Daily Cup of Tech

I used to work for a large consulting firm. Once day, I was transitioning a client over to a new network system and I was chatting with the client’s secretary. I looked inquisitively at her as she took a large stack of printouts into her boss’s office. When she returned, I asked her if he generates a lot of documents that need to be printed. She replied, “Oh. Those aren’t his documents. Those are his e-mails.”

At the time, I thought that it was a bit silly for a senior manager to not want to deal with e-mail personally. And I still do. But, the situation is a bit different for someone who has never worked with the technology and only want to keep in touch with family. The 80 year old grandma comes to mind.

HP and Presto have come up with a solution for grandma. The HP Printing Mailbox will check your e-mail and then automatically print out those e-mails without a computer! From their website:

It allows you to send email, photos, and content to people who don’t have a computer or Internet connection. You can send email just like you do today from your regular email account and the Presto Service automatically transforms it into beautiful layouts for printing. The HP Printing Mailbox then prints when you want, on your schedule—up to several times a day.

The printer costs about US$150 and the e-mail service is US$10 per month. Sounds like a pretty good way to keep grandma in the loop. The only down side is that there is no way for her to reply to the e-mail. It would have been nice if the printer had a scan option so that she could have written on the original e-mail and then scanned it so that it would reply back to the original sender. But, with that being said, it still seems pretty cool!

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