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Paper lives: Little Printer and the rebirth of the hard copy

2012-08-14
hey guys his left from the verge I'm here with Matt Webb CEO of Berg London who are designed consultancy company take for joining us Matt and we'd take a look at your new little printer right here so can you give you like the elevator pitch for all this product is and what it does so a little printer is a connected printer it connects to the web it's not like a regular printer a prince automatically and what it prints is a miniature personal newspaper for you every day well you speak for you but you also plug in in quite a few other things I as you have an Instagram feed some other things that word of the day and things I love you mmm food which is the joy of connecting to the network so you know a newspaper is like a regular thing which is printed you know by the hundreds of thousands the same to everyone the way little printer works is you subscribe to publications each publication is like a tiny bit of content you know a couple of inches and that can be a puzzle it can be headlines but neat thing is because it comes from the web it can be from your social network or it can be something which is really timely or based in your like your location so could you just walk us through the initial setup process once you bring a little bit too hung sure so you get a little brighter home it comes in the box you take out the bridge you plug the bridge into your home Ritter yeah supply the ethernet cable and power some lights come on you take little printer out you plug it into the wall you need to be with them at 50 feet of the bridge and when it's found that the light comes on here you press the button and out comes this claim code at this point we go to Berkeley opcom on your smartphone and at that point you can start choosing your publications you know I've already I've already claimed little printer on my phone and I've given it a name given it a location I can hit share and that will give me another code which comes out to the printer you can then go onto the onto burg cloud yourself and you you too can be an owner of that same little printer one of the things we found when we originally talked to people about side areas that people would want to have it for that for their parents or for people who didn't know how to use computer so well um who lived quite some way away because they wanted the way of being able to send the messages and so those kind of things are answering the question of what the little printer is kind of involves answering a question of why it is as well doesn't it and my understanding is that you also trying to kind of simplify a streamline all of the information that we do get from the 1 i've been using little printer at home for some time i have it sitting on my shelf and I find there's a few things that's really good at so one thing is things I can scribble on and take with me so it's really good for birthdays and it's really good for puzzles cuz I can keep them in my wallet carried them on the bus with me those kind of things one thing that had tried out earlier on it hopefully it works again is sending the right message so if we try doing that now it'll take a few seconds so what's going on here is this a there's a mobile website which you can use in your iPhone Android or Windows Phone and that's that's kind of running in the cloud some I don't know where you point to when you point to the cloud my kind of out I somewhere it's usually up here and it kind of gets rendered sent down by the bridge to the printer and here it actually gets to us sort of you said hello from the verge keeping it simple there you go when you're scheduled feeds come down they like that white light up you hit the black button your publications print out when you are collecting news feeds are you collecting RSS feeds or how do you get information from no we're encouraging people to format bear content specifically for little printer okay so when you when you look at the content what you're actually seeing is a very thin black and white web page we've made it as easy as possible to create content for it to be a publisher where you're basically making is just a specialized kind of website it's you know page 4 pixels across and you have to return some HTML when we when we asked for it yes I but basically how it works there's some kind of neat magic built in which means you can authorize your publication so for example with we've built just a test one using instagrams API and so when I subscribe to it i authorize against instagram and it prints out the most popular photo from my friends so for the moment what we're what we're going after is publishers people who want to make content with people subscribe to and the the publishers handbook we call it it's the star guide it's the API is all built around kind of that idea so we look to what was in common between the products we had and we saw that they were pretty much low complexity low bandwidth they would do pretty much only one thing and they were network connected so we developed this technology berg clouds bound by this thing that would make it very easy for us to make all of those products so the bridge can connect to you know fifty plus products and those products don't need to be connected to the power light little printer is but they can be battery-powered too so we kind of see a future of wearables of connected devices for the home of connected signage in the business of connected city blocks it doesn't really matter but we'd like to have a hand in all of those kind of things so we see little printer is just just the first thing that we're doing you
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