Yes - you heard me right. Printing through a mobile phone. How do I do that?

I wanted to take a few minutes to share with you an experimental/beta service that allows users to share, store, and print documents easily using your mobile phone.

It is called CloudPrint and it was developed by HP Labs. Perhaps you don't always carry around your laptop, but probably always carry around your mobile phone. Perhaps you received an e-mail on your Blackberry or browsed an interesting article on the web? If you could only print it instead of viewing it on that tiny mobile phone screen!

In the past, you would have tried to figure out how to email a copy of the document to your notebook or synch up you phone to another mobile device. And forget about trying to directly print from a mobile phone directly to a printer (although hp has developed some phone-specific solutions for Nokia).

With CloudPrint, you can take your mobile phone to any networked printer and "print" your documents. There is no need to synch up - just receive them from the "Internet Cloud" and print them to a local printer. There are several interesting use models:

1. Print email attachments, data or Web pages from your mobile device. Send what you want to print to the CloudPrint virtual print server. The server stores a copy and sends an SMS to your device with a reference ID. When you enter the code on the CloudPrint site, the server converts your data to a PDF, ready to print. 


2. Print documents stored on the CloudPrint virtual server. Before you travel, download the CloudPrint driver to your PC and save files to the server. The server sends your laptop or mobile device a unique code for each file. When you're on the road, enter the code to CloudPrint, and you're ready to print. 


3. Can't find a printer? CloudPrint’s online Find a Printer service can help you locate one nearby. The service also lets you print files – even vacation photos you shoot with your camera phone –back to your home or office printer (I am sure the boss will like that) or that of a friend.

Go ahead and give the service a try an tell me what you think.

Vince Ferraro 

My HP colleague Chris Hawkes has some interesting insights on how hp works
with customers to keep updated on their current and future product requirements
- Vince

How does HP know what their customers want and why? Sometimes it’s a simple
“launch and learn” where we try something and see how it goes over with our
customers. However, mistakes in our business where our printers are designed
12-18 months before they are introduced to the market and the pipeline has
thousands or tens of thousand of those printers boxed up and ready for customers
can be very, very costly. They can also cost us a great deal of customer
loyalty.

Fortunately HP has an enormous number of engineers, product manager and other
groups who help to put the whole product together, diligently working to make
sure that we’re designing our products to be as feature-rich and simply to use
as possible. Our employees also know a great deal about our customers and are
constantly looking for ways to improve the ‘product experience’.

There are a number of mechanisms that HP uses to stay connected to our
customers:

• We have periodic studies that ask how happy our customers are with their
  products and whether they intend to purchase HP again.
  
• We get feedback from the technical support calls – to understand what
  functions or capabilities are less intuitive than they could be.
  
• We also conduct a good deal of market research to talk to customers, in
  different environments (home, small business and the enormous enterprise
  customers
  
• We also do this across the globe to understand how people on different
  continents and in different countries want their printers to work, what
  functions are critical and which ones could be taken out, so we can meet their
  expected price-point on certain types of printers.

Some of the issues that we have conducted market research on include:

• Understanding how price sensitive customers are.
• We can always add impressive capabilities to our products, but if they’re
  not expected or desired by our target customers, those functions should be taken
  out so we can give customers a better price on their next printer
  purchase
• We have also researched want advanced features such as ‘fax to e-mail’ (or
  Digital Send in HP terms) our customers want
• Are smaller companies interested in having these higher end capabilities
  which have yielded great efficiency improvement for the larger businesses? If
  so, are they willing to pay more money to see those capabilities built into
  their products?

HP conducts dozens of market research projects every year; it is our
marketing priority to understand what you as a customer, would ideally want from
the perfect printer or MFP. We consistently seek out and value customer’s
opinions and do everything that we can to see that they are included in the next
generation of our products. Of course conducting market research doesn’t mean
that we also always hit the perfect mix of capabilities and price for all of our
customers. That’s not an easy thing to do, but it is considered everyone’s job
at HP to do as much as we can to match our product offerings to the customers’
demands and do that better than the competition. The team works very hard at
that. We’re trying to make your life easier and it’s important that we can talk
to you, our customers, to understand how best we can serve you – now and in the
future.

Best Regards,

Chris Hawkes, Market Research Consultant

For more information on the types of market research that
are available and how they work, you can go to www.MarketResearch101.com for more details on the
processes.