Online arm of DIGITALX magazine, the source for news and trends in technology business, gadgets, the Web, government policies, mobile, and social media. Published in Lagos, Nigeria.
TwitterSearch
This Printer Automatically Prints the Stuff You Love on Facebook and Twitter in a Newspaper the Size of POS Receipts
It's little, very little - it will easily sit in the palm of your hand. It is called the Little Printer and what it does is to collect bits and pieces of information from your social connections and print them in a 10-inch newspaper. Yes. A newspaper in the size of a POS receipt.
The Big Idea is this: Every day you see stuff on Facebook, Twitter, Foursquare, Google, etc and you just forget about them. Or at best, take a quick glance and save on your phone to read later. But. What if you could subscribe to these websites via a smart phone app, the same way you do on Float and Flipboard, and let the machine curate content that will later be printed at your desk – or your nightstand -- twice daily? That way you can have your own extremely handy personalised bulletin, which you can then file away or stick on your fridge.
The Little Printer is one of the mind blowing futuristic gadgets coming from the London design consultancy, BERG. After one year of developing the concept and tweaking the product, they think this very adorable toy-like printer is ready to help you liberate the content you love from behind the screens of your mobile phones and PCs to the physical world.
Um, why paper, you ask. Exactly. I thought the modern world was shredding the idea of printing altogether. But CEO Matt Webb disagrees. Actually, he argues, paper is the interface of real life social networking, not the 700 billion social networking type but the small-size, small group of family and friends kind of social networking. He believes you can get personalised notes from people close to you, get reminded of their birthdays, get pictures and other things you share through regular updates collected and printed for you by this new little sidekick.
He told CoDesign, "Each information source we think of as a personalised 'publication' that you subscribe to from a kind of 'app store for paper,' collated into a delivery that arrives at a chosen time."
How it works: Powered by BERG Cloud, Little Printer uses a thermal printing process and is connected directly to the internet. It will be available for preorders in 2012 with content from Facebook, Foursquare, Nike, and The Guardian (UK).


