A New Approach to Printing with Google Cloud Print

Thanks - a good find.

P.S: Love the profile blurb about being lost :-)

I sure wish they'd propose something similar for scanners.

+1 to this. I wish there were a unified standard for networking scanners at all, actually. The majority of business scanners have arcane features to Email, FTP, or SMB-share the documents they scan. SMB is the usually only thing that invites practical use on a small business network, and the scanner's implementation of the protocol is almost always poor. I've encountered $5k copiers that could only copy to SMB shares on Windows XP, mysteriously failing for Server 2003 or Server 2008. I don't even want to think about trying it with Samba.

Networking a copier is no afternoon job, either. I've seen businesses where setting up their copier on Ethernet was such a bother that they just hook up the fax line instead and fax everything to their own eFax number whenever they need a PDF scan of a document.

My dream is that I could plug in an IP address/hostname to any scanner and I press Scan. The scanner contacts a daemon running on the host on a well-known port and protocol (if it's the first time, the host presents a dialog or something to confirm pairing) and then the file goes shoop over the network into a folder of my choosing.

Why does this not exist! In a networked world, scanners need to be more like faxes, except there is no fax equivalent on the TCP/IP level.

thanks :)

My former employer spun off a company based on exactly this problem: http://www.thinprint.com

They did very well back then and probably still do. If I had any stock, however, I'd probably sell around the time Cloud Print looked like it would get traction...