Breezy makes some of the highest-rated print apps in the iOS, BlackBerry and Android stores. But we've always wanted to be more than an just app: for months now, we've been telling our friends, investors and partners that our real aim is to be the mobile printing infrastructure in all of the other apps.
Today, we're incredibly excited to announce the Breezy Button: an easy, almost drag-and-drop SDK that allows any iOS or Android developer to add the industry's best printing technology to their apps in just minutes.
We hope most developers agree that it's a no-brainer to integrate the Breezy Button into their apps. After all, how many PC or Mac applications can you name that lack a print button? Until now, there's been no way for mobile developers to provide the same capabilities to their users. But with the Breezy Button, you can easily give your users the print functionality they need.
A number of industry-leading apps have already completed* their integrations, including the following:
Check out the screenshots below to see how clean the integrations look in our partners' apps, and then head on over to http://www.breezy.com/developers to add printing support to your own.
*Please note that some app updates are still pending App Store approval, so printing may not be available today on all platforms as of press time.
Back in April, Breezy was one of the first to integrate with Box's OneCloud platform on iOS. This allowed users to print from Box on iOS devices in a secure and user-friendly way.
The integration has been a big success (and even led to Breezy being featured on a Box billboard). So we're thrilled to announce today that, once again, we're making up the vanguard of enterprise mobility apps by integrating with Box OneCloud on Android.
The Box team has done a great job building the OneCloud platform, and the integration looks great - even better, we think, than on iOS.
To print from Box for Android, just tap the "Open..." button, select "Print/Fax with Breezy" from the menu, and select your printer. Check out the screenshots below to see how easy it is!
The Breezy Partner Network is one of our favorite parts of what we do here. Breezy's the only app that lets you locate nearby printers on a map, delivering on our promise of making printing easier, wherever you find yourself. Users love it too - indeed, for some people without printers, the Partner Network is Breezy.
So we're delighted today to announce that Breezy now allows users to print directly to FedEx Office locations. With more than 1,800 stores nationwide, the FedEx Office addition has more than doubled the size of our network.
All of these FedEx Office locations are now available to all of our users - and as with all additions to our Partner Network, you don't have to do anything special to take advantage of the improvement. Just select 'Nearby Printers' when printing, and you'll see many more pins than you would have last week.
With this addition, the Breezy Partner Network is now the largest fully secured on-location printing network in the world. No other mobile print offering has built a network of this size without compromising on security, and we're thrilled to be able to provide this unique benefit to our users.
This is big news for us, so please help us spread the word by using the buttons below to tweet, share and tell your friends. Thanks for your support - happy printing!
Box is one of our favorite companies here at Breezy.
For those not already in the know, Box provides secure file storage storage, sharing and collaboration in the cloud. It's a great replacement for FTP servers, USB drives, email attachments and, in general, the Old Way of Doing Things.
Breezy and Box are natural partners, since we're both focused on mobility, on improving the user experience for business customers, and on ending the myth that you can't have security and a great user experience at the same time.
So today, we're excited to announce that we've integrated with Box via OneCloud, a new service from Box that allows us to access documents stored in your Box account.
With this integration, you can expect to see us right inside the Box app. Just tap the OneCloud icon for access to Breezy:
With the recent addition of thousands of new locations to our network, we're giving you more ways to print than ever.
We'd love to hear what you think of the OneCloud integration, so please let us know in the comments. We'll also be doing other, deeper integrations with Box and similar services in the future, so stay tuned!
For months, customers have been asking for an easy way to share the benefits of Breezy within an office setting.
Users at car dealerships, hair salons, independent law offices and more have told us they wanted to enjoy Breezy's ease and simplicity at work while sharing the benefits with their coworkers. Our new Organizations feature is designed to meet that need, and like most of what we do, it's really easy to use.
Here's how it works:
1) Make sure you're on a Breezy Professional account. If you aren't, you can easily upgrade from our Plans & Pricing page.
2) While logged into your account, click the drop down menu next to your profile in the upper right, and select Manage Organization.
3) Enter the email of each person with whom you want to share your printers.
4) Each person you invite will get a nice email letting them know you've shared printers with them. If they already have a Breezy account, all they have to do is login, select "My Invitations" from the profile menu, and click accept. If they don't have a Breezy account yet, they can create one for free.
That's it! Members of your organization will instantly have access to all of your printers, and can share in the pool of any Fax Credits you purchase.
Organizations also benefit from:
- On-device encryption for all documents, providing regulatory compliance and peace.
- A simple reporting dashboard, allowing administrators to see who printed what, where, and when.
- The ability to share printers among up to 20 users.
- Phone and email support
We'd love to hear your thoughts about our organizations feature. What do you think? Anything we should add? Let us know in the comments!
If you're reading this, you probably already know that Breezy's great for secure mobile printing from your iPhone, iPad, BlackBerry or Android device. But what you probably didn't know is that you can now access our entire print infrastructure, including the Breezy Partner Network, from your laptop as well!
Why would I ever do that?, you might ask. Well, if (like many of our users) you leave your laptop at home whenever you travel, maybe you won't.
However, many (unfortunate) people, even today, must bring a laptop whenever they're on the road. So for those of you who've ever found yourselves stuck in a hotel room, with a need to print from your laptop but without any desire to install drivers or otherwise connect your computer to the sketchy-looking printer downstairs, there's now a simple, three-step solution.
1) Visit www.breezy.com and login to your account.
Then, select "Print a Document" from the drop-down menu near your name, and upload any file you like.
2) Select your printer and submit your document.
You can use the map to find a Breezy Partner Network location near you, or print to one of your own or your company's printers instead. If the printer supports it, you will be able to select options like color and duplexing.
3) If printing in a public location, check "Recently Printed" section in the Breezy app or our website for your Release Code.
As part of our commitment to security, documents printed to public locations will not be released to the printer until the user enters a unique Release Code on a keypad located next to the printer. You can find this code in the Recently Printed section of the app or our website.
We're proud to be the only mobile print solution to provide full functionality via our website as well as our mobile apps. We'd love to hear your feedback, so let us know what you think!
One of the cool things about building
Breezy (our award-winning mobile print and fax service) on an open API is that it allows us to integrate new features much more quickly than we otherwise would be able to.
For instance: this past week, we added easy faxing from your PC to the list of Breezy's features.
Usage couldn't be simpler. Just login to your Breezy account and click "Send a Fax". You'll see a dialog prompting you to upload a file (pick a file, any file: for
Premium users, Breezy supports over 400 file types). Upload your file, enter the fax number and hit send.
Done!
This feature's so new we don't even have a nice obvious button for it up on our website yet, but we'd love to hear your feedback. What are you looking for in a quick-and-easy fax product? What do you think we're missing? Let us know in the comments or by posting feature requests at
www.breezy.com/support.
Happy faxing!
After months of development, we're proud to announce that
Breezy, the best way to print and fax from mobile devices, is finally ready for iOS. We spent a lot of time and energy in getting this right and we're tremendously excited to take off the covers. Here's a quick tour of some of the cooler parts:
The Breezy Partner Network
This one's so cool it deserves its own post, so watch for that soon. In brief: when you're out in public and you need to print, start Breezy as you normally would and select "Nearby Printers". You'll see a map like the one above, letting you print to one of the many locations in the Breezy Partner Network. We have nearly a thousand locations online today, with thousands more to come in the next couple of months.
Fax Support
Breezy makes it easy to send faxes. Instead of selecting a printer, just select "Send as Fax", and enter the fax number. We'll send you an email letting you know when your document has been successfully sent.
Recent Documents List
Wanting to confirm the status of a recent fax or print job? Just touch "Recent Documents" for a list. This is also where you go to find the Release Codes required by some locations in the Breezy Partner Network.
We've had great feedback from a number of beta testers already, and we're really psyched to hear what the rest of you think.
It's an exciting time to be working at Breezy right now. We're past the initial rush to build our MVP and can finally loop back around and focus on making things more awesome. One of the biggest challenges we've had to solve is how we notify our Connector applications that documents are ready to print. A bit of context, the Connector is a piece of software that sits on desktop PC's that have printers. When a user chooses to print to a printer that's "connected" to this PC we notify the Connector and it does the work of actually sending the document to the printer.
It's magic and it works. So what's the problem? The problem is we currently solve this notification challenge by having the Connector poll our web service. This is less than optimal for a number of reasons: 1) This places a significant (seriously...) load on our backend infrastructure 2) This introduces latency because the Connector is polling on an interval. Finding a better solution is difficult because most of these Connector installations are sitting behind firewalls and are on a consumer's home network. This means you can't expect any additional setup other than installation of the software so any sort of direct connection initiating from the server is out of the question.
So what's option 3? In a word Websockets. This nifty little protocol has silently made its way into web browsers and web servers over the last few years. It's most common use case is allowing servers to send messages to web browsers, allowing the display of real time data and notifications. Web Sockets are similar to long lived HTTP connections except that they allow bi-directional messaging between both the client and the server. After the initial handshake the connection is "upgraded" after which time data is exchanged using a process known as Data Framing. Websockets also run over HTTP/S ports 80 and 443 so there's no worry that they'll be blocked by firewalls. For these reasons Websockets are also a great solution to our Connector's polling problem.
Cool, so Websockets, now what? We could have built a Websocket server that's capable of handling thousands of live connections at a time, implemented a nice security layer and defined our own messaging protocol but... that's a lot of work. It's a beautiful world we live in where people build these sorts of things for us and let us use them. That's where Pusher came in.
Why did we choose Pusher?Pusher didn't just save us time it made refactoring our architecture possible. The work required to implement a notifications infrastructure that would handle our traffic requirements is simply intractable for us. Furthermore, out of the box it has many of the less obvious features we needed like security, presence information and a well documented messaging protocol.
What problems did Pusher solve?
Pusher allowed us to offload the vast majority of our backend traffic to their notifications infrastructure. This will result in significantly improved performance and dramatically lower costs as we scale. Furthermore, this adds value to our customers because we can print a document in "real-time" rather than forcing them to wait several seconds for the next poll.
What was missing from Pusher?
One feature I'd like to see added is the ability to receive callbacks when clients connect to a Channel. This would help us keep track of what Connectors are actively connected and ready to receive notifications. Currently our workaround is a process that is constantly checking with the Pusher API to see who's active. This has been somewhat time consuming and challenging to develop, it'd be nice if we could remove this "moving part" in the future. I've talked to some of the Pusher guys and it sounds like this is on their near-term roadmap, definitely looking forward to seeing it.
Also, they seem to have their client libraries separated into Client and Server functionality. This provided a bit of a challenge for us because we needed some of the "client" functionality available from our backend which is written in Rails. This meant that we had to add this functionality to the Pusher gem, also a bit time consuming. For our scenario it would have been nice to see a single gem that encompassed both client and server functionality but frankly I'm not sure how common that is.
Mobile startup Breezy announced today that it has secured $750k in funding from a broad group of experienced mobile seed investors including Jeff Clavier of SoftTech VC, Aydin Senkut of Felicis Ventures, Rich Wong of Accel Partners, and others. The company’s software, which allows users to print or fax any document from any mobile device to any printer or fax machine, is available now for BlackBerry, Android and Windows Phone 7 devices, and an iOS app is in development.
Breezy was founded in 2010 by Jared Hansen, a former corporate lawyer who had been “constantly frustrated” by BlackBerry’s lack of a printing function. The company has already attracted 20,000 users of its mobile print and fax applications, and Hansen believes they’ve barely scratched the surface of the market demand. “As professionals continue to move away from desktop computing and toward mobile devices, there’s a huge gap that’s being created between mobile users’ data and the printed page. We’re here to fill that gap,” he said.
“This is a really interesting opportunity to serve hundreds of millions of business users by offering them ubiquitous printing, faxing and other services”, said Jeff Clavier, Managing Partner at SoftTech VC. “We were impressed by Breezy’s plans and execution to date.” Mr. Clavier has invested in Tapulous, Mob.ly and a number of mobile services startups.
“Breezy is a great bootstrapped company at the intersection of two of our core focus areas, enterprise and mobile”, said Aydin Senkut, Partner at Felicis Ventures, who has invested in mobile startups like Plusmo, Erply and Bump.
Rich Wong, Partner at Accel Partners and an investor in mobile startups such as 3LM, Mopub, Admob and Getjar, among others, was similarly enthusiastic: “We believe we’re seeing a new wave of exciting mobile enterprise and productivity startups”, he said. “While there has been significant VC activity in mobile consumer plays during the past few years, we expect an increasing number of great mobile business services as well.”
Breezy is a 2010 graduate of the Founder Institute, a startup accelerator focused on grooming startup founders into CEOs. Breezy took first place at the fifth Founder Showcase, a quarterly Silicon Valley event in which startups compete before a panel of VC judges and an audience of three hundred investors, journalists and tech CEOs.
For more information or to sign up for a free account, visit Breezy’s website at www.breezy.com. You can also follow the company on Twitter at @breezy.