Carsten Mickeleit of Cortado on the Cloud Printing Alliance

I’ve been looking at a whole host of mobile enterprise possibilities and one of the rather mundane areas is printing from mobile. I use the word ‘mundane’ there because frankly, printing isn’t that sexy.

But it’s something we all need to do now-and-again. Paper, unfortunately, sometimes is necessary.

So when you’re swanning around with your gorgeous iPad 2 or your all new PlayBook — or, if you’re using a smartphone — how do you print?

The answer?

We email it to a colleague. Or to a nearby secretary.

Yeah.

Rubbish solution.

Isn’t there something better out there? Well, I asked Carsten Mickeleit, CEO of mobile services firm Cortado, to give us an overview of their Cloud Printing solution.

First though, let’s get the background. Over to Carsten:

In terms of mobile, our view is ‘Desktop as an App’.

We deliver the full PC desktop experience to Tablets and Smartphones, but as a real application and not as a Windows screen. Our product is easy and fast to use, completely integrated with all the other device applications and your corporate environment.

One of our ‘Virtual Desktop Process’ offerings is Cloud Printing, which we built and are continuing to grow in co-operation with members of the Cloud Printing Alliance (the CPA).

Right, and you’re a big supporter of the Cloud Printing Alliance?

Yes, we launched the Cloud Printing Alliance with other founding members: Brother, Dell, Funkwerk, Konica Minolta, Kyocera Mita and OKI. They all signed an alliance agreement with us to bring true mobile cloud printing to the market.

How does your approach to Cloud Printing work?

Cloud Printing is a real technical challenge and we believe that we have the leading solution compared to most of our competitors who only have a very limited approach – meaning their products are limited to a specific: printer, device, apps or documents, or to specific location.

We’ve created an application that allows you to print wherever you are to whatever printer you would like to use.

However, this is just the beginning for us – with the support of the Cloud Printing Alliance members to complete the driver list, and the support of the device manufacturers to provide our app on their stores/phones/devices – we are aiming to create a real impact in both the enterprise and consumer worlds.

We realise we cannot do this alone, so we do need the feedback of our users to be able to provide the best possible user experience.

We are working very hard to convince hot spot providers to host a printer in their network and offer printing to their customers and if we do our job right, mobile printing will be possible nearly everywhere and much more easily compared to a PC.

Well, bring it on. We’re looking forward to bring able to print stuff anywhere! Where can we go for more information?

You can find out more about our enterprise services (to mobile-enable your enterprise environment) at our site, Cortado.com and you can find out more about the Cloud Printing Alliance at www.cloud-printing-alliance.com.

Thanks Carsten!