Hewlett Packard, a.k.a. HP is one of the oldest brands in Information Technology business and is respected for being one of the most innovative business empires in technological landscape. They are getting into every emerging facet of technology, whether it’s laptops, Netbooks, PDAs, smartphones or tablets, you can see a prominent player in the name of HP, producing cutting edge hardware for satisfying the growing market demand.

But along with all the accomplishments that HP has made in the past decade, one important area where HP is seriously lagging behind is its monopolized Print business. And it’s not HP’s competitors(Canon, Lexmark…) which are hurting the revenue stream of HP’s established print business but there’s a different sort of threat for them. It’s the Next Generation digital devices that are making Paper printing worthless.

With the advent of smartphones, e-readers and tablet devices, people are getting more adapted to reading content over the screen. Less people are looking interested in printing every single document they want to read as the comfort zone is slowly drifting to Wireless digital devices from Paper reading.

Dying business of Newspaper & Magazine industry is one big indicator. That’s probably the reason why media entities like WSJ and NYTimes have launched their iPhone and iPad apps, to keep serving their content to current generation of consumers.

Apart from the changing preferences of our generation when it comes to consuming content, there’s another reason why Printing is no more a desired thing for many of us. The reason is the incapability of most of the upcoming devices to start printing right away.

Majority of printers that HP builds today require printer specific drivers, wired connectivity, etc as the mandatory condition, which simply turns off anyone interested in taking a quick print from his smartphone or tablet, as all of them are wireless devices and don’t have printer drivers installed on their sleek machines.

All of this is hampering HP’s print business revenues to a great extent. Solution ?

HP has found a reliable companion, which will make things better than what they are now. Google and Google Cloud Print to be more specific.

As Chrome OS team announced earlier about Google Cloud Print, a cloud based service to execute printing jobs from any device (Desktop, phone or browser), without any need of printer drivers, it recently updated about the progress on Google Cloud Print service and also highlighted HP’s launch of full suite of cloud-aware printers ranging from $99 consumer printers to business-oriented printers.

As Google describes, Google Cloud Print can print from any printer, be it a legacy printer or upcoming Cloud aware printers but Google strongly recommends Cloud aware printers as they will give the best experience to the users. And supporting Google’s vision, HP has finally come up with affordable ‘Cloud aware’ printers.

Google employees have started internal testing of ‘Google Cloud Print’ service employing HP’s cloud aware printers and it seems that the goods(Chrome OS) are most likely to be delivered on time(this fall), as committed.

As more and more people are spending substantial time on Internet and more likely from their wireless devices(smartphones, tablets), if all of us become able to start printing right from our smartphones and tablet devices, HP will have far less problems to deal with, to keep its print business revenues flowing.

Since the launch of Chrome OS, plethora of questions were raised over the feasibility and productivity of Chrome OS powered devices. How will the web based device ensure heavy data storage ? How will it print documents without any native printer driver ? and a lot more questions like these..

Today, one of the most critical questions of them all, ‘Printing’ from a Web based device appears to have been solved by Google Chrome OS team. Writing a post on the Chromium blog today, Chrome OS team has introduced some preliminary designs for a project called Google Cloud Print.

Google Cloud Print will basically enable all web enabled devices, be it desktop, web or mobile to be able to give printing job commands to any kind of printers, either Cloud aware printers or legacy printers, without any need of printer drivers.

So, all web enabled devices will actually give their print commands to ‘Google Cloud Print’ service and then it will be Google Cloud Print service, which will forward your print command to your Cloud aware or Legacy printers and get the job done.

Google Cloud Print service is still under development and the Chrome OS team has made both code and documentation publicly available.

All of this means that work behind Google Chrome OS is in full pace and all possible difficulties in building this revolutionary Web based OS will be conquered, soon or later.

]]> http://www.googlechromeosupdate.com/print-through-chrome-os/feed/ 2 http://www.googlechromeosupdate.com/chrome-os-launch-event/ http://www.googlechromeosupdate.com/chrome-os-launch-event/#comments Thu, 19 Nov 2009 14:41:38 +0000 admin http://www.googlechromeosupdate.com/?p=107

Finally, the day for Google to open up its cards in front of mainstream media has come. Google is to announce much hyped Chrome OS and let all of us know the expectations we should keep from them. As promised earlier, this event will be kind of a tech preview of the operating system and will detail further plans of its launch.

According to rumor mill, Google would release Beta version of Google Chrome OS today but our guess is that the beta launch will take some more time to happen. Lets see what’s in Google store today.

We’re going to LIVE BLOG the event scheduled for today, 10 am at Google HQ so come back right here for Chrome OS event details.

• Sorry folks but there is going to be no beta today. The actual Google Chrome OS is still 12 months away from its mainstream launch.
• Sundar Pichai is now talking about Google Chrome’s achievements in terms of radical growth(over 40 million users within an year), high browsing speed and regular bug fixes. Chrome for Mac and Linux are in the pipeline, he says.
• Google Chrome OS team is figuring out a secure way for Web based applications to take advantage of the desktop OS in the same way that desktop applications do, says Sundar Pichai.
• As expected, every application on Chrome OS will be a web application(NO DESKTOP APPS). The emphasis will remain on providing high level of security, lightening speed and 100% fidelity. By fidelity, he refers to an instance that If someone loses his Chrome machine, he should go buy a new chrome machine and that’s it ! My computing experience would remain exactly the same it was earlier.”
• Chrome OS is basically Chrome browser with everything else on the cloud. All applications open in tabs and there are ‘panels’(described as persistent light windows) as well.
• Quick demo of Chrome OS UI is shown to us..It seems just fine…cool and lightweight.
• Speed, simplicity and security are the three main points Chrome OS will be based on.
• Sundar Pichai is done with his introductory speech and handing over the next part to Matt Papakipos
• Chrome OS eliminates the need of booting up. The browser gets auto-launched the moment we switch on the machine. The OS will self-update itself to stay aware of any security patches available and does the job by itself.
• From firmware to the OS kernel, things remain protected with a cryptographic signature ensuring a secure bootup. Malware detection and removal are automated.
• The existing system allows same level of system privileges to apps as given to users. This is entirely different when we talk about web based OS. The apps are web based and hence the privileges to web apps are never system based, which makes everything much secure and controlled in web based OS environment.

• Chrome OS’s file system is pretty much locked as it’s a read-only root file system. All user data is encrypted and synced to the cloud. PC would be utilized for caching your data but the ultimate stuff remains cloud based.
• It won’t be that easy to download and install Chrome OS on just about any machine. The hardware specs are an issue and Google is very much in talks with hardware manufacturers to settle down with a min. hardware requirements for Chrome OS. Chrome OS is expected to be ready by the fall of 2010.
• Q&A session starts..some interesting questions coming up….you catch the video embedded below :

Finally, the prime time has come. Google has finally decided on the date for the early preview launch of Chrome OS this thursday. This preview will include

• Development progress on Chrome OS
• Complete Chrome OS overview
• Future plans on official OS launch
• Scope and scalability

The complete event will be conducted by Sundar Pichai, VP of Product Management and Matthew Papakipos, Google Engineering Director for Google Chrome OS. The event will end with a Q&A session and our guess is that the Q&A will be most interesting to look out for.

Finally, it seems that Google Chrome OS is about to go mainstream by early next year so its great for us that we will have more to write about the stuff our website is all about.

Stay tuned…we will bring you byte-by-byte event details as they happen on thursday.

Google Chrome OS is back in buzz again. And we’ve something critical to talk about. Although, there hasn’t been any official word about Chrome OS for quite sometime now, the web diggers (aka geeks, bloggers) were right on their job, trying to dig out any possible traces of Chrome OS and they’ve somehow found one out.

The clue belongs to Chromium web repository, the Open source project that serves as a backbone for Google Chrome browser development. DownloadSquad spotted out a mention of Chrome OS login manager, somewhere buried in the open source code of Chromium web repository.

As Chrome OS is supposed to be a Browser based OS, a general interpretation of the term Chrome OS login manager would mean an OS that operates on Single Sign-On (SSO) cookie, working for all Google services.

In simpler words, you will be required to login with your Google Account when you will boot up your Chrome OS machine. Once you login with your Google account credentials into Chrome OS, you will get access to all the Google web services(Gmail, Google Docs, Picasa, Reader, Blogger, Friends Connect……)

It sounds pretty cool and absolutely perfect for a company like Google, probably the only internet company in tech industry that has in-house web based alternative to all major desktop applications and software needs. It also means that you just need to login with your Google account to any machine(home, office, friend’s) and you have your custom OS ready to be served. As all the services belong to Google, the overall compatibility will be immensely smooth.

But this presumption (which is most likely to turn true) that one must have a Google account to make an access to Chrome OS and use Google Chrome as the primary web browser for using any web service on Chrome OS has raised a lot of questions over the freedom of choice.

If somebody is not interested to work on Google Chrome(the supposed backbone of Chrome OS) but Firefox or IE or whatever else then ? Or if somebody doesn’t want to use Google Docs or Picasa but instead, want to use some other alternative software from a third party developer, then ??

Will Google allow other competitive software or services to get replaced as primary service in Chrome OS ? It’s a question that’s still to be answered by Google but we’re guessing that Google will choose to stay competitive than playing resistive.

Even when any user downloads and installs Google Chrome on Windows OS, Chrome first asks the user to choose a default search engine (in-built into URL address bar) and doesn’t just impose Google search on new Chrome user. It’s a competitive ideology that Google has always followed (so far) and we expect that for Chrome OS as well.