Printing directly from your Blackberry, why not?

…using any printer in sight. HP kick-starts Printing 2.0, where the printer itself becomes agnostic. Vishnu Anand spoke to Sridhar Sood, Principal, Office of IPG CTO – HP, London via Halo Telepresence

 Untether the printer from the Operating System, and imagine it as a Web service operation, where your BlackBerry comes armed with a print button and ‘seeks’ the nearest printer, having geo-located where you are currently stationed.

In a typical use case, HP’s CloudPrint allows you to be at a shopping mall, an airport terminal, or any public location that is likely to have a ‘critical mass of printers’.

You receive an e-mail, shoot a picture from your phone camera, or just feel like printing out some random text message while waiting for your delayed flight. Your BlackBerry (which will soon be equipped with a ‘Print’ menu option), will geo-tag your location using GPS, and links up to HP’s repository of registered printers that are being used by a retail outlet, a cyber café, or even a copier shop in the vicinity.

Alternatively, you can enter your detailed location (Eg: Singapore Changi Airport, Terminal 2, Departure Security holding), and the HP application embedded on the BlackBerry identifies the printer closest to you, gives you directions on how to identify it, and lets you give a ‘print’ command.

And since HP’s CloudPrint initiative is aimed at creating a social printing ecosystem, the printers in the repository do not necessarily have to be HP printers.

At the back-end, HP creates a Cloud Print operation layer that sits between the Network layer and the wireless (device) layer. When a search query for a printer is generated by the device user, the Cloud print layer pulls out the query from the device layer, communicates it through the network layer, in order to access its repository of registered printers. Having found the relevant ones (one or many), it returns the response to the device, using the network layer. HP promises this operation cycle to last anything between 6 to 12 seconds.

The obvious challenge, of course, is to populate the repository with a ‘critical mass of printers’ worldwide. To begin with, HP is planning to start with small corporate environments, before putting in place a mechanism where cyber café owners, for instance, can register themselves with HP to have their printers under the Cloud print umbrella. The monetary transaction would be limited to the Blackberry user and the owner of the printer, while HP hopes to rope in advertisers to fuel the operation.

“We at HP hope that CloudPrint will give a meaning to the concept of Social Printing. It would also go a step further and bring people closer. Imagine a scenario where you happen to visit a distant place of worship, shoot a picture and choose to print it on your home printer many thousand miles away, that your grandmother can see. This is the broad aim of social printing,” said Sridhar Sood, principal, Office of IPG CTO – HP, London.

“A more realistic example would be a simple scenario where you visit your branch office in a different city and need to print out a document. The printers in the office are not registered with your laptop/handheld and invariably you need to email the document to an email ID of another employee and take a print out. CloudPrint begins at this level”, he explained.

Sridhar explained that the starting point for HP would be to target corporate networks of this nature and have the printers registered, before expanding the ecosystem and spreading outside corporate walls.

“Beyond this, the growth will be driven by individuals – users, service providers, printer owners, whoever they might be – and that will be the birth of Printing 2.0,” he said.  – via blackberry-news.newslib.com

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This entry was posted on May 30, 2009 at May 30, 2009 and is filed under News. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed.