Tired of having all your stuff out there in the cloud? Now HP says you can print it out to any printer you want with the HP ePrint Center. Cleverly mixing in something actually makes HP money (printer sales) with cloud computing, HP will sell you a “Web-connected printer” — signing up for their online service gets you the ability to print when you are away.
It’s unclear how many Web-connected printers people are expected to buy, if they will be strategically scattering them at various locations in their daily lives, or if some sort of underground “print clouds” will emerge with “public printers,” “private printers” and maybe even “hybrid printers.”
Rumor has it HP used its purchase of Palm and Palm’s webOS to power the printers, which, naturally, have “apps” and can do things like browse the Web. Grumpy IT pros may say this certainly does not look like a secure improvement over a network printer and they already knew how to email documents to their printers, since HP has made that possible for about 20 years.Google Cloud Print, however, hasn’t made it off the ground yet, despite being the exact same idea. That may have something to do with HP selling printers as well as software and services and Google not doing so, but we cannot be entirely sure.