Berg: Little Printer

Another post on Little Printer? Yeah, you guessed it ;)

I’m not going to say much on it apart from a congrats to Berg for releasing it, it’s a fantastic looking product and I’m looking forward to getting my hands on one and secondly the reason I like this is because it’s moving away from digital.

It’s a bit of a weird thing to suggest (especially for an app developer), but a small chunk of paper I can grab in the morning, with all the bits of info I need for the day, that’s pretty handy. The main reason I think it’s going to be successful is because the output is something physical.

It’s easy to believe that everything should be in the cloud and to be honest I keep the majority of my content in cloud. At the end of the day  I don’t want to worry about back-ups and how to access content when I’m away from my usual computer. However, with this mentality comes a sense of letting go of all things physical, paper notes, CD’s, DVD’s, even hard drives, but should that be the case?

The root cause of my interest stems from the loss of physical attributes which occur when shifting to the cloud. This was peaked during a completely different discussion about applications like bump with one of my close friends Andy Coghill, who has a background in product design.

After starting a conversation around substituting a physical business card for a digital one, the first thing Andy focused on was the loss of touch.

Taken back I probed further questioning why he didn’t like the idea of things like NFC, QR codes or bump, thinking NFC was the most natural way to do it and Andy simply moved onto to push that touching, feeling and owning that card was far more powerful. I had to agree. My software engineer background went to the toolbox and found the usual tools of the trade, cloud computer, NFC & mobile devices. His product design background went to the toolbox and found the materials, the user perception and everything he knows and loves.

Now consider Little Printer, you can see how that might apply. Having a physical receipt sized piece of paper with the vital bits of info you need for the day has a number of physical properties that you could easily overlook. All this printer offers is a link between the cloud to the physical, something which has been overlooked all too much these days.

If you want to find more info then check out: http://bergcloud.com/

Hello Little Printer, available 2012 from BERG on Vimeo.

Orig Photo: https://flic.kr/p/eb7rF1