Jaguar: Rendezvous

Steve Jobs demonstrated Apple's new JXTA-based Rendezvous system for auto-discovery of printers and other network devices, including Bluetooth devices.

It's reminiscent of Apple's old Apple Open Collaboration Environment, which could create ad-hoc catalogs of users or services.

At Coca-Cola, we created a technology demo of our e-mail/address book/calendaring application running under AOCE, and it was an amazing improvement. Instead of being app-centric (Let me find Paul in the calendar app to invite him to a meeting, let me find Paul in the mail app to send him an e-mail, etc.), it was user-centric: You had a personal Rolodex of business cards that represented users, and you could (for instance) e-mail them a file by simply dropping the file's icon on their business card. You could mount their public network share directly from their business card, as well.

Rendezvous will enable this sort of integration, and it's an open standard: read more about it on the JXTA site.