App offers printing from fingertips

Irish company Surfbox is seeing great growth thanks to the ePrint app, says Mark Twomey

A NEW iPhone app allows users access to many remote printers, meaning all-important documents can now be printed almost anywhere and anytime.

The ePrint app from HP is simple to use but is having a terrific impact on Irish company SurfBox, who for the last seven years have built their business providing pay-as-you-go internet kiosks with printing facilities in hotels.

Surfbox managing director Thomas Marry says their aim is to educate consumers that if they have the app on their phone they can print while mobile.

“We are doing this through direct advertising at the print locations with the internet kiosks [and] the HP printers. People know they can print direct from the kiosks but we want to raise awareness that they can print from their mobile device. The way we are looking to expand this is through firstly users downloading the HP app onto their device and using that to locate our printers and send print jobs to them.”

The kiosks will be available in Edinburgh and Gatwick airports in January and February respectively, a move that will grow Surfbox’s business by 25%.

“What we found in our negotiations with BAA for Edinburgh and Gatwick airport was mobile printing is a key reason why they have decided to go with us and move from their incumbent suppliers. They’ve seen our print solution to be far superior and its mission critical,” Marry says.

“If you recall the effects of the snow last year in Gatwick airport, people had to rebook travel arrangements and printing boarding passes and documentation was a key demand and it has to be accessible to people at a fair price.

“We standardised our print service using HP laserjet printers, the main reason was the reporting available: we remotely operate the service; we don’t have personnel on location so the reports for toner running low or paper trays running empty or a paper jam, that’s relayed to our central management system and we communicate to local service partners on the ground to remedy the problem. It fits into our business model which is a remote automated form of retail of internet access and printing.”

Printing from the kiosks works in two ways: users can print at the kiosk or remotely from a mobile device.

“Locally at the printer we have an email address associated with the kiosk’s printer, people email their document to that email address, they receive a six-digit release code which they enter at the kiosk and for 50 cent per sheet they get their document,” Marry explains.

“However, the more exciting one and the one which will drive this forward is by using the ePrint app on their phone, for instance, they can select a document, then a specific remote printer at an airport... or one ‘near me’ — which will display all of the printers near that user’s location — and similarly they will receive a six-digit release code and when they get to the remote location they enter the code and get their document.

“The beauty of the app is that it offers geolocation and a description of each printer within the app. It gives visibility to our network of printers be it in a hotel, service station or airport.”

A typical example of a customer who will benefit from this would be an airline passenger.

“Somebody flying with Ryanair for instance, you have to print off your boarding pass and if you don’t it will cost €40 at their check-in desk. The sting in the tail is the boarding pass must be printed off four hours before the flight is due to depart; so if you’re sitting in central London and flying out of Gatwick and you realise you don’t have a boarding pass you can take out your mobile phone, generate the PDF of the boarding pass, send it to the printer at Gatwick and arrive there an hour before the flight; enter the release code and pick up the pass. You don’t have to be at the printer four hours before the flight.

“We would see a high volume of boarding passes being printed off in the future as awareness of the service grows,” Marry says.

“Another area of growth we’ve seen is people who don’t have printers at home and need documents, we are located in 12 shopping centres in Ireland at the moment and people come down to print of all sorts of documents and with the ePrint app, they can send them in advance and know they will be there when they get to the kiosk.”

SurfBox is seeing volumes of 620 documents being printed daily and expects growth of 25% over the next four months. By the end of 2012 they expect that figure to reach 1,000.

However, this isn’t the only revenue stream for SurfBox. They make most of their cash from usage of the kiosks. “We have a turnover of more than €2m annually. The typical charge is 10c per minute (€6 per hour) and the average user spends between €1 and €1.50. It’s good value for money and our machines accept coinage from 10c up so there is no real minimum.”

Marry continues: “The company was set up seven years ago and now we’re growing that. The challenge we see is with the emergence of mobile devices that the use of kiosks is dropping off so we are adding on new services with the use of mobile printing; we are also including charging devices on our latest kiosks.

“We currently employ eight people but expect to take on more people to service our contracts as the business develops, we are exporting our business. We’ve gone from three years ago of having no exports sales to having 10% last year; 20% next year and we expect that to rise to 40% the year after. Small Irish companies really have to look at the export markets to generate future growth and profit,” he says.

“We manufacture our kiosks from scratch in Ireland and we are creating jobs, from the metal fabricators to the people who provide the desktops, all of our suppliers are in Ireland and everything is then shipped abroad.”