The Mobile Printing Revolution Promises Victory

Mobile Printing… hasta la victoria siempre?

The Unfinished Mobile Printing Revolution

Thilo Lutzeler, CEO, Drivve

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As revolutions go, the mobile printing revolution is a stealthy one. Never as eloquently declared as the American Revolution, nor as keen to decapitate elites as the French, nor as anti-bourgeois as the Russian, it is nonetheless gaining steam.

Like most revolutions, mobile printing began modestly when a small (but soon growing) number of people, grumpy with a certain status quo, started casting around for alternatives to traditional behaviors. But unlike other revolutions, mobile printing’s seeds of discontent were not sown amongst the workers of an urbanizing proletariat, or of a rural peasantry, but amongst the rather well heeled “mobile workers” of the 21st century.

Becoming Smart

As phones suddenly became “smart” in the first few years of this century, and business users began wanting their devices to work more and more like all-purpose computers rather than basic telephones, a desire to print from such mobile devices became manifest. Mobile print solutions that delivered print jobs via email and web arrived on the scene and became popular in travel, hospitality, and other guest-printing environments where business travelers might need to mobile print “in a pinch” while on the go. But explosive demand for tablets after Apple’s first iPad release in 2010 focused the tech community on the need to make mobile printing even simpler. In response, Apple developed AirPrint, which became a popular mobile-print-via-Wi-Fi solution for iOS devices, and Google unveiled Google Cloud Print, with the more universal aim to make it easy to print from any device to any printer…

One can’t help but savor the irony that Apple and Google, two paragons of the digital age, should get so embroiled in the age-old practice of printing as to become the most prominent examples of Wi-Fi printing and cloud printing, respectively.

Of course Apple and Google are not alone in the mobile printing universe. Big trends that drive all things mobile—the explosion of smart devices, the increasing adoption of bring-your-own-device policies and the embrace of cloud solutions among organizations of all kinds—mean that anyone selling printers and print software now offers a mobile printing solution of some kind.

Companies that today employ legions of mobile workers are looking for mobile printing solutions that enable levels of control that go beyond the mechanisms that Apple and Google offer. Today’s enterprise-grade mobile printing offerings of printer manufacturers and independent print management software vendors promise particular value in corporate environments, where security, trackability and compliance are paramount.

So there’s been a quiet revolution over the past several years in terms of mobile printing possibilities and the print options available to mobile users in both home and corporate settings. But revolutions are not just about possibilities and options—they’re about achieving actual change.

50 Million Opportunities

According to recent surveys by InfoTrends, two thirds of respondents in the United States said they would print from their mobile devices. But roughly half of them had either never tried to do so, or were not even aware that it was possible. Given that over 160 million US adults have a smartphone, these responses would seem to indicate that over 50 million US smartphone owning adults were interested in printing from their mobile devices but for some reason or another had never actually attempted to do so. That seems like a missed opportunity—particularly considering last year’s InfoTrends findings: when people would like to print while away from their home or office and cannot immediately do so from their mobile devices, about 50% of the time they don’t print at all. So a lost opportunity, and a quantifiable loss in print volumes of many millions of pages.

Recent InfoTrends findings also seem to suggest that the primary inhibitor of mobile printing in the US may no longer be technical glitchiness (which has been blamed for a long time as the chief culprit), but rather a lack of familiarity. Among those surveyed that declared a willingness to print from mobile devices, only 10% reported that they had tried and been unable to successfully do it. The rest were evenly split between those that had already mobile printed successfully and those that had never attempted it. That 10% reportedly “tried and failed” still indicates that the tech community needs to continue innovating a path towards ever more positive outcomes. But it also signals that even bigger impacts can be achieved simply through increased awareness and convenience.

Any situation in which 50 million people are open to doing something but don’t (out of ignorance or lack of familiarity) is called a business opportunity. It’s an opportunity that seems tailor-made for the players that have the most to gain from increased mobile print volumes: the OEMs and Aftermarket players that sell consumables. Companies like Apple that sell phones, or like Google that sell ads, or like software companies that sell solutions that promise to reduce printing costs, will all make money regardless of whether these notional 50 million potentially mobile printing Americans end up printing a lot or just a little from their smartphones. But vendors of printers and printer supplies have a real upside if these folks take to mobile printing with gusto.

Easier Mobile Printing

Laying the groundwork for shifting consumer behaviors in ways that benefit entire industries is typically the realm of industry associations and alliances. And there is indeed an alliance of print industry players, MOPRIA (the Mobile Printing Alliance), which has been advocating for easier mobile printing since 2013. MOPRIA’s focus has been on facilitating Wi-Fi mobile printing from Android devices, creating the MOPRIA Print Service plug-in for the Android. MOPRIA is now moving from creating technical possibilities (in the form of their Print Service) towards building awareness and achieving actual change in terms of people’s propensity to print from mobile devices. As InfoTrends noted in last year’s Mobile Printing Update, MOPRIA recently shifted from engineering (creating MOPRIA compatible printer standards and the MOPRIA Print Service) to evangelizing (encouraging handset makers to support the plug-in and app developers to enable print functions). With many of the technical pieces in place, this type of awareness building is key and there is much scope for industry groups to step up such efforts.

Convenience is another area that industry players can impact in creative ways. No matter how aware people might be of how easy mobile printing is, if there’s no printer around when they need one, it’s not going to happen. According to a recent IDC study, there are over 64 million non-office-based mobile workers in the US (meaning workers that use a mobile device as part of their daily professional tasks and whose primary workplace is not in an office or home-office environment, but out on location or in the field). That’s an enormous number of people that are on the go with their smart devices and are probably in need of a conveniently located printer every now and then. Several companies are already ahead of the curve in keeping up with the mobile workforce: PrinterOn (now part of Samsung) has long worked with airlines, hotels and other locations that are frequented by the mobile workforce to maintain PrinterOn-enabled printers at public print locations the world over. HP has also been active in this area. Part of HP’s ePrint strategy, has been to get its mobile-ready printers and its associated ePrint mobile printing solutions into more locations that might be convenient to the mobile worker, including places like drug stores, supermarkets, post offices, and coffee shops. Prominent aftermarket players have gotten in on the act as well by entering into maintenance and supply agreements with venues that put on-the-go print locations into spaces patronized by many a mobile worker. And there’s much more that can still be done here.

So while it’s not quite as romanticized as the storming of the Bastille, nor quite as loud as the shot heard round the world, the mobile printing revolution is here.

(Source: Edition 76, Recycling Times Magazine (English))

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