From the San Francisco Chronicle:
"I worked for Ford a few years ago in Europe, doing innovation stuff, and we had a Costco-size building that was five stories tall," says GreenPrint founder, Hayden Hamilton. "On each floor, there were 25 print stations, and all of them would be overflowing with orphan pages by 10 a.m. each day."
"I was printing something, and got one of these pages, and I thought, 'There's got to be a solution to this," he said. "I started looking on Cnet's Download.com and on Google and didn't find anything."
"Almost everyone has experienced that final page that's just a url, or a banner ad, or two pages of legal jargon that they didn't know would print," he said. "I thought, 'This is really an un-met need out there.' "
Hamilton, 30, who lived in San Francisco a few years ago when he worked for the Global Business Network, returned to his hometown of Portland and started GreenPrint. He hired California Software Labs, with offices in Pleasanton and Chennai, India, to develop the software.
And GreenPrint was born.
Home users can download a trial version for free, and buy it for $35. (For every purchase, GreenPrint will plant a tree in any name you choose.) The big money will be in selling it to large companies, which can save big bucks in reduced paper and ink costs. The World Bank is using it, and 23 Fortune 500 companies have pilot projects. GreenPrint says big companies can save $2 million a year on paper and ink, as well as save 4,000 trees and cut 12,000 tons of carbon emissions.
In addition, GreenPrint sells a custom-designed font, Evergreen, that "will maximize the amount of words you put on the page, as well as make it as readable as humanly possible." It saves more than 15 percent, compared with common fonts like Arial and Times New Roman. The font costs $10, or $5 if bought with the software.