How it works

The xPrinterServer has two variations: a Home edition and Network edition. The Home Edition ($99.95) supports USB printers as well up to five network-based printers. The Network Edition ($149.95) only supports network-based printers but supports an unlimited number of them. For that price, you could, in theory, simply buy a new AirPrint-compatible printer. Both products support multiple printers so the xPrintServer value scales the more printers you connect, although higher-end network-based printers or all-in-one network -based copier solutions are the target market for the Network product.

What I liked

Set-up is very easy. The Network Edition simply has an Ethernet port. Plug it in and the software autodetects a vast majority of printers over a network while the Home Edition adds a USB port to support non-network printers and makes USB printers accessible to Macs, PCs and iOS devices. Both devices require no direct change to a network or installation of any software or apps.

What I didn’t like

Compatibility can be spotty. Although the supported printer list is extensive, I had to contact Lantronix to add support for a few my printers, but I was testing over a wide base of printers. Occasionally I noticed slight variations in print quality and margins, which Lantronix attributed to the nuances of iOS rather then the xPrintServer device — though I noticed these variations when printing from my Mac directly via USB and then printing via the xPrintServer. Some network-based printers required minor configuration via the xPrintServer web interface, such as my older HP Laserjet 4m, as well as a large office-based copier that also supported printing.

Speed was slower than printing directly via USB or using an existing printer’s network interface. This makes sense since the xPrintServer has to do the work of rendering the data and then sending the data to the printer. Once the printing actually started, speed was fully dependent on the printer and I noticed no speed degradation.

Conclusion

Home users will like being able to share a USB printer with more devices, similar to Apple’s Airport Express and Extreme. Business users will see their investment in network-based printing extended to iOS. I wish hotels had a solution like this as I still need to use a public printer and desktop when I want to print a boarding pass on the road.

The older and more expensive your printer, the more you’ll find value in the xPrintServer in both your home and office. The product works almost as well as advertised with some minor caveats and quirks and I highly recommend it for those situations in which you simply have to print something via your iOS device

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Walls360 has reprint rights for hundreds of thousands of pieces of content and it’s able to offer up a wide variety at any given time because it only prints on demand. The raw materials aren’t too expensive and everything is done in-house, so as long as it can keep up with the pace of orders, Walls360 can reap the rewards of not having a stockpile of pre-printed merchandise to move. In some ways, this is very similar to how the iTunes store lets a company like Apple offer far more music than a single record store ever could.

A sample of what users have created.

But the partnership with Zazzle takes Walls360′s business to a new level because, for the first time, customers can actually design and upload their own prints. So, not only can parents who want a 40-inch-by-40-inch print of their daughter’s smiling face can get personalized prints, but  — just like music artists can put their wares on the iTunes store — individual designers or brands can make their work available for the world to order.

The great part for Walls360, however, is that Zazzle handles all the front-end work (billing, design tools, e-commerce, etc.) so Walls360 just needs to print and ship. That lets the company focus on its primary business of printing licensed content (ranging from Tetris to children’s books to Star Trek), custom content for large customers such as EA and even internally designed creations such as period tables complete with QR codes for additional information on the elements.

The on-demand and long-tail business model isn’t entirely new, of course — it’s pretty much what drives the web these days — but I’m interested in seeing how unique ecosystems shape up around large platforms. In one corner of the web, Amazon Web Services’ relatively inexpensive and flexible infrastructure has enabled countless startups that can afford to create and run web applications that address long-tail users. In another corner, Zazzle is giving Walls360 (and consumers) a platform via which it can sell custom prints, but Walls360 actually brings its own unique capabilities to the table, making it much more of a partnership than anything else.

Whatever you want to call it, though, the relationship appears to be doing well. While he wouldn’t go into exact numbers, Walls360 Founder and CEO John Doffing told me via email the company has broken sales and production records “several times in the last week.” If you can keep up, opening up your business to the unique tastes of potentially millions of designers, consumers, software developers or whomever can’t hurt business.

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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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Enabling More Printers for AirPrint With Printopia

For those user who’ve upgraded to iOS 4.2, Ecamm Network provides an effective and reliable solution with Printopia. For $9.95, Printopia enables AirPrint on any printer your Mac can connect to and works with both Leopard and Snow Leopard (great for those still using PowerPC-based Macs). Not only does it allow printing, but it will also convert files to PDF or JPG for storage on your local Mac or on Dropbox.

Printopia has three key requirements: your iPad must be on the same network as your Mac, you must be running iOS 4.2 or higher, and the application you’re using must support AirPrint. If you don’t meet all those requirements, other options exist and I detail them below.

Pinnacle of Printing: Print Bureau

Eurosmartz has nine different printing apps ranging in price from $2.99 to $12.99. Print Bureau ($12.99) encompasses the features of all each in a single app and can print emails, contacts, calendars, pictures, clipboards and both local and cloud-based files. If it’s on your iPad or accessible via your iPad, Print Bureau should be able to print it. I was able to directly access iDisk, Google Docs, Dropbox, box.net, FTP, and WebDav with the app.

Printing directly from Print Bureau can produce inconsistent results, since it communicates directly with printers. Fortunately, Eurosmartz also offers an alternative method using a companion application called “WePrint.”

WePrint works on Macs running OS X Tiger and above, as well as on XP, Vista, and Windows 7. Instead of having Print Bureau (and any other Eurosmartz apps) print directly to the printer, WePrint intercepts the file and routes it through the desktop’s native printer software, ensuring near-perfect compatibility.

Moreover, WePrint will monitor an email address for you and print any files you send it via the iOS app, thereby enabling printing from outside your local area network. They call it “Printing Over 3G”, but you can be on any type of network to use it.

Other Alternatives

For basic photo printing, a majority of manufacturers have their own printing apps, which are usually free. I’ve tried both HP iPrint Photo 3 and Epson’s iPrint. Both print pictures very well (including screen shots from other iOS apps). Considering these manufacturer-based apps are free, having them all in case you happen to need them is probably a good idea.

Other apps I tested such as Wella’s Print Magic, Avatron’s Air Sharing Pro, and Microtech’s ePrint weren’t always compatible with every printer in every situation. The key advantage of these apps is that they don’t require a “helper” application to be installed on a separate computer. In public environments like a computer lab or hotel, Wella’s ePrint was the most reliable. I was able to walk into a Wi-Fi network and simply print to an available printer. Great for printing a boarding pass at the last minute!

Developers Picking Up Where Apple Left Off

While we’ve come to expect the ability to print from any program on our Mac, it’s sadly still not fully baked in to the iPad, iPhone and iPod touch. Fortunately, programs like Printopia and Print Bureau are helping users bridge the gap between Apple’s printing hype and the iOS reality.

Any other solutions you’ve found that aren’t listed here?

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Samsung Galaxy Tab possibly printing

In conjunction with the iOS 4.2 beta, Apple has issued a press release touting “AirPrint.” The trendily named wireless printing feature for iOS will be included with iOS 4.2 in November.

“AirPrint is Apple’s powerful new printing architecture that matches the simplicity of iOS—no set up, no configuration, no printer drivers and no software to download,” gushed Apple VP Philip Schiller.

First demoed at the Apple Event in September, AirPrint will initially work with HP ePrint printers or shared printers on a PC or Mac. HP ePrint printers use unique e-mail addresses to receive documents from devices with e-mail capability, supporting a variety formats including Microsoft Office, PDFs, rich text, HTML, and others, though no mention is made of iWork.

Compatible shared printers include HP Photosmart, Officejet, and LaserJet models. Of course, only iOS devices capable of running iOS 4.2 will be AirPrint ready: iPad, iPhone 4, iPhone 3GS and iPod touch (second generation and later).

As nice as wireless printing from iOS devices will be, the unanswered question in the press release is why we are hearing about it again. The answer is the Samsung Galaxy Tab, the first real rival to the iPad launching this week in the U.S. that is wireless printing capable. This is something of a role reversal for Apple, fighting a real competitor with features on paper, paper that can’t yet be printed wirelessly.

Quite simply, HP’s new range of “ePrint” products enable any device to print to any printer, anywhere, as long as they’re all connected to the Internet.

Cleverly, HP will be issuing all of its ePrint-based printers with a unique email address; to print a document, users simply send documents to that address. Harnessing the ubiquity of email ensures that you will be able to print from devices that don’t even support printing!

It’s easy to consider the downside of web-connected printers; from a new generation of “printer spam” to transposing inbox overload into even more unmanageable paper form. However, I think the development is exciting for a number of reasons:

• The potential for a “social letterbox” perhaps limited to really close family and friends — sending a tangible, printed letter, article or photo could return value and intimacy to the printed word.
• Being able to use existing email filters and tools to determine what arrives at your printer’s inbox. I can envisage “print@yourdomain.com” becoming a useful communication end point for individuals and companies; finally killing the fax.
• A new means of permission marketing where the sender pays me to send me a printed flier.
• Postal services that transcode snail mail to electronically delivered prints that are also archived digitally.
• iPhone apps that locate the nearest available printer when you’re on the move and need a hard copy.

Looking further ahead it’s not difficult to envisage a time when a range of email-able “HP Deskfab” 3D printers will allow users to email real objects to each other, transforming bits into atoms. ePrint’s simple innovation of an email inbox for printers can inspire a multitude other ideas and is a true platform opportunity.

See also:

• Jan Chipchase’s “Thoughts on Cloud Printing“
• BERG’s “My printer, my social letterbox“
• HP’s ePrintCenter
• Google Cloud Print
  

(Editor’s note: If you’re interested in learning more about cloud computing and how it enables web apps like this, check out our Structure conference in San Francisco later this month).

Printing is still an important part of every web worker’s workflow, and though it’s quite arcane, much of our communication and documentation is still conducted via a paper trail. Not only does this leave piles of paper to manage, there’s the economic cost of all of that ink and paper and, importantly, there’s also an environmental cost involved with printing that we all bear as a society.

In a recent issue of Wired UK, Thomas Counsell from the University of Cambridge’s Institute for Manufacturing speculated that up to two percent of greenhouse gases are a result of paper consumption, largely driven by the production and disposal of new and used printed paper.

Counsell’s research is focused on technologies that use a combination of ultrasound and chemical solvents to remove toner from printed documents, enabling paper to reused. Though Counsell’s research is still very much in the labs and somewhat fantastical, there are alternatives, available today, that can help us make environmental and financial judgments about the paper and ink that we use.

The Paper-Less Alliance‘s web site not only provides handy advice on how to reduce paper consumption, but also provides free software, in collaboration with PaperCut, to help individuals and companies visualize their paper consumption in terms of a carbon footprint, trees, energy use and financial impact.

GreenPrint offers an inexpensive software solution that adds a new printer profile to Macs and PCs. As documents are sent to the “virtual” GreenPrint printer, they’re analyzed, and attention is drawn to wasteful or unnecessary areas, which users can then choose to remove from the final printout.

For example, many documents often have a page with just a few words or lines on the last page; GreenPrint automates the discovery of such inefficiencies.

Adobe’s Tools for Sustainable Design are yet to be released, but were previewed by Adobe’s CTO, Kevin Lynch last Spring at ETech 2009. Lynch demonstrated some great demos, including:

• optimizing a box pattern to use less paper
• tools that show the toxicity and chemical impact of various ink colors
• embedded guidelines from organizations such as Greenpeace
• calculating the number of trees or soy plants required for a print job
• suggesting digital rather than hard copy outputs

More recently, designer Matthew Robinson conducted a somewhat unscientific project entitled “Measuring Type,” which explored how much ink commonly utilized typefaces tended to use. Robinson discovered that Garamond had the highest ink efficiency.

Though I tend not to print much anyway, preferring the flexibility of digital documents, these four initiatives have forced me to understand the true cost of printing and show that software can help us make value judgments about environmental issues.

A year ago we saw controversy and ridicule around one researcher’s carbon calculation of a Google search, yet our various applications and tools still aren’t doing a great job of reporting their environmental impact to users. As we see software emerge to help us understand the environmental impact of printing, I hope we’ll start to see other categories of software and hardware reveal their environmental impact and cost.

Coincidentally, the Daily Beast just published a great article on the advantages and disadvantages of going paper-free, entitled “My Paperless Life.”

Are you mindful of the environmental impact of your printing? Which strategies do you employ to reduce waste?

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This is another attempt by HP to marry its printing technology with mobile phones. Last year, HP introduced its free iPrint Photo application that lets iPhone and iPod touch users print 4×6 photos stored on their devices to most HP inkjet printers hooked up to a local Wi-Fi network. And just this spring, RIM said it licensed HP’s CloudPrint technology, which lets people print documents to any networked printer, for use on BlackBerry mobile phones. Antonio Rodriguez, HP’s chief technologist for Inkjet and Web Solutions, said today that this capability is currently being rolled out to enterprises. Rodriguez said HP’s partnership with Phanfare is part of the computing giant’s strategy to “make the smartphone as general purpose a computing device as possible.” Indeed, though a mobile phone has a limited memory, Photon offers you the ability to access all your photos in the cloud and print them without being tied to a PC, making the iPhone a much more potent machine.

The app is limited in that it’s only compatible with HP printers on your local area network. The startup’s CEO and co-founder, Andrew Erlichson, told us that the resolution is slightly lower than if you printed out the photos from its web service. Phanfare stores its data in Amazon’s S3 cloud. Overall, Photon’s new offering is one we hope others build upon in the future to make smartphones more full-featured. Phanfare received $2.5 million in funding led by Azure Capital in January 2008, according to Erlichson, and has raised around $5 million in total.

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I own a laser printer/copier/scanner, mostly so I can print out legal documents, sign them, scan them and return them. I haven’t actually printed anything besides an airline ticket in years — I can’t remember the last time I wanted a printed photo, but if I had some need for it, I would probably use iPhoto’s printing service, or something like Shutterfly. It’s the best of both worlds, and it saves a trip up the street to Wal-Mart’s photo processing lab. Shutterfly’s customers seem to agree!

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I’m not going to debate the merits of upgrading with you, since I’m sure you’ve already wrestled with that particular demon yourself, but I did want to take a look at the gaming side of Apple’s new 3GS, and the amazing potential it boasts for bringing cell phone gaming to even more lofty heights. I knew it was better at handling graphics, but just how much better only became really clear yesterday, thanks to a post at Gizmodo looking at how the 3GS handles hardware emulation.

In short, it handles it very well. Much more adeptly than its predecessor, the 3G, in fact. ZodTTD, homebrew coder extraordinaire and jailbreak enthusiast, recently managed to get his Playstation console emulator running on a new 3GS, and the performance gap between it, and the same program running on a 3G, provides a tantalizing hint at what could be coming in the near future for 3GS gaming enthusiasts.

The results are amazing. The 3GS runs PSX game Final Fantasy VII flawlessly, albeit in a tiny space, since the screen is mostly taken up by clunky controls. ZodTTD demos the game in action in the YouTube video included below, so you can see for yourself. Sadly, none of the game’s lavish cutscenes were included, which really would’ve provided an accurate measure of the hardware’s capabilities.

Even without cutscenes, this performance beats the same game running on the same emulator on the iPhone 3G by a wide margin. So far, developers seem reluctant to exclude 3G users by developing games specifically for the 3GS, and instead claim that some games will scale based on your hardware capability. I think it’s only a matter of time, though, before some companies start taking the lead in 3GS exclusive development, a move which Apple will likely want to encourage from a product differentiation standpoint.

Add to better first-party hardware in the 3GS the ability to connect with third-party devices via the dock connector interface and over Bluetooth, and you have a recipe for a great gaming machine that can match, or even exceed, the likes of the PSP and DSi in terms of both core and casual gaming. The oddly themed GameBone Pro appears to be the first such device on the horizon, but I’m sure it won’t be the last. It’s a controller with a built-in battery, microphone and speakers that uses new hardware device access APIs in the 3.0 SDK to control your phone.

It’s a nice start, but as Kotaku points out, companies will have to build support into their apps if they want players to be able to use the device. So before we see a truly useful iPhone controller, industry players will have to agree on a coding specification that third-party hardware makers can then use in all of their devices.

With third-party device access, and much improved graphics capability, Apple has opened the doors for an unrivaled gaming experience on the iPhone. Let’s just hope developers are up to the challenge.

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