Cloud printers wrest ink from Google, HP
Cortado has formed an alliance of printer and networking equipment manufacturers to broaden the number of devices that support its mobile cloud-based printing technology.
Inaugural members of the Cloud Printing Alliance include Brother, Dell, Funkwerk, Konica Minolta, Kyocera Mita and OKI, Cortado, subsidiary of ThinPrint AG, announced at CeBIt on Tuesday.
"Printing is not an easy task, so we have the challenge of making printing as easy as possible from any application, any operating system and any location," Carsten Mickeleit, chief executive of ThinPrint AG, said. "If you take the solution from HP or Google, it's not a mobile printing solution. The solution the Cloud Printing Alliance will provide is printing from the customer side."
According to Mickeleit, the alliance members' new printers will support Cortado Workplace technology, which allows documents from computers and mobile devices to be sent to nearby printers. "We are able to print to any printer which is in the same network [the device is] connected to," he said.
He told ZDNet UK one use case would be a person walking into an enterprise that had alliance printers and using the Cortado Workplace app to print documents from their mobile device to the company printer.
The Cortado Workplace app, which is required to print from mobile devices, is available for free for BlackBerry, Symbian, Google Android and Apple iOS operating systems. The app works by scanning the local Wi-Fi, Bluetooth or LAN network for printers, grabbing their specific identifying details and sending it to the Cortado cloud, which is housed in ThinPrint AG datacentres, to acquire the specific printer drivers required to print the document, Mickeleit told ZDNet UK.
Cortado has drivers for around 10,000 printer models from 90 different manufacturers stored in its cloud-based printing technology, Mickeleit said, and part of the purpose of the alliance is to grow the range of supported devices.
"The game today is not to try to earn money for basic print services; the first thing we need is an architecture that is able to print. We believe if we can produce this architecture, then we can think of a lot of ways for us to earn money," Mickeleit said, when asked about how the scheme would be monetised.
Mickeleit told ZDNet UK that Cortado is hoping to integrate with Google's cloud printing product in the future, but would not give dates.