Cloud Printing: Digital data as a service

Cloud printing allows businesses to send print tasks through desktops or notebooks to print devices connected to the Internet, saving resources and saving time and money. Peecho founder Sander Nagtegaal said.

Digital publishing is growing rapidly and the real-time media are becoming more attractive to people. Even so, as Gigaom's Mathew Ingram recently said, most of the information we put on the web is actually being flooded with uninterrupted traffic. As a result, hard copy printing is still best for some jobs or users.

Cloud Printing mode simplifies the printing process. A large financial services firm needs to print tens of thousands of annual reports each year to shareholders-most of whom will throw reports directly into the dustbin. If the company consults with shareholders, they want the specific part of the report, or simply receive the electronic report. So the company only needs to give the shareholders who actually read the report a print job on the web, and the shareholders can accept the printed paper report locally. This avoids the waste of paper, reduces carbon emissions, and eliminates a large postage for mailing reports. Since the cost of printing industry still requires a large volume of business support, so if the company to do so, although the price of each copy is still high, but the total cost is reduced. As more and more printing companies sniff out cloud printing opportunities, the economy as a whole is likely to improve.

In the recently published "Manifesto" of cloud printing, I believe that cloud printing has the unique potential to change the publishing industry. It can transform digital data into 2d or 3D objects according to demand, and promote the maturity of digital information industry. This will help protect important digital data and avoid the massive production costs mentioned above.

Turn virtual content into physical objects

The era of paper-based media as the main means of communication is coming to an end. For example, a few weeks ago, the Guardian reported that Amazon's Kindle E-book sales exceeded print book sales for the first time, while the American Publishers Association reported in June 2012 that sales of hardcover books were also falling. With the big bang of digital content, the future of hard printing is worrying. However, some of the content submerged in mass blogs, status updates, tweets and videos may be more powerful and profoundly personal than the daily news vitality.

Such content requires a paper-based medium to carry, because the paper media carries longer and more secure data than digital data. The conversion of personalized, high-quality digital data into paper data will become a new service, and such demand is increasing.

At present, there are some applications that use this mode to provide services, by printing to make the content of the data monetization. Postagram,printstagram and Canvaspop are some of the simplest examples where they can print photos on Instagram.

The sheer volume of data on the Internet offers amazing market potential for these applications, but it's not that simple. There is no doubt that converting digital data into physical objects is by no means a commodity, but a service.

Print as a service

For site owners, the print feature should function as well as any other function, like running water or electricity at home. In fact, the cultural differences between the digital world and the real world pose great challenges to online cloud printing. Huge sums of money have been spent negotiating cooperation with one or more printing equipment vendors, establishing global delivery systems, global order distribution channels, order monitoring and customer service.

Therefore, a simple infrastructure is required to provide print services. By accessing the managed commodity resources of a professional print service provider, users can avoid the cost of purchasing hardware and software and the complexity of the purchase process.

Why hasn't anyone succeeded in achieving this idea until recently, when the printing industry began to shift from mass production to demand production? Because in recent years, online connection services have been made easy by using technologies such as simple Rest,json and JavaScript. However, the most important reason is the lower cost of the infrastructure itself.

Cloud Printing Coming Soon

There are a lot of content on the web, but there is little to meet the production standards: size, quality and aspect ratio, cut, color management, bleeding or ISO certification is unheard of. On the other, web content is a mess. Standardizing these different types of online data to prepare for printing requires a high degree of computational power.

In order to maintain cost and energy use and revenue coordination, the system should be able to expand and reduce demand. In other words, the system needs to be highly resilient to ensure that the peak of Christmas and the trough of the January are not wasted, without wasting energy and generating unnecessary costs. In the cloud era, cloud computing can do a little.

So, as long as the use of automatic scaling cloud printing, printing that service will be very profitable.

Up to now, the cloud printing solution has made important breakthroughs in the consumer market. Followed by Google Cloud printing footsteps, Xerox, Ricoh, HP also launched a similar service.

However, cloud printing is not the main product of these enterprises, only a small number of enterprises –hubcast, MagCloud, Shapeways and peecho-are truly focused on this area of enterprises, through networked printing equipment to convert digital assets into 2d and 3D products professional services.

Cloud Printing to the printing industry changes should not be underestimated. Web sites, applications, and games can be supported by a single cloud print infrastructure, and can access professional print devices that access the Internet, share print resources, save costs, and reduce complexity.

Through the establishment of eco-friendly on-demand production system, cloud printing service providers can promote the transformation of global large-scale production mode, establish a new type of industrial model on demand and promote sustainable development.