First Look:

Dartdevices wants to make CE devices cooperate

By Bernard Cole
iApplianceWeb
(01/31/07, 1:54 PM GMT)

San Francisco, Ca. – To deal with the lack of interoperability between various networked devices and systems, startup Dartdevices Corp. is developing software that will in essence make everyone play nice.

In spite of a lot of talk about common interoperability standards, most connected consumer electronics devices employ various CPUs and operating systems, all running proprietary applications written to specific application programming interfaces.

Accepting this lack of standards as a given that can be a market opportunity, Datadevices is taking an end run around this basically closed model with a software application it calls Dartplayer. It is similar in concept to the "Obje" software architecture, developed originally at Xerox Research.

Requiring only 250-kbyte of memory, the DartPlayer software package, once installed, an application originally developed for a specific device or platform can be shared among multiple operating systems over a variety of wireless connections.

Adding a DartPlayer to each device exposes hardware, software and content to all other devices embedded with DartPlayer, allowing all the devices with DartPlayer to interoperate smoothly, since each device has direct access to the combined resources of all others.

The company is currently negotiating with device manufacturers to incorporate Dartplayer into their products.

In many respects, Dartplayer is essentially a virtual machine, similar in concept to a Java VM. But where the JVM masks the differences of each device, Dartplayer instead exposes such exposes such differences to Dart applications.

Essentially an instruction set-based technology, Dartplayer is written in C++, allowing it to run in C++ across different devices without recompiling.

Rather than depend on the presence of a full-time system administrator somewhere in the network of cooperating devices, in the Dart approach, a small Dart utility (a Daplet or Dart applet?) acts as a middleman running a number of PCs or mobile devices. The program goes back and forth among devices, just like PostScript documents work among different devices, in order to achieve interoperability.

The company is planning to license DartPlayer, an engine and core Dart applications to device manufacturers. The software development kit for third-party developers is ready now, the company said.

The company will launch Dart applications for phones, PCs and the Web, in addition to phone-to-phone Dart applications, in the second half of 2007.

To learn more, go to www.dartdevices.com.

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