I love my inbox in the morning. There’s always at least one zinger that makes me think, wow, that’s something no one will ever use! Today’s contestant is Phanfare and Hewlett Packard.
In a move that reminds me of this painful memory, the two have paired to create an iPhone app that lets people print photos on their iPhone to networked HP printers via the Phanfare Photon app. “Phanfare Updates Popular iPhone App to Enable Home Printing to HP Printers,” says the press release.
Not to pick on Phanfare, which is a great photo site. And while I’ve been hard on HP lately, I’m not one to complain about people printing too much stuff (see Hey, You Condescending Jerk, No One Prints Emails Anyway).
But there’s a reason why no one else has licensed HP’s iPrint software yet. It’s because it’s something no one wants to use.
Raise your hand if you’ve ever had prints made of a photo you took on a mobile phone. Now keep your hand up if you were so excited to print that photo that you actually did it on a home printer, sacrificing quality for immediate gratification. I’m pretty sure no one has their hand up.
But anyway, in the spirit of supporting startups, we’ll help get this thing started. The first person to download the app, take a picture, print it to an HP networked printer and then takes a picture of the printout with the iPhone next to it gets a free TechCrunch tshirt. You will definitely have earned it. Just upload it somewhere and leave a link below.*
* – Phanfare and HP employees are not eligible for the tshirt.**
** – Oh, what the hell, nevermind. Go for it. Someone has to test the software.
That’s just way too much work for a t-shirt, sorry.
Agreed. If anyone uses this… I pity their souls.
To Print , LOL – Old fashion…Not good for the environment…
I would have made the first comment, but I was out hugging a tree.
haa!
+1
Nice way to Promote HP useless stuff .
Cost of TechCrunch T-Shirt = $10.00
Cost of HP ink cartridge = $29.57
Cost of your time = (varies)
Making a public fool of yourself: priceless
el oh el
“Making a public fool of yourself: priceless”
You mean wearing the TC t-shirt in public?
Just kidding, haters.
awww, man. if i could only find an HP networked printer. i’ve always wanted a TC t-shirt (please note dripping sarcasm)
http://twitter....atus/4658180498
Too funny.
This can join that group of unused features with Facebook photo faxing!
Bummer. It becomes even more useless when it works only with HP printers.
http://farm3.st...e59f37887_o.png
you can have a tshirt anyway, good effort. check your email.
I’m replying to you, is that enough effort for a T-shirt?
Good call Michael. Companies often forget that “just because you can” doesn’t mean “you should”! I bet you can post a daily entry about a different product using the same blog post title.
LOL
Phanfare syncs your whole photo and video collection to your phone so you are not limited to printing only the photos you take on the iphone.
70% of our customers have digital SLRs and many are the type who do carry a better camera everywhere. We have found they use the iPhone more as a viewer of their collection than to add to it.
But this helps round out the app and communicate our vision of the digital camera of the future where every photo you take floats to the cloud and every photo you have ever taken can be viewed on the camera. imagine this technology in a digital SLR from Canon.
Andrew Erlichson
CEO
Phanfare, Inc.
wow. I am having a very, very funny email exchange with Phanfare CEO Andrew Erlichson right now. We’ll be keeping this one off the record, though.
You tease.
Aww. C’mon. Share.
Maybe tell him that you won’t publish it until after an agreed-on embargo. That should convince him.
My experience is that a lot of dotcom exec types know that many web services are less-than-essential. I imagine the conversation is something along the lines of “Yeah, it’s kinda lame, but you gotta put food on the table.”
or “yeah it’s kinda lame – but I it got on TechCrunch didn’t I?
”
I really like the shirt… but I don’t have any of the elements
I had a HP printer from 3 years ago…I finally booted the thing up only to find out that I am getting a “you have expired ink so please buy new ink” message. It would be at least nice if they let me TRY to print using expired ink to see for myself why expired ink is so bad.
Agreed. Fail on my part as well. Double fail because I downloaded the Photon app thinking I needed it to try this.
X_X
http://i33.tiny...com/11bryg4.jpg
The HP printer sitting on my desk doesn’t work with Vista so I don’t print anymore.
that must be an old printer.
I’m sorry, but I think this is awesome.
Head off to the local best buy or office depot and when you see an employee walk by, randomly take and print their picture out of every HP printer that you find. Maybe add in some text like “I’m watching you” Or “Hi Mike” (assuming that is the name on their nametag.) Just hours of fun!!!
(kidding)
ok, do this on video and i’ll give you ten tshirts.
Love the ASL graphic. Well done, Mike.
In support of HP: They were very easy to work with on this. And we went to them; they did not come to us.
We thought it would be cool to be able to print any photo from your collection to a local printer. HP already had an app in the store.
Phanfare, little startup, approached HP and asked to get the code that powered their Iprint Photo app. That app, btw, has been consistently in the top 50 photo apps, and spends most of its time in the top 25.
HP agreed to give us the code, which we included in our app. They did this based on a simple agreement, even thought the code is considered proprietary. It has all the driver magic that can print to 1000s of HP printers.
Working with HP was a pleasure. And while it may seem comical to all us TechCrunch futurists that somebody would want to print something on a dead tree, the truth is that printing is not going away any time soon.
And so HP has this huge business, bigger than nearly all the web 2.0 startups that we might create, to serve this printing market. And they are doing a yeoman’s job of continuing to innovate in the space, even though, as we all know, printing on paper is not sexy stuff.
All that said, HP’s printing tech is pretty cool. If you ever get the chance, look under the hood of an HP Indigo printer that makes all those gorgeous photo booksand cards you get during the holidays. They are as beautiful as a Ferrari engine and as meticulously engineered as Movado visible-movement watch.
Final thought, in 2080 when we print the last thing on paper and all enjoy our flexible OLED displays and e-ink, I bet that HP has once again reinvented themselves. Remember they got their start in test equipment and oscilloscopes.
Andrew Erlichson
CEO
Phanfare, Inc.
Andrew, Good of you to come on here and post. Now you should share your email exchange with Mike. If you want him to wait for a while, just ask him to agree to an embargo, I understand that he’ll say yes to that.
+1.
i’m also glad you can take the joke.
You’ve made the best points in this discussion, and seem like the kind of person that should be supported. Often, when company execs pop up to get involved in Internet banter, I find myself cringing at their attempts to make the situation better. Usually they say nothing to change anyone’s opinion and sometimes just make things worse for their company. I’m impressed and I’m heading to the app store to get this.
Nice post Andrew, MA and the others are not representative of a typical internet user.
I think you and Mike should meet and shake hands!…ohh wait?
Andrew – you knocked one out of the park with your reply.
-Ben.
I gotta disagree on this one. Of course people want to print photos. I dunno what quality iphones are capable of, but even if it is pretty crappy, that isn’t the point… in many situations the quality of the image isn’t hugely important. Is grandma going to blow the print up to a 4 foot wall poster? Or is she merely happy with a 3×4 inch print of her grandchild? As more and more people use smart phones, and more and more people print photos, and the quality of smart phone cameras improves, people are going to find more and more situations where they want to print photos. It would be smart of any company that wants to position it’s brand as synonymous with this general area to get in on the ground floor and get it’s brand into the minds of as many people as possible in the form of some iphone app. Remember, just because anyone will actually use it doesn’t mean it doesn’t have value… Everyone who bought a VHS or Betamax VCR for the purpose of using it to automatically record shows raise their hand… That’s a lot of hands… now everyone who never really used it for this purpose, put your hands down… how many hands are left up? Answer: not that many… but the VCR having that capability still served it’s purpose… it helped the VCR as well as the overall brand image of the particular brand of VCR to stay competitive with other brands in the minds of consumers…
On a sidenote, fingerspelling rocks (for the uninitiate, the image in the post spells out W T F in sign language).
Well my website is also probably one canditate for that catecory
Actually, I’ve got to say this worked really well for me & was pretty slick. Has seriously no one tried this yet today?
See the result (shot out my office window): http://btucker....are.com/4373642
II’m pretty impressed with the polish on the photon app. My only complaint is I couldn’t figure out how to rotate an image in the iPhone app.
-Ben
“takes a picture of the printout with the iPhone next to it gets a free TechCrunch tshirt.”
Ben, close but no cigar (though you probably earn a t-shirt)
what? actually follow directions.. that’d cramp my style a tad too much.
bingo! one tshirt coming up.
In an effort to get some free advertising for http://www.PokerDIY.com I have sycophantically (!?) followed the steps, knowing full well that someone 2 comments up has already won the shirt. Here is the picture of the picture next to the iphone which took the picture. http://pokerdiy...mageID=82819788
Don’t send me a shirt Michael (I am based in Sydney’s Silicon Valley anyway
– but commit this name to memory – PokerDIY.com – a social network for connecting poker players.
We focus on the home poker game market and have a mobile app (for recording your scores at the poker table) and a facebook app to show your home poker league scoreboard.
Re: what Andrew Erlichson said about people using their iPhone as a portable photo storage device…
I shoot with a DSLR and have never once transferred a photo TO my iPhone. Is there even a “Photos” folders in iTunes?
Does anyone actually do this? And if so, without a jailbreak?
At the risk of getting flamed…. I probably find reason to print a photo from my iPhone to my printer about every other week. A snapshot of a whiteboard from a meeting, for the most part. I didn’t buy an HP printer, however. Settled on a Brother, weprint server and a $2 iPhone app.
I actually print from my iphone a lot. The quality is fine, especially for small prints. I use “eprint”, which lets me print directly to my printer over wifi without running a server on my computer like the other apps, and isn’t limited to a certain brand.
http://mail.goo...paper/more.html
Phanfare is designed to store all your photos and videos at full resolution in the cloud and give you universal access. Hence, our being able to print from Phanfare Photon means getting access to being able to print any photo from the iPhone, including ones you shoot with a DSLR.
We wirelessly sync your whole collection to your phone. My 100GB collection takes less than 2GB on the phone because we downsample when syncing to the phone.
But when you print from Photon, we download our slideshow rendition, which is about 1.5 megabits. Phanfare Photon does not print larger than 5×7, so you get a nice print from that.
If you want to go totally wireless and use a dedicated camera, one solution is to use an Eye-Fi card to move photos from your camera to Phanfare and then Photon to sync them to your iPhone.
Meh, went to try this out since I’ve got an HP printer at home, but you can’t use the app without signing up for a Phanfare account. Pass.