By Gadjo Cardenas Sevilla
Not that printing isn't already cool, but it's sort of been upstaged by the temporary nature of smartphones, tablets and their screens, both of which haven't really been properly designed to talk to printers.
BERG Cloud has created The Little Printer, which on the surface seems like a mini-printer for mobile devices but it represents so much more. It is a social printer that can print messages from your friends, the latest gossip, puzzles and even cobble together a mini newspaper with itsy-bitsy articles that will appeal to you. It provides the social ticker tape of your life.
As the Little Printer website states,"Connected to the Web, Little Printer has wide range of sources available to check on your behalf. We call them “publications”. Subscribe to your favourites and choose when you’d like them delivered. Right on time Little Printer gathers everything it needs to prepare a neat little personalised package, printed as soon as you press the button. You can get deliveries multiple times a day, but we find once or twice works best–like your very own morning or evening newspaper."
The printer mixes nostalgia, a well thought-out novelty factor and powerful cloud computing mojo to create an ecosystem that's already got Google, Foursquare and The Guardian UK as partners.
This could be the next big thing (i.e. it will become super popular and spawn a number of cheap knockoffs) or it could be fail to catch attention.
Pre-orders for The Little Printer have started. The device plus starter pack costs $259.00 and includes a Little Printer, BERG Cloud Bridge, international power supplies, cables and replacement paper.