SUMMARY

The opportunity created by the steep price drops in networking and computing power of recent years is enormous. New technologies will combine information and processing power seamlessly, presenting customers with the right information at the right time and place. In many ways these new technologies hark back to the original promise of mechanical computing devices—devices that would serve to augment our abilities and intelligence and free us from burdensome tasks, just as the steam engine augmented humans'physical strength during the Industrial Age.

The transition from a world of stand-alone devices to networked devices, from appliance users to information users, will not happen overnight. It will certainly not happen any time soon if a costly, winner-take-all API battle is waged. Universal Plug and Play is an open initiative to take existing standards, existing technologies, and existing knowledge, repurpose it, and deliver on the promise and opportunity of the networked world. Standards-based, simple enough for the smallest appliances to implement, powerful enough to scale to the global Internet, and based on the proven approach of explicit protocols, UPnP is an incremental approach, but an approach that has been proven to work. UPnP is defined as an enabling technology for connecting multiple devices throughout a home to the Internet. Universal Plug and Play initiatives are being developed to support key existing industry standards such as TCP/IP, HTML, XML, HTTP, DNS, LDAP, autoIP, DHCP, SSDP and others. The Home API SDK planned for December 1999 was not shipped because the efforts of Home API were merged with the interests of UPnP that same year.