Program aimed at Fortune 500 lets companies use software free in exchange for half the cost-savings they reap Program aimed at Fortune 500 lets companies use software free in exchange for half the cost-savings they reapAs I noted in my entry today about PC-power management, there are some technology projects out there with a return on investment that’s incredibly simple to measure. GreenPrint is betting that its software, aimed a reducing printer waste, is among them.Through September, GreenPrint (which I wrote about earlier this month) is offering a program called “Pay the Fortune 500 to Go Green.” Through the initiative, GreenPrint will waive the licensing fees for its software for companies with at least 1,000 PCs. Instead, each quarter companies would pay GreenPrint half of the money they save on the paper and ink costs by using the tool. Companies will also get free upgrades. GreenPrint provides end-users with a simple means of choosing which superfluous pages to remove from a print job; they also can opt to remove all images or all text from a printing, which can also save paper and ink.Notably, research suggests that each end-user wastes about $85 worth of printer paper and ink each year through unnecessary prints, such as spill-over pages containing a superfluous line of text or gridlines. That means a participating company might expect to send GreenPrint a total of around $42.50 per user, per year, to GreenPrint. The licensing fee for the Enterprise Edition is $70 per user. “Because the environmental benefit is so significant, we want to do everything we can to make it as easy as possible for large organizations to use GreenPrint,” said GreenPrint CEO Hayden Hamilton in a written statement. “We also see it as symbolic of GreenPrint’s revolutionary proposition – saving money while saving the environment. Has any other company ever offered to pay the Fortune 500 to go green?”Companies and GreenPrint would use the product’s reporting tools to assess how much money a company saves each quarter in ink and paper.For more information, go to www.printgreener.com Technology Industry