Save paper, save ink, save money, save the planet. Marketing doesn’t get any better than that.
When Hayden Hamilton and James Kellerman started batting around the idea for their printing software in May 2005, it seemed that simple and brilliant.
Roughly one out of five pages that people print are wasted — the stray lines at the end of a Web document, the boilerplate at the bottom of an airline e-ticket, the endless PowerPoint slides before the page with the important conclusions.
Hamilton and Kellerman wanted to create software that would make it easy to eliminate the junk: When users hit “print,” a preview of the document would pop up and allow them to quickly choose which pages they really wanted.
Four years later, the two men and the company they founded, GreenPrint Technologies, are still struggling. About 168,000 people have tried the company’s free consumer version, but only about 25,000 are using it on any given workday, by the company’s estimate. Corporations, the gold mine for software like this, have been reluctant to buy it until GreenPrint worked out a host of technical issues.
“It’s more difficult than you’d think it would be,” said Hamilton, chief executive of the start-up, which is based in Portland, Oregon. “We had zero insight into what challenges would be in place for an organization of 50,000 users.”
GreenPrint’s travails are all too common for small technology companies.
“The gulf between invention and innovation is often a huge one that many entrepreneurs can’t cross,” said Scott Anthony, president of Innosight, a consulting firm.
In other words, it’s not easy to turn a bright idea into a genuine business.
GreenPrint might finally hit its stride with version 2 of its software. The updated consumer software was released last month (downloadable versions are at www.printgreener.com), and the corporate version is due in a few weeks.
The new software is faster and offers network administrators more reports on who is printing what and how much money a company is saving. GreenPrint has already landed one big customer — an Asian conglomerate that ordered 50,000 licenses — and says that several more are interested, including the HSBC Group, the big banking company.
But if the past four years have taught GreenPrint anything, it is that progress can be slow.
Kellerman, the chief technical officer at GreenPrint, said the company had listened closely to early customers, like the International Finance Corp, a unit of the World Bank Group.
IFC tested the original version of the software with about 190 people. The verdict was that it was too slow and choked on large documents like PowerPoints. A lot of users turned it off.
“It was preventing them from doing work they needed to get done,” said Sarah Raposa, who runs IFC’s internal sustainability program.
Kellerman said GreenPrint had not realized how hard it would be to create a universal “translator” that could handle every application and printer. Ultimately, GreenPrint had to overhaul the entire software engine, switching to Microsoft’s XPS document standard, which is tuned to run especially fast in Windows Vista and the coming Windows 7.
In the meantime, the environmental consciousness that prompted IFC and other early users to support GreenPrint has become commonplace.
GreenPrint’s biggest deal so far is with Xerox, which has distributed 150,000 copies of the software with its line of solid-ink printers as part of a broad, eco-friendly marketing campaign.
“It increases the ‘reduce waste’ message,” said Deb Koehler, director of sustainability of the Xerox Office Group.
Koehler said that Xerox had been patient with the 28-person start-up. Despite the initial sluggishness of the software, “we also had a lot of feedback that if someone really cares about reducing the waste, it’s worth the wait.”
It may be worth the money, too. GreenPrint says its software, which costs about US$70 per corporate user, will shave an average of 17 percent from the cost of paper and ink — about US$100 annually for a typical employee printing 10,000 pages at US$0.06 a page. In the case of Savills, a British real estate brokerage firm whose agents briefly tested the software, the projected savings were more than US$800 per user a year, GreenPrint said.
With that kind of money at stake, a successful GreenPrint could nip at the profits of the big printer makers, like Hewlett-Packard and Canon.
HP deflects talk about the cost of ink, preferring to discuss carbon footprints. The company has directed its conservation efforts toward cutting the energy used by its printers, recycling ink and toner cartridges and making it easier for machines to print on both sides of a sheet.
HP, the leading maker of printers, makes a 40 percent operating profit on ink, according to Sanford C. Bernstein & Co. As a result, HP is trying to bolster, not reduce, consumption of printer ink, which costs customers US$40 to US$80 for about 30 mililiters (making Dom Perignon champagne look cheap at about US$5 for the same amount).
TYPHOON: The storm’s path indicates a high possibility of Krathon making landfall in Pingtung County, depending on when the storm turns north, the CWA said Typhoon Krathon is strengthening and is more likely to make landfall in Taiwan, the Central Weather Administration (CWA) said in a forecast released yesterday afternoon. As of 2pm yesterday, the CWA’s updated sea warning for Krathon showed that the storm was about 430km southeast of Oluanpi (鵝鑾鼻), Taiwan’s southernmost point. It was moving in west-northwest at 9kph, with maximum sustained winds of 119kph and gusts of up to 155kph, CWA data showed. Krathon is expected to move further west before turning north tomorrow, CWA forecaster Wu Wan-hua (伍婉華) said. The CWA’s latest forecast and other countries’ projections of the storm’s path indicate a higher
SLOW-MOVING STORM: The typhoon has started moving north, but at a very slow pace, adding uncertainty to the extent of its impact on the nation Work and classes have been canceled across the nation today because of Typhoon Krathon, with residents in the south advised to brace for winds that could reach force 17 on the Beaufort scale as the Central Weather Administration (CWA) forecast that the storm would make landfall there. Force 17 wind with speeds of 56.1 to 61.2 meters per second, the highest number on the Beaufort scale, rarely occur and could cause serious damage. Krathon could be the second typhoon to land in southwestern Taiwan, following typhoon Elsie in 1996, CWA records showed. As of 8pm yesterday, the typhoon’s center was 180km
TYPHOON DAY: Taitung, Pingtung, Tainan, Chiayi, Hualien and Kaohsiung canceled work and classes today. The storm is to start moving north this afternoon The outer rim of Typhoon Krathon made landfall in Taitung County and the Hengchun Peninsula (恆春半島) at about noon yesterday, the Central Weather Administration (CWA) said, adding that the eye of the storm was expected to hit land tomorrow. The CWA at 2:30pm yesterday issued a land alert for Krathon after issuing a sea alert on Sunday. It also expanded the scope of the sea alert to include waters north of Taiwan Strait, in addition to its south, from the Bashi Channel to the Pratas Islands (Dongsha Islands, 東沙群島). As of 6pm yesterday, the typhoon’s center was 160km south of
STILL DANGEROUS: The typhoon was expected to weaken, but it would still maintain its structure, with high winds and heavy rain, the weather agency said One person had died amid heavy winds and rain brought by Typhoon Krathon, while 70 were injured and two people were unaccounted for, the Central Emergency Operation Center said yesterday, while work and classes have been canceled nationwide today for the second day. The Hualien County Fire Department said that a man in his 70s had fallen to his death at about 11am on Tuesday while trimming a tree at his home in Shoufeng Township (壽豐). Meanwhile, the Yunlin County Fire Department received a report of a person falling into the sea at about 1pm on Tuesday, but had to suspend search-and-rescue
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