Carrying all your info around in digital form has many
advantages, but there are times when only hard copies will do-like
when you want to give your audience handouts of your presentation.
When you need printing on the road and you're far from your
15-pound laser printer, your options are often to fax or e-mail
your documents to your hotel or a nearby Kinko's. Neither
solution offers quite the convenience and quality you'd really
like. "Printing is a pain point for a lot of people,"
confirms Golvin. "Even though most people do presentations
using laptops and overhead projectors, they still like to have
paper."
Fortunately, portable printers can please most paper-loving
mobile entrepreneurs while offering fewer compromises than other
mobile printing options. Canon's i70 $250 Color Bubble Jet
inkjet printer weighs in at less than 4 pounds and is a little over
a foot long, less than 7 inches wide and 2 inches deep. It prints
up to 13 ppm in black and white, 9 ppm in color, and takes 60
seconds to print a 4-by-6-inch photo at up to 4,800 x 1,200 dpi
resolution. It prints on paper up to legal size and has a standard
30-sheet feeder that can also handle envelopes.
The $299 Brother MPrint MW-100 microthermal printer is still
more petite, weighing less than 10 ounces and measuring 4 by 6.4 by
0.7 inches. A lithium ion battery powers printing up to 100 sheets
of A7-size, or 2.91 by 4.13 inch, thermal paper. The 50-sheet paper
cassette also handles self-adhesive labels, and special carbon-copy
stock allows you to make an original and duplicate in one pass. It
communicates with laptops and PDAs via an infrared or USB port.
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The Mobile
Future
While business travel may be down, business mobility isn't.
Technology is providing solutions for entrepreneurs who work from
home or who just wander down the hall. IP Office, an office
telephone system from Avaya, provides growing companies with
all-in-one data and voice communications for around $375 per
station. It offers tools like a "follow me" feature that
allows absent workers to forward calls invisibly to home, a meeting
room, the hotel or wherever they may be. "Then people can be
contacted 24 hours a day," says London-based IP Office product
manager Jayne McLachlan. "That makes them much more productive
and efficient."
Other mobile-friendly features of IP Office let growing
companies inexpensively host their own teleconferences and provide
remote access to homebased workers and distant offices. In the
future, systems like IP Office will automatically switch cell phone
calls from the cellular network-where per-minute charges apply-to
the in-house network as a caller walks from the parking lot into
the building, McLachlan says.
Seamless integration of wide-area packet data networks and more
localized Wi-Fi hot spots is one of the next big objectives for
mobile computing and communications. Opinions vary on when that
will occur.
Other trends that may help mobile entrepreneurs include
increasing standardization and linking of mobile networks, more
emphasis on customer care and expanding network coverage, and
improvements to that old bugaboo-battery life. Heightened
competition among network operators may help the progress of
standardization and innovation. Powerful new lithium ion batteries,
more sophisticated power management, and experiments with different
fuel cells raise hopes that short battery life may soon be a worry
of the past.
Meanwhile, no matter what limitations or possibilities are
created by the technologies available to mobile entrepreneurs, the
business reason for employing them remains compelling. "To
provide good service, you have to have instant answers," says
Chander Dhawan, mobile IT consultant for MobileInfo.com, a
Thornhill, Ontario-based computing information site. "Those
who will grow and carry on are those [who] will invest in this type
of technology."
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