If computing is going to the cloud, does that include printing? It does in Google’s plan. The company has introduced preliminary designs for a project called Google Cloud Print, a service that would allow any desktop, web, or mobile app on any device to print to any printer that the user sets up.

"Rather than rely on the local operating system (or drivers) to print, apps can use Google Cloud Print to submit and manage print jobs," explains product manager Mike Jazayeri. "Google Cloud Print will then be responsible for sending the print job to the appropriate printer with the particular options the user selected, and returning the job status to the app."

It’s important to understand that Google Cloud Print is in the early stages of development, and there’s no telling when it might become available, but Google has released all the documentation and code as part of its open source Chromium and Chromium OS projects.

My guess is that they will want to make something available before too long, as the release of the Google Chrome OS devices gets closer. In case you don’t remember, that’s Google’s web-based operating system, on which all applications on a device are run from the cloud.

"While the emergence of cloud and mobile computing has provided users with access to information and personal documents from virtually any device, today’s printers still require installing drivers which makes printing impossible from most of these new devices. Developing and maintaining print subsystems for every combination of hardware and operating system– from desktops to netbooks to mobile devices — simply isn’t feasible," says Jazayeri. "Since in Google Chrome OS all applications are web apps, we wanted to design a printing experience that would enable web apps to give users the full printing capabilities that native apps have today."

Google says it will have more information to share about which Google products will use Google Cloud Print in the coming months. The company will eventually offer an API for any app to use it.

The company expects "cloud aware" printers to become standard, although it acknowledges that none exist today. Google says it will engage with the printer OEM community in the coming months to help drive the effort forward.

For regular printers, users will be able to install a print proxy on their PCs to enable functionality with Google Cloud Print.

If you think about it, it’d be slightly inaccurate to say that phones let people all over the world communicate with each other; current tech just transmits sounds, not their significance.  But Google’s looking to knock down language barriers with devices that will perform translations on the fly.

This isn’t some poorly sourced rumor or random conspiracy theory.  Chris Gourlay interviewed Franz Och, Google’s head of translation services, and Och said, "We think speech-to-speech translation should be possible and work reasonably well in a few years’ time."

Incredible as that might seem, the building blocks are already in place.  Android allows users to perform searches by just saying terms out loud.  Google Translate deals in 52 languages at the moment.  Google only needs to integrate everything in order to be in business.  Maybe.

The sentence "I am going to eat lunch at 12:30" becomes "I’m going to lunch at 12:30" after Google Translate takes it from English to Spanish and back.  That’s enough of a difference to create confusion (suppose someone’s trying to distinguish between stuffing his face and stepping out to run errands), and it’s not like Spanish is a rare dialect or the original phrase represents a curveball.

Toss in imperfect speech recognition, and it’s hard to imagine anyone trying to conduct important business or even chat for fun.

Nonetheless, it should be very interesting to see how this project works out for Google.

Related Articles:

> Google Analytics, Chromium Receive Language Upgrades

> Google Announces Unicode Progress

> Google Launches New Transliteration Tool

If you think about it, it’d be slightly inaccurate to say that phones let people all over the world communicate with each other; current tech just transmits sounds, not their significance.  But Google’s looking to knock down language barriers with devices that will perform translations on the fly.

This isn’t some poorly sourced rumor or random conspiracy theory.  Chris Gourlay interviewed Franz Och, Google’s head of translation services, and Och said, "We think speech-to-speech translation should be possible and work reasonably well in a few years’ time."

Incredible as that might seem, the building blocks are already in place.  Android allows users to perform searches by just saying terms out loud.  Google Translate deals in 52 languages at the moment.  Google only needs to integrate everything in order to be in business.  Maybe.

The sentence "I am going to eat lunch at 12:30" becomes "I’m going to lunch at 12:30" after Google Translate takes it from English to Spanish and back.  That’s enough of a difference to create confusion (suppose someone’s trying to distinguish between stuffing his face and stepping out to run errands), and it’s not like Spanish is a rare dialect or the original phrase represents a curveball.

Toss in imperfect speech recognition, and it’s hard to imagine anyone trying to conduct important business or even chat for fun.

Nonetheless, it should be very interesting to see how this project works out for Google.

Related Articles:

> Google Analytics, Chromium Receive Language Upgrades

> Google Announces Unicode Progress

> Google Launches New Transliteration Tool

Google released an early version of the Google Chrome Frame today. This is a plug-in for Internet Explorer, which lets the browser use HTML5 and…Google Wave (starting next week when the product’s preview is extended).

"We’re building Google Chrome Frame to help web developers deliver faster, richer applications like Google Wave. Recent JavaScript performance improvements and the emergence of HTML5 have enabled web applications to do things that could previously only be done by desktop software," Google says on the Chromium blog. "One challenge developers face in using these new technologies is that they are not yet supported by Internet Explorer. Developers can’t afford to ignore IE — most people use some version of IE — so they end up spending lots of time implementing work-arounds or limiting the functionality of their apps."

Google says it will encourage IE users to install Chrome Frame, once the Wave preview is extended, and IE users will see the following message when they login to Google Wave. Then they will be running Wave in a speed that equivalent to that of Google Chrome.

"Google Wave depends on strong JS and DOM rendering performance to provide a desktop-like experience in the browser. HTML5’s offline storage and web workers will enable us to add great features without having to compromise on performance," says Google’s Wave Team. "Unfortunately, Internet Explorer, still used by the majority of the Web’s users, has not kept up with such fairly recent developments in Web technology. Compared with other browsers, the JavaScript performance is many times slower and HTML5 support is still far behind. Likewise, the many different versions of IE still in use — each with its own set of CSS quirks and layout limitations — further complicates building rich Web applications."

If you have not yet gotten acquainted with HTML 5, Google has uploaded a 40-minute introduction to the technology to the Google Code YouTube Channel. You can view it below.