Giordano Beretta
Hewlett-Packard Labs
In 1990 the first print-on-demand (POD) systems were successfully brought to market. The Internet and the World Wide Web are enabling technologies that are fostering new print models. A popular scenario for the future of printing is that decentralized POD systems will allow to dramatically reduce warehousing and distribution costs; the ability to print very short runs will also eliminate the risk of volume forecasting.
I will present a second scenario based on individual printing. In this scenario a print job is distributed to end-users for printing at their discretion. While POD is capital intensive and inexpensive to operate, individual printing requires low capital expenditure but can be expensive to operate. Depending on which scenario will be prevalent, the printer market will be radically different.
Especially for the second scenario there is a difficult issue with the structuring of information and the creation of knowledge. I will discuss how in the past year the Web has changed as a medium and speculate on how it could change again in the near future. I will conclude by presenting some ideas that could be useful for structuring information on the Web.
This is an extended version of a talk presented at "Electronic Imaging: Science and Technology -- Color Imaging: Device-Independent Color, Color Hard Copy and Graphic Arts II," San Jose, February 10-14, 1997. SPIE Proceeding Vol. 3018.
Giordano Beretta holds a diploma in mathematics and a doctorate in computer science of the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology in Zurich. Major past research areas include human-computer interaction, framework architectures, computational geometry, design automation tools, computational color science, and data compression. Other than research, he has also worked in strategic planning and intellectual property. He is currently a software design engineer in the Imaging Technology Department at HP Labs. He holds several patents related to color imaging technology.