My frustration about this led me to start Peecho, a free service that lets people turn digital content into a physical product. Peecho’s service infrastructure draws on cloud printing, a technology that helps transform digital data into printed products by tapping into networks of production facilities through the cloud. Other companies in this arena include HubCast, MagCloud, and Shapeways.

Here’s how the cloud print model can streamline the process. A big financial services company typically prints tens of thousands of annual reports it sends out to shareholders — most of whom promptly toss the reports in the garbage or recycling. What if that company instead asks its shareholders to specify print or digital versions of that report. Then the company uses a digital network  of providers to print copies just for those who will really read them, eliminating wasted materials, carbon emissions creating and shipping the hard copy product, not to mention postage. Since printing remains a volume business, the price per copy is higher now, but total cost to the company falls. And as more printers see the opportunity of cloud print, the economics may improve.

In the recently published Cloud Print Manifesto, I argue that cloud printing has a unique potential to revolutionize publishing. It promotes full-blown digitization by allowing for the “occasional” transformation of digital data into 2D or 3D objects on demand. This would help preserve valuable digital data while foregoing the aforementioned environmental costs of mass production.

Let’s explore the potential of cloud print to revolutionize publishing.

Trading virtual content for atoms 

The use of paper as the primary means of communication is coming to an end. For example, a few weeks ago, the Guardian reported that Amazon’s Kindle eBook sales are outstripping print for the first time, in line with the declining hardcover revenues reported by the Association of American Publishers in June 2012. With digital content exploding, it is hard to envision a future for print. Yet some content — lost amidst an ever-increasing amount of blog posts, status updates, tweets and videos — may be more persistent than daily news and carry deeper personal meaning.

This is exactly the kind of content that begs for the level of engagement and permanence provided by a physical product. Turning personalized, high-quality digital content into professionally managed physical objects is a service that will be increasingly in demand. Or as John Bracken eloquently states: “As more and more of the content we consume is based on bits, the ability to engage with atom-based media will, for some, gain value.”

A few applications are already embracing this model, using print to monetize digital content. Postagram, Printstagram and Canvaspop are some of the simplest examples, built to monetize Instagram photos.

The enormous amount of data on the Internet leads to a staggering market potential for these companies, but the execution is not that simple. So far, transforming digital data into physical objects is by no means a commodity.

Print as a Service

For website owners, the print feature should just work — like water from the tap or electricity in the home. In reality, the cultural differences between the digital world and the realm of mechanical product manufacturing pose a significant challenge. As a result, huge sums are spent on negotiating and integrating with one or more printing facilities, international expansion, global delivery, monitoring orders and customer service.

Therefore, simple infrastructure is required to provide Print as a Service instead. By accessing professional print as a hosted commodity resource, users can avoid the cost and complexity of buying and managing the underlying hardware, software and processes.

Why didn’t anybody successfully implement this idea before? Only recently has the print industry started to shift from mass pre-production to the production of unique items on demand. Secondly, connecting a website to a service is much easier these days, using simple technologies like REST, JSON and JavaScript. However, the most important change is the decreased cost of the infrastructure itself.

Enter cloud print

The web contains a lot of content, but almost none of it conforms to required production standards: sizes, quality and aspect ratios differ greatly and cut marks, color management, spines, bleed margins or ISO certificates are unheard of. To put it bluntly, it is a mess. Transforming such heterogeneous online data to standardized, print-ready components requires serious processing firepower.

To keep associated costs and energy usage relative to revenue, systems should be able to scale up and down with demand. In other words, to cope with the Christmas peak and the January low at realistic cost levels and with as little energy consumption as possible a system should be fully elastic.  Cloud computing can offer this.

So, a profitable business case for Print as a Service can only be made by using automatically scaling cloud print.. 

The provider void

So far, significant steps towards a cloud print solution have been taken in the consumer market. Xerox and Ricoh followed in the footsteps of Google CloudPrint  with their mobile cloud solutions, while Hewlett-Packard implemented a similar mechanism with ePrint.

However, professional cloud print is not yet a commodity. Only a few independent players  – Hubcast, MagCloud, Shapeways and my company —  have ventured into this area, providing professional, on demand manufacturing of 2D and 3D products from digital assets using a network of printing facilities.

Cloud print will revolutionize publishing

 The potential of cloud print to revolutionize print publishing should not be underestimated. Websites, applications and games could be powered by a single cloud print infrastructure that allows access to a network of professional print facilities, leveraging print as a shared commodity resource while avoiding costs and complexity.

By providing eco-friendly, on-demand manufacturing, cloud print providers could support the global transition away from mass paper production towards full-blown digitization, promoting sustainability in the industry.

However, there is no dominant cloud print infrastructure provider for professional products yet. What do you think this provider should focus on? Join the discussion in the comments below and check out cloudprintmanifesto.org. 

 Sander Nagtegaal, the CTO and co-founder of Peecho, will discuss what really motivates customer moves to the cloud at GigaOM’s Structure: Europe in Amsterdam next week. Prior to Peecho, Nagtegaal was chief architect at Albumprinter, which was acquired by Vistaprint in October 2011 for €65 million.  

Feature photo courtesy of Shutterstock user imageZebra;  3d printer image courtesy of  devopstom

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Enter Ezeep, a Berlin startup that’s been in stealth mode. The company provides a technically similar service to Google Cloud Print – both basically abstract the printer drivers off to the cloud – but its system is aimed at organizations like hotels that may want to charge for printing. For them, Ezeep is promising to take a lot of hassle off their hands.

“We’re working on changing printing. We want to change the whole industry and the user experience,” Ezeep co-founder Sascha Kellert tells GigaOM. “People are frustrated with printing, and it costs companies a lot of money. We have an infrastructure that moves most of the things that are currently done locally into the cloud.”

The managed service’s first clients are indeed hotels, but Kellert won’t say which ones.

The system means guests no longer have to take their documents to the hotel staff by USB stick or email for printing. Instead, using Ezeep’s subscription-based system, the hotel provides the guest with an online portal that includes a per-page billing mechanism. The guest uploads their document and it gets printed through the hotel’s connected printer, for collection later.

Ezeep also has apps for iOS, Android and BlackBerry OS. These are mainly intended to find nearby printers and send them documents stored on the mobile device, but it is also theoretically possible to use them as an intercontinental fax replacement.

There’s even a neat feature for sensitive documents that lets the guest set up a print job, then manually trigger on their phone when they’re standing in front of the printer.

The company has “several partnerships in the pipeline which are quite big”, and the first full version of the product will come out “soon”, says Kellert. Details of pricing are vague right now, but there is money behind the venture. Ezeep quietly closed a funding round last October that brought in €500,000 ($662,000) from the likes of HTGF, which also funded 6wunderkinder, and serial entrepreneur Thomas Madsen-Mygdal.

It’s not as if there aren’t cloud printing companies already targeting this space, though.

Setting aside brand-specific manufacturer initiatives like HP’s, PrinterOn provides an interesting point of comparison, since it offers mobile and desktop cloud printing to customers including, yes, hotels.

However, on the desktop side – where people tend to store their documents – PrinterOn’s service involves emailing the document to a special address or installing a driver. And while PrinterOn’s service is secure, that is only because it involves sending a release code back to the user which they then have to approve.

Ezeep’s system, on the other hand, just involves uploading the document to the cloud. “Again, keeping it simple,” Kellert says.

In the long term, Ezeep wants to seek partnerships with hardware manufacturers so the company can provide physical kit as part of its managed service. “But we’re not seeing that much demand right now as most people have printers already,” Kellert points out.

And in the meantime, attendees of trade shows such as next week’s LAUNCH in San Francisco will get to see Ezeep-sponsored conference printers that offer a demonstration of the service. Even mobile-centric businesspeople still need a little dead tree sometimes, and Ezeep hopes that its system fits the bill.

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The new printing support shows how the web continues to change the paradigm of traditional computing. Instead of printers that are effectively chained to a single device or shared on a local wired or wireless network, the lowly, utilitarian printer is now web-connected. Evidence of that lies within the method used by HP to link the ePrint devices to Google Docs and Gmail: Consumers simply attach the printer’s unique email address to their Google account to use Cloud Print services. Once the link is made, documents or email can be printed out through a mobile broadband or wired web connection from practically anywhere.

Last year, I tried to make sense of this paradigm shift and how it relates to the declining need of the PC we’ve relied upon for years:

Essentially, Google is attempting to remove the computer from the middle of the print equation. In today’s world, we use an application to send a print job to the print server running on our computer. That software manages the task by communicating through a driver (more software) to the physical hardware of the printer. In the Google Cloud Print solution, the computer and accompanying print server software go away and are replaced by the cloud. Google handles the print job and communicates directly with a cloud-aware printer — these don’t exist yet, which is why I said the solution isn’t implemented yet.

Now that the cloud-aware printers I mentioned are available, the solution is here, although in a limited fashion because it will take time for apps to enable cloud printing functionality. Up to now, there really wasn’t much point for that development effort, but with HP’s support, that’s sure to change. And maybe the best part of all this from a consumer standpoint — at least in theory — is not only the diminishing need for a computer to print, but more importantly, the extinction of installing or updating print drivers and other software setup challenges.

There’s another relevent event that happened right about the time that Google introduced Cloud Print last April: HP’s $1.2 billion purchase of Palm. We haven’t yet seen many tangible product benefits as the result of HP’s big spend to get into the mobile space, but that should be changing soon due to an updated webOS platform and a new HP tablet based on the operating system. When HP introduced the TouchPad slate, it noted it would have wireless print capabilities that will leverage the ePrint devices.

With both cloud printing and mobile devices that can use such functionality, it’s notable to see a traditional computer maker — the biggest in the world, in fact — moving away from the very computing hardware that has helped grow the company.  I can’t think of a better example of this shift to mobile, but if I can find one, I’ll shoot it to a printer from my smartphone.

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Estimates of computer sales indicate roughly 350.9 million sold in 2010, with 93.4 million sales in the last quarter alone. Those numbers are comprised by both desktops and laptops, with the majority now being notebook computers; quarterly laptop sales began to surpass those of desktops in 2008. But many of those laptops can already print to shared printers on a home or enterprise network. Enter the smartphone, which typically doesn’t have the ability to print and is on pace to start outselling traditional desktops and laptops combined.

Google’s Cloud Printing on phones targets a user base that’s growing quickly, especially in the U.S., where 50 percent of consumers are expected to use a smartphone by the end of this year. In fact, Google’s new print service is initially limited to the U.S. during this first roll-out wave. And the print functionality fits in with another aspect of smartphones: that of mobile apps, where handset owners are using bite-sized chunks of functionality.

For now, printing from smartphones is limited to Docs and Gmail activities, but when it introduced the Cloud Print service, Google’s stated goal was “to build a printing experience that enables any app (web, desktop, or mobile) on any device to print to any printer anywhere in the world,” meaning any mobile app developer could integrate Google’s Cloud Print service into a smartphone application.

That makes me think of SpringPad, a cross-platform application I use to capture thoughts and notes from. Some of those thoughts might be worth printing out. Or maybe I won’t just buy my movie tickets through Fandango on my phone, but instead I’ll send them to a printer at home so they’re ready to be picked up before the show. And then there’s ToodleDo, the to-do app I use on my handset: Shooting a chore list to the printer for the kids to pick up and handle could mean that their rooms might actually get cleaned. Although it’s rare I print much of anything these days, there are specific times when being able to print something from literally anywhere could bring big benefits.

To be sure, Google’s Cloud Print will eventually find its way to traditional computers in the future as well, but it makes sense for Google to go after the smartphone first; more of our small but valuable task-based activities are taking place on the connected handset, not on the computer.

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