HP Web Print Roadshow Hits Hong Kong

Reuters and several other news agencies are covering the arrival of the HP Cloud Printing/Web Print roadshow in Hong Kong. I found a good interview with VJ by Yun-Hee Kim on the Wall Street Journal Blogs (read it here)and Reuters reported that HP plans an App Store focused on printing apps. The only thing I would take issue with is the characterization in the WSJ piece about this initiative being a "gamble" for HP, maybe it's just a language thing but I would say that these printers and even more important the ecosystem HP is creating, are a sure thing.

HP APP STORE (Clip from Reuters, their whole Reuters piece can be found here).

Like peers Nokia and Apple, Palo Alto- headquartered HP will launch its own version of an app store designed to work with its printers, enabling customers to print directly from the app.

The company will take 30 percent of the revenue gained from the store, with 70 percent going to the software developer.

"If we try to develop all the software from the U.S., it's going to take years," said Joshi, who has been with HP since 1980. "Because we are making it open, there'll be some smart young kid in college who'll figure out what is the best thing for printers."

PRINT IS GREEN!

Joshi also rubbished talk that the printer was on its way out as more people begin depending on computers for their communication and learning needs, and amid concern that increased use of paper was causing deforestation.

"Do you think this computer is more green than that?" he said, as he waved a piece of paper. "It is not. People are missing the whole point. This (paper) is more green than anything else."

-- End Reuters clip

I can tell you that my company, Mimeo, is very likely to put some exciting applications into that HP App Store over the next year.

Internet Week NYC- HP Web-Print and Google Cloud Print

Great video on the Chromium Blog from an HP event streamed live during Internet Week in NY on June 7th, click here to watch, featuring Vyomesh Joshi (VJ) from HP, his team and Google product managers responsible for Google Cloud Print. HP called their new stuff "Web-Print". They talked about their new printers, and guys from Google did a demo of Cloud Printing. Super cool. The actual presentation starts a few minutes in, so be patient or advance the video.

This Week in Internet Printing - HP and Apple

HP continued to march forward with more announcements (and a press conference scheduled today), regarding their ePrint initiative. You can read coverage by Adam Ostrow from Mashable at Forbes blogs. It's awesome to see so much coverage emerging on this topic, especially from traditional media outlets like Forbes. There's also a great article from last week by Louella Fernandez, a Principal Analyst at Quocirca Research, here.



In a nutshell, the Forbes article says HP is enabling printing from devices like iPad via email to new web enabled printers (picture above), and can connect directly to Google's nascent Cloud Print. Ostrow describes several connection initiatives HP has created, including Google apps like Docs and Picasa. He sort of cynically suggests that HP is doing this to sell Ink. But then adds that emailing files to printers opens doors to new applications-- honestly, I don't think email is going to be the vehicle by which printed news is going to be delivered. Email is OK, and it is fairly robust, but it isn't super reliable as a delivery mechanism for content, nor is it particularly secure. But it is interesting!

Both articles touch on the fact that Cloud Printing removes the need for drivers and updates, which is sort of the least of its advantages-- drivers haven't really been a big issue for users for about the last five years. That is, at least for individual users. Drivers have continued to be a problem for enterprise users with many different vendor's printers, dispersed geographically at many locations. The HP printers featured in this announcement aren't really targeted at the enterprise, and Google's Cloud Print isn't ready for enterprise prime time, though.

The timing of the Quocirca article couldn't be better with this week's Apple World Wide Developer Conference. The article mentions that in the iPad support documents, it refers to printing as "not currently supported", leaving the door open to future development.

I have wondered since the iPad launch if the reason printing support is absent on the iPad today is intentional, due to the fact that the device is completely focused on delivering media to users via the screen -- or if the iPad tech team just did not have enough time to get the printing working the way they wanted to before the launch.

I'm kind of hoping at the moment that as coverage continues this week of WWDC 10 in San Francisco, we'll see some announcements from Apple about how they plan to directly support printing. Apple has some amazing printing technology built into MacOS X and it would be a little shocking if they didn't leverage at least some of that to support printing from the iPad.

Since Google and Apple have been at odds lately, it seems unlikely that Google Cloud Print will be the mechanism via which iPad and other Apple mobile device users print. Although HP ePrint could be a contender (at least until HP comes out with their competitive tablet computer), it seems that we're likely to have several competing Internet printing initiatives emerge. Let's hope they all land at least close to a standard way of doing this, or at the very least, an interoperable one. That isn't email, that is.