Last April, I blogged about Hewlett-Packard as they were acquiring Web 2.0 photo site, Tabblo.

HP’s Vyomesh I. Joshi, the senior vice president in charge of the printing division, recounted his experience of one of the cruelest of the teen-to-parent interactions — hearing that one’s life work is irrelevant. His daughter informed him she didn’t need a printer because her life was all online.

V.I. Joshi didn’t get mad or hurt or ignore his kid’s comment. Realizing that her words reflected the experience of many people today, he allowed that HP might not be in the printing business at all. “We are in the content consumption business,” he told reporter Damon Darlin.

That line came to my mind and as the tech buzz about HP’s announcement of Cloudprint spread from John Markoff’s NYTimes storythrough the blogosphere.

Cutting through technical jargon, here is what Cloudprint does. You send a document to Cloudprint which is an HP server somewhere in cyberspace, using your cellphone number as an ID. Cloudprint sends you a confirmation that includes a six digit document code. When you want to print the document, you open the Cloudprint site, enter your phone number and document code, and up pops your document and a print command.

The program is free. It only downloads to PCs. A Mac version is promised soon, but you can send documents out to Cloudprint server with any computer that can access the Web. Now all I had to do was locate remote Cloudprint printing spots from the website. I live just north of Chicago, the 3rd largest city in the United States, so I entered my zipcode expecting to be able to ride my bike to a Cloudprint spot, whip out my cell and print my doc.

Not so fast.There wasn’t a remote printing place within 50 miles which includes O’Hare Airport and downtown Chicago.

Cloudprint is not vaporware. It was easy and fast to use. You can use it to transmit documents to devices that are connected to printers, but the promise of being able to travel with only a handheld device and being able to access printed material from “anywhere” is still a way off. So what does it have to do with journalism?

The implications for e-versions of news media publications are intriguing. If I was on the road, could my local news organization send my “paper” to me via cell and Cloudprint so I could print it from wherever I was? When e-paper gets affordable, will Cloudprint be part of how the e-words get to the e-papers everywhere?

Perhaps some MSM types need to act like Mr. Joshi. He didn’t get mad when he realized his business model was becoming obsolete, he got thinking outside the box.