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!

Cloud Printing Becomes a Reality with Scribd and Mimeo

Scribd describes themselves as the largest social publishing and reading site in the world. They make it incredibly simple for anyone to share and discover content on the web and mobile devices. Scribd welcomes tens of millions of readers every month, who pick and choose from tens of millions of documents available, in over 90 languages. Scribd is used by individuals, as well as institutions and corporations like Harvard University and Ford Motor Company. Some of the largest companies in the world are using Scribd to enable document sharing with their global constituencies, and they are using it instead of legacy content and document management systems or building their own web document sharing architectures. Corporations and institutions are able to choose a solution like Scribd because standing up a cloud computing environment to serve very specific applications is becoming a "best practice", versus spending millions on IT resources and software. Scribd itself is a great choice, because it is so easy, flexible, and available, and their reader is become ubiquitous across the web and mobile devices.

Mimeo and Scribd recently announced a partnership to allow Scribd readers to order printed (and, if desired, beautifully finished) versions of millions of documents available. Trip Adler, CEO and co-founder of Scribd said, “With the Mimeo open platform, Scribd was able to quickly implement a solution that offers our readers a convenient, easy to use and cost effective solution that makes printing a seamless experience. Customers can request a printed version of any eligible document in minutes and have it delivered to their doorstep."

If it wasn't clear before, our experience at Mimeo since David and I starting writing this blog (and creating Cloud Printing applications), that there are complementary applications for reading on the web and printing documents. I won't go into much of the details of why here, but if there's interest I will cover it in a later post. Because of this, we've been talking here at RichInternetPrinting, and in other venues like TAGA, for some time about the need to create an environment in which printing can occur when content is created and lives on the web.

Scribd is unique compared to some other applications we've discussed, because the content may or may not originate "in the cloud", it could originate in desktop applications. Scribd is a user generated content repository for documents. Unlike blogs or other web-based UGC, Scribd lets you upload richly formatted text, so documents preserve layouts, fonts and graphics. Because you get unlimited storage (same as with Mimeo), you can manage all your documents online. So then you need a robust way to print them.

Now, the need has never been greater, with the advent of new mobile devices like Tablets-- none of which have any real printing capabilities. So the answer until recently is to somehow email your document to a place where you can download it and print it. Obviously, depending on where you are, there could be a lot of obstacles in the path to success with that approach. Little things like bandwidth and network security policies can ruin your day. With Mimeo and Scribd, you can use your mobile device, and have finished documents delivered to you, in whatever quantity you desire.



In the screenshot above, I was reading a Scribd document entitled, "Arizona Immigration Lawsuit", and I simply clicked on Scribd's Print button on the menu bar at the top of the document. I can choose to print to my desktop computer (assuming I am on a desktop machine, with the ability to print from my browser, with a printer attached on my LAN)-- OR, I can choose "Premium Printing" from Mimeo.



If I choose "Premium Printing", I see this screen, which lets me choose how I want my "book" delivered to me. This is the technology that Mimeo and Scribd developed and deployed together. It uses a combination of Scribd's APIs to get the document, and Mimeo's APIs to send the document and describe how the user wants to have it Manufactured.

Because the interface is embedded in Scribd, and it is user friendly, all the user needs to know is what they want their document to look like (based on some simple, constrained choices we've given them-- for example, the size of the book, one of two binding choices, and what to put on a cover we will provide.) Mimeo and Scribd handle the rest once I check out and place the order the twenty, 12 page double-sided perfect bound "travel" books that I am asking for containing the text of the Immigration Lawsuit!

This is only the beginning, but we've already produced quite a few documents and had a couple thousand people click in to take a look at the possibilities. We're looking forward to feedback from Scribd's 50 million readers per month about what features they want in the system. If you've been following this blog, you know we've been working on the technology underpinnings of this for a couple of years now, and it is really coming together-- continuing to evolve as we work with partners like Scribd and develop new ideas.

Google Cloud Print Announcement- Exciting Stuff!

Google has announced Google Cloud Print, check out details from Google here. This is an incredibly important step in creating the ability to print from a variety of new applications, and devices. TechCrunch covered this announcement, too. It's very notable in light of (and in contrast to) the Apple iPad introduction, which doesn't actually appear to have a hard copy strategy. For the moment at least, printing from the iPad is dependent on some relatively primitive printing apps available from third-parties. I think this technology and approach could be far-reaching, beyond the Chrome OS; Google also needs a great printing strategy to complement Google Docs. I'm hoping that this will follow in short order; my company is in the process of adopting Google Enterprise Apps, for document collaboration. Robust printing is certainly something that we get from Microsoft Operating Systems at this point. As we transition to Cloud applications, especially for office productivity and document management, there is a great opportunity to do much more. I'm also hoping that commercial print can benefit from Google Cloud Print. My investigation is just beginning.

Everything as a Service (EaaS)

Some very exciting stuff going on at HP, as usual. I found this recent quote (March 19, 2010), from CEO Mark Hurd, "Services now account for 38% of Hewlett-Packard's total operating profit, more than any other segment of the firm's business. The news from one of the world's biggest PC manufacturers reflects a transition seen across the industry as computing firms away from their traditional business models. CEO Mark Hurd says the firm's acquisition of major business outsourcing firm EDS and developments in other parts of its operation have wrought significant changes. Hurd went on to say, "It's very different from how it was four or five years ago where imaging and printing group was over 80% of HP's profits," Hurd told HP's annual general meeting. "So it's a big change in the company's position and segments."

This might seem somewhat obvious, with the acquisition of EDS. And it also might seem very similar to the moves of other tech titans over the years and their services approach, notably IBM and their acquisition of PWC several years ago.

But unlike other technology or services companies, HP also owns a big piece of the imaging and printing space, an ecosystem in which they have been incredibly innovative and successful. The difference between what they are doing, and competitors, is that they have, and will continue to, move very "traditionally conducted" activities in this area to the cloud. This could be very disruptive over the next couple of years.

Visit HP's page dedicated to their Everything as a Service theme, here.

"There’s been a great deal of confusion in the industry about the cloud. In simplest terms, the cloud is the next stage in the evolution of the internet. Through the cloud, everything will be delivered as a service, from computing power to business processes to personal interactions.

At HP, over the past several years, we have executed a strategy that puts us in an ideal position to capitalize on this trend. We began with Compaq to establish ourselves as the leader in hardware, as that segment steadily moves toward open systems and architectures and always connected devices. To differentiate our hardware, we expanded our software portfolio and acquired 11 software companies in 4 years, including Mercury, Opsware and Peregrine. We then acquired EDS and put a services arm with global scale and expertise at the head of our enterprise business.

In short, we have laid the groundwork to offer an integrated cloud ecosystem — or any of its parts as discrete components — to all of our customers. At the same time, we have developed cloud services adjacent to our core businesses. From digital printing to IT infrastructure itself, we have offerings as broad and varied as HP's portfolio. "

New Silverlight PDF Library

Our friend Greg Salzman from Aleyant Systems has created an open source Silverlight PDF library project. SilverPDF is based on two excellent open source projects: PdfSharp and iTextSharp. Download and contribute to the project at on Codeplex, here.

Mimeo and SlideRocket: Printing In The Cloud

A great example of Rich Internet Printing is the collaboration between my company, Mimeo.com, and SlideRocket. In this case, our two companies had to work together to invent a way that Sliderocket presentations could be professionally printed by Mimeo. SlideRocket is part of this new generation of RIAs. It is a Web 2.0 online presentation application that allows users to produce slideshows that have some advantages over creating presentations in desktop applications like Microsoft PowerPoint. SlideRocket runs in a web browser, instead of requiring the installation of software on your computer. It features collaboration tools that let users share slides and other assets (like graphics and movies) between presentations. Because the application is Internet-based, these users can be geographically dispersed and still share nicely. This collaboration, and user-generated content sharing, is what makes SlideRocket a unique and powerful Web 2.0 application. The company recently announced that Chuck Dietrich, former VP GM at Salesforce.com, joined the company as CEO, see the TechCrunch article here.

The SlideRocket relationship with Mimeo involved the use of the MimeoConnect SOAP API technology. This is a set of Web Services that let partners submit files, define product intent, get quotes and proofs, and submit orders, recipient addresses, shipping methods and payments. This technology solves the problem of delivering content files and placing orders; primarily the communication between our two applications in the cloud (i.e., cloud to cloud).

With that connectivity in hand, we then needed to solve how SlideRocket would take their rich content (screen-based Flash presentations) and turn it into PDF files to send to Mimeo (this was a Mimeo requirement, due to our automated PDF-based production workflow). Finally, we needed to create a way to let the non-technical SlideRocket user to specify the product intent to communicate to Mimeo for manufacturing.

To solve the former problem, SlideRocket created a server-based application that “printed” the “slide deck” to a PDF file. To solve the latter problem, Mimeo created a special interface designed to reside within the SlideRocket Flash application. When the user chooses “Print” from the SlideRocket menu, they can either choose to print on their local printer, or print “high quality with finishing options” via Mimeo.

The interface we built incorporates a subset of Mimeo’s new photo-realistic document viewer. We call it MimeoProof, because it is about as close as one can get to holding a print product in their hands by viewing it as an image on the screen. The Sliderocket version lets the user see their presentation, visually depicting paper stocks, covers and binding choices. This is an important part of helping the non-technical user specify product intent, it gives them the confidence they need to proceed with the order.

Once the user places their order on the SlideRocket site, e-commerce and print-specific transactions flow: we are sent a PDF file containing the slides, and an XML transaction containing the order information (desired quantity of books, destination, shipping method, etc.) The next day, or at some point in the near future depending on the user’s choice, a beautiful bound version of the Sliderocket slides shows up on the user’s doorstep in whatever quantity they specified.

A Visit to Google Makes Us Think...

David and I recently went to a breakfast at Google’s cool offices in NYC, at Chelsea Market. Here is some good info on the Google presence in NYC.

The event focused on Google Enterprise Apps, co-sponsored by venerable NYC IT consultants BlueWolf. Kristin Shevis, Google’s Director Northeast Google Enterprise presented, along with several other Google and BlueWolf staffers. Really good turnout, looked to me like about 100 companies present. Obviously a hot topic. A couple of excellent case studies were presented, with a focus primarily on cost savings. In addition to the formal case studies, during Q and A, several members of the audience actually answered questions from other attendees, primarily about enterprise Google mail services. It didn’t appear that anyone in the room had actually deployed non-email apps on an enterprise basis (i.e., instead of Microsoft Office)… but there was great interest. The applications are still pretty basic, but for a lot of uses, they are quite adequate.

Google documents are about collaboration. As an outside observer, beyond the cost savings, this is the primary advantage in using Google Apps. Google documents can be edited by more than one person simultaneously (actually, up to 10 people, according to Google); Spreadsheets can be edited by up to 50 people simultaneously; they can also be shared with up to 200 collaborators and viewers. Presentations can be edited by 10 people simultaneously, out of a total of 200 who can be either collaborators or viewers.

Which led David and I, during our fifteen-block power walk back to Mimeo’s NYC headquarters, to discuss some of the challenges that might be faced in professionally printing Google documents, which are “dynamic” for lack of a better word. How do you print a dynamic, collaborative document? It is clear that while the Google apps are not particularly competitive with “desktop” applications right now, someday they will be, and in the foreseeable future. Formatting is pretty weak in Google Apps right now. Control of printing is even weaker, which is somewhat surprising because it does appear in other areas that Google has some sophisticated technology for handling PDF files. I hope someone is thinking about this at Google, because there clearly will be a need for professional printing in years to come, it isn’t going to be eliminated by these collaboration tools— demand will increase for many document types coming out of these apps.

Furthermore, what does the new document model look like? I ask this because Google is not the only company working hard to put document creation, collaboration and management “in the Cloud.” There is, of course, the upcoming Microsoft Office 2010, which recently got some splash in the media and apparently, according to hype, will be a focus at WPC09, Microsoft’s Worldwide Partner Conference, which begins on Monday July 13th, in New Orleans; click here for the details.

Online office suite developer Zoho announced a couple of weeks ago that they have created a seamless API integration with Microsoft SharePoint, which I haven’t had a chance to look at in depth yet.

We will be looking at all of this very closely here, and would love to hear your thoughts on these new developments.