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Earlier this year, Jonathan Treble needed a physical copy of a concert ticket and found that his Old Town neighborhood had gone paperless more quickly than he liked.
“There were no nearby convenient options. I figured I wasn’t the only person in this position, and that it should be pretty easy for a local business to have some kind of self-service networked printer. For a few months I sat on the idea and let it marinate as I thought about the technology that would be used, and the business model. After a while, the idea just wouldn’t stop bugging me, so I called my friend Phil [Callahan] to ask him what he thought of it and he could almost finish my thought for me. We knew we had to try it.”
[ibimage==42680==Medium==none==self==ibimage_align-right]Thus was hatched PrintWithMe, a cloud-based printing solution partnered with a growing network of coffee shops and other small businesses in the Chicago area. After bringing on two developers, a designer, and a copywriter, Treble and Callahan began bootstrapping. As of today, their technology is officially 'patent-pending.' By the end of 2015, PrintWithMe hopes to achieve penetration in Chicago and start exploring other markets.
Let's say you're a PDF that wants to exist on paper. “Oh my, you’re a PDF,” said Treble. “I feel sorry for you. But let’s say your owner wants to print you. You’re sitting on their device, most likely in their inbox or hard drive, so your owner forwards a copy of you to our printer’s unique email address, e.g., [email protected]. At that point, our system processes you and sends the user back a confirmation email. The user then clicks on the secure 'Continue to Print' link in the email to arrive at their checkout page, where they enter payment information and click 'Finish Printing.' Then you, Mr. PDF, are wirelessly sent to that printer via our API, to become rapidly incarnate in ink and paper form.”
Treble said that he realizes the tradition of paper documents is in decline, but he doesn't believe it's happening as quickly as some might believe. “Take résumés, for example,” he said. “The tradition of arriving at your interview with a printed résumé will stay intact for the foreseeable future, unless there’s some massive cultural shift down the road. There are still plenty of needs for hard-printed tickets, paper copies of legal documents, and tactile forms of class notes that students can write on. Furthermore, as the rate of personal printing gradually slows, people will own printers less and less and will prefer to use a distributed network like ours.”
