Cloud Enabled Mobile Printing

There’s a recent Verizon Wireless commercial in which a hip, creative-type guy rolls up to the front of a big office building in a cab. He pays and gets out, and as he does, he accidentally leaves his thick, color, mechanically bound presentation book sitting on the seat. As the cab drives away, the camera pans to the sad look on his face. He’s going to blow the pitch. As he breaks out his phone, the narrator explains how his Verizon Smartphone will allow him to recover by printing the presentation upstairs (presumably at the client’s office), in color. Cut to the phone’s screen, and a fantasy app allows him to print the document in an amazingly user friendly way. The meeting will proceed, and our Creative’s career has been saved!

The commercial shows a fictionalized application, and its purpose is to sell Smartphones. The coolest thing about it to me is that a major carrier like Verizon is advocating Cloud Printing from mobile devices as a serious business application, on TV! I’ve seen this spot quite a few times now, so apparently the company believes this application is compelling enough that they are spending significant sums of money on airtime promoting the idea.

Cloud Printing can be used for a wide variety of applications, as we’ve discussed here in several posts and, as David and I have discussed in some papers we’ve authored together. Honestly, I think most people don’t really think much about printing from their phone. With the release of the iPad, though, much attention is now being made to the fact that mobile and network-centric devices (representing a new, non-traditional computing paradigm), may be missing or have limited printing capabilities. Mobile devices like Tablets, and Smartphones with bigger screens and faster (i.e., 4G) Internet connections, are already changing the landscape and will drive the need for print capabilities.

It is not such a stretch to envision walking into a conference room, spotting a printer, locating your presentation “in the Cloud” from the phone’s browser or an app, using Cloud Printing software (also accessed from the phone) to direct it to that local printer. Then, since some phones now have built in projectors, too, you pass out the handouts and set the phone down on the board room table to project that same preso! In reality, the document in the Verizon commercial was a complex, bound document that couldn’t be produced on a local printer; it would more likely be produced by a Cloud Printing Service Provider, like Mimeo.com (which, in fact, can be accessed today from your web browser and if you are in New York, we could deliver the document to the prospect’s office on the same day—anywhere else, it would be overnight). But I digress.

There are quite a few exciting companies working on these things and enabling this new printing world. I will talk about several of them here over the next few weeks. One of the most important companies developing solutions in this area is HP. Their new solution, called HP ePrint, is the result an alliance between HP and Research In Motion (RIM), the BlackBerry people.

HP ePrint Enterprise is a cloud-based solution that makes it possible for BlackBerry Smartphone users to send a print job to a network printer. HP says the solution is printer-agnostic, and driverless.

Using HP ePrint, Enterprise users can print e-mail and e-mail attachments, including documents (similar to what was depicted in the Verizon commercial), presentations, reports and photos generated using Microsoft Word, Excel, PowerPoint, PDF files, Images, HTML, Text and XPS from their BlackBerry to “registered” printers in their enterprises’ networks. Eventually, HP plans to make ePrint available at public locations in hotels, airports, coffee shops and other spots.

Most mobile devices are already quite good at accessing business applications. But as we’ve discussed, printing is an important function that is missing. Just like in the Verizon commercial, printing ahead from a remote location so documents are available on arrival could be a fantastic productivity enhancer and super convenient, too. According to HP, once the solution is deployed, the user experience is simple: “Hit print” on your Blackberry, choose a printer based on descriptive, relevant qualities and click to select it. GPS-enabled BlackBerries allow searches by location. The user sees a full description of the printer, reviews the selection of e-mail messages and attachments, and clicks Print again to initiate the job.



HP says they are making a three-front attack on the Cloud: collaborating with cloud providers, collaborating with existing cloud users, and offering its own cloud services and cloud-enabled products. Their big vision for HP’s cloud research is focused on delivering an application and computing end-state of Everything-as-a-Service (see a previous blog post and link here on RichInternetPrinting. )

Cloud Printing is here, and the applications are virtually endless. Pun intended!