When I arrived at my house in Homer, I hadn’t been here for two years. It took me one phone call to get Internet (DSL) working again (ACS had to reset my password) and within about 15 minutes everything was working just fine. Except I couldn’t print. I have an old HP 3330 with a JetDirect USB to Internet print server. The printer doesn’t have many miles on it – I’ve only used it for a total of about three cumulative months. It took me about thirty minutes to fight through all the nonsense of the Internet to figure out how to set it up as a print server for my new Mac (which I’ve never used with it before) and for Amy’s Windows 7 computer. It turns out that nothing really works except hard wiring its IP address into our printer setup. Um – yeah – that’s obvious – especially for someone who doesn’t know what an IP address is.
We had a Pogoplug board meeting at our office two weeks ago. For each company we invest in, we try to have a board meeting with all four Foundry Group partners attending at least once a year. This was our “group Pogoplug board meeting” (although I missed the best part – which is the dinner the night before – because I participated in Governors VC Roundtable at the Governors Mansion.)
At the board meeting, Daniel, Jeb, Brad, and Smitty (actually, mostly Jeb) showed off the new Pogoplug “print anywhere” function. They printed a document from an iPad to an Epson printer. Boom – paper came out of the printer. The Pogoplug had two things connected to it – the Epson printer (via a USB port) and our network (via a 10BaseT connection). The iPad was connected to the AT&T 3G network. Did I mention that they printed a document via the iPad? When was the last time you saw someone do that? Yeah, it could have been a web page via an iPhone also.
My immediate thought was how cool it would be to start printing porn on my partner Ryan’s printer connected via Pogoplug since he’d shared his Pogoplug-connected hard drive with me and would probably share his printer also. But then I undermined my evil plot by mentioning the idea. Oops.
If you already have a Pogoplug, this will be a simple free software update coming later this summer. If you don’t have a Pogoplug, seriously, why not? The thing is magic.