Google on Ulitzer

Berlin-based ThinPrint AG, the printer virtualization house, thinks it's got a cloud solution for the admittedly printing-challenged Chrome OS.

It say it will be available in the fourth quarter of 2010 when the Chrome operating system is supposed to be fit for public consumption on special Google-spec'd netbooks.

Of course Google has sworn that Chrome will print by then too. But it hasn't explained how or under what circumstances or with what dexterity but if it can't manage it in-house, well then maybe it'll be ThinPrint to the rescue.

Henning Volkner, the head of ThinPrint in North and South America, suspects Google will try to ignore the hard-to-fix printing challenge and at best come up with a USB solution that prints PDF files and photos, which would relegate Chrome to the "not really serious" class of widgetry.

All this Gnostic, non-material talk of doing everything on the web is neither practical nor realistic. People still want pieces of paper to shuffle around and produce on demand.

ThinPrint chairman Carsten Mickeleit said in a statement, "Naturally, we don't have all the details on the Google Chrome OS yet, but we are certain that we will provide the best Google Chrome OS print solution based on our patented technology."

ThinPrint's "driver-free" widgetry deploys a virtualized print server and a client agent that uses the end device as a "kind of facilitator for communication between applications and printers."

It supports all the printers Windows supports, which must be everything that prints and that's what it's promising for Chrome.

ThinPrint has strategic partnerships of one stripe or another with RIM, Citrix, Fujitsu Siemens, Lexmark, Microsoft, Nokia, Orange, Palm, Sun, Symbian and VMware. It also has 9,000 customers and a 10-year history putting black ink on white paper under trying circumstances.