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Gold/Mining/Energy : Unitec Int. Controls Inc. -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: Link Lady who wrote (730)	2/14/1999 9:44:00 PM
From: Link Lady	Read Replies (2) \| Respond to of 856

More on Jini for anyone interested dailynews.yahoo.com Sun Optimistic On Jini Software. I hope their last paragraph comes true for us. By Alice Ratcliffe DAVOS, Switzerland (Reuters) - Sun Microsystems aims to have its Jini software installed in around half a billion devices annually within a few years, a senior executive said. ''We would hope in terms of units, you give us a couple of years, and we would like to a half a billion devices per year with Jini technology,'' said Mark Tolliver, president of Sun's consumer-embedded division, in an interview with Reuters. The California-based firm formally announced Jini on January 25 with the backing of 37 partners ranging from technology firms to appliance makers. ''We are obviously very excited about the potential that this simply-connect technology...delivers,'' Tolliver said, speaking on the sidelines of the World Economic Forum's annual meeting in Davos this week. Jini aims to link up everything to one network, bypassing the personal computer. It has applications not only for devices like printers and scanners, but even for household appliances like dishwashers, where it could allow routine maintenance to be carried out through technology channels. Tolliver said Sun plans to use Jini to add value. ''We intend to use Jini as a fundamental piece of technology for adding new services and value in our disc arrays. We think it will be part of all of our servers and work stations in terms of their serving as part of a Jini network,'' he said. Sun will charge a small licensing fee for using Jini, but foresees more revenues from the value it adds to products. ''Are we expecting to make enormous sums on licensing a trademark? No,'' said Tolliver. Instead, he said, Sun planned to ''license (Jini) very, very broadly.'' ''We expect to offer people who want to use it in large quantities the ability to make the incremental cost of adding that Jini technology very small,'' he said. ''By doing so, we think we have the ability both for Sun and others to create new kinds of products with extra value. And we are going to have to compete on that basis, with products that bring value to people,'' he said. Tolliver declined to disclose revenue projections. Sun has said it would charge a nominal licensing fee for using the Jini logo of either 10 cents per unit or $250,000 per product line. Tolliver also said Jini was available on the Internet Web for free, for non-commercial and internal use. Sun's technology will compete with some others, including Microsoft Corp's Universal Plug and Play. Microsoft Chairman Bill Gates, speaking during the Forum, said of such technology: ''It is an important area where there will be open standards, so that people can really get their information easily moved between the different devices, and control them far better than they do today.'' Tolliver said the main difference between the two rival systems was that in the case of Microsoft, ''their view of the world passes through the personal computer (PC). Their goal is making it easy to connect devices to a PC. Ours is a more peer-to-peer strategy. Your scanner could talk to your printer.'' Jini's programming language is Sun's Java. But Tolliver said the Jini system could work with a device which doesn't have Java as long as one device in the network is Java enabled. ''As long as one device somewhere is enabled with Java, then all devices can be Jini-enabled,'' he said. ''We absolutely think Jini will be a revenue enhancing product for our company, as well as for anyone who licenses the trademark and uses it.''