The following appears on 4-traders.com
By a News Reporter-Staff News Editor at Journal of Engineering — According to news reporting originating from Alexandria, Virginia, by VerticalNews journalists, a patent by the inventors Nuggehalli, Jayasimha (Cupertino, CA); Hong, Jiang (San Jose, CA), filed on April 23, 2013, was published online on December 31, 2013.
The assignee for this patent, patent number 8619275, is Ricoh Company, Ltd. (Tokyo, JP).
Reporters obtained the following quote from the background information supplied by the inventors: “The approaches described in this section are approaches that could be pursued, but not necessarily approaches that have been previously conceived or pursued. Therefore, unless otherwise indicated, it should not be assumed that any of the approaches described in this section qualify as prior art merely by virtue of their inclusion in this section.
“Conventionally, printing a document from a mobile device may require identifying the printing devices that are available in a user’s network, establishing connectivity with the available printing device and sending a printing job to the printing device for processing. Identifying a printing device available in the user’s network is referred to as a printer-discovery process. A printer’s discovery is often limited to discovering only those printing devices that are in the user’s local network. Therefore, the user can only print on the printing devices located in the user’s local network, but not on the printing devices located remotely.
“Furthermore, performing printer-discovery, determining a printing driver suitable for the printing device, physically locating the printing device, entering a job release code to the printing device and initiating a printing job on the printing device can be tedious and time-consuming because many MFPs have simple user interfaces with limited functionality.
“Moreover, a user may be unfamiliar with an interface that is specific to a particular printing device. Therefore, the process of selecting the printer’s features and options by navigating the unfamiliar printer’s interface can be difficult and disappointing.”
In addition to obtaining background information on this patent, VerticalNews editors also obtained the inventors’ summary information for this patent: “Techniques are provided for utilizing encoded data of a printing device to identify an available printer, queue a printing job for the printing device at a network service that acts as a repository, and allow the printing device to retrieve the printing job from the network service. A printing device displays the encoded data and a mobile device scans or photographs the encoded data from the printing device. The mobile device uses the encoded data to identify the printing device and to queue a printing job at the network service for the printing device to retrieve it and process. Encoded data represent various types of information comprising a) features and options that are currently supported by the printing device, b) a printer identifier of the printing device, and c) network service interface data for a network service.
