mars," which is an answer to Microsoft's new XPS format.
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Microsoft Corp. is enlisting Linux distributor TurboLinux Inc. to help tailor work being done to translate documents between Open XML and ODF file formats for Japanese and Chinese users.
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Pavilion Technologies, a world leader in model-based software, today  announced an agreement with Shanghai SECCO Petrochemical Co. to deploy  Pavilion's Polymer Solution on six polymer  lines at the company's manufacturing facility  in the Shanghai Chemical Industrial Park.
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Four Linux vendors have joined together to develop technology that would potentially make it easier for software makers to build products for multiple distributions of the open-source operating system.
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The Associated Press this morning hailed a new Xerox innovation that aims to take search engine indexing capabilities "to the next level," with a public unveiling of a semantic networking tool it plans to integrate into its FactSpotter legal document search system. It's being described as the next stage in textual indexing development, and the culmination of a four-year project at Xerox's European research center in Grenoble, France.