Little Printer prints you a beautiful mini-newspaper. | Hacker News Reader

Little Printer prints you a beautiful mini-newspaper.

bergcloud.com

181 pointssteren78 comments

It's a receipt printer in a box. Receipts (the thermal kind this uses) can't be written on with a normal pen without it getting all gunked up, so the 'puzzle' idea is more or less not going to work.

The quality of the printing will be receipt quality, and will degrade and become completely unreadable over time.

We went through this entire 'push media' bullshit in 1999, but I guess knowing that makes me an old timer these days. The punchline is, people will not want this.

Edit: Now, take away all the cloud magic and foursquare bullcrap, and I would actually like to have this just as a little printer. I'm often trying to print lists and so on, because I hate unlocking my phone over and over to check a shopping list at the store. So I would buy this if it were possible to print out lists of things, driving directions, and that sort of thing.

Like most people, I sign and write on receipts on a pretty regular basis. Am I missing something here about the writing aspect. Are you talking longer term than a few minutes?

Some kinds of thermal paper don't work with pens, some do (e.g. the kind used by credit card terminals, or fax machines). What made you think that they use the first kind of paper?

They all clog pens. It just takes a few uses. Anyone who has ever worked a cash register can tell you that between customers you often have to scribble on some regular paper to unclog the pen.

I'm having an extremely hard time wrapping my head around the usefulness of this product. The Little Printer is generating hardcopy of snippets of temporal events. These snippets are reduced to headlines without content to put them into context. It is using thermal paper, which HN has identified does not have longevity for scrapbooks or archival purposes. I can't find the value of this. Why consume resources when my phone can provide me all this? I was very surprised to see it as a trending topic on Twitter. Why does everyone want one so terribly so?

It's like having an infinite supply of smartphone displays that are set up to show one thing at a time. Limited use, and temporal, but far more long-lasting than the notifications you get that disappear a second later.

Cute, and nice music choice. But wasteful, and most of the things they print out on the video left me thinking "wait, why would I print that? I can read that off my smartphone in 2 seconds!" It would take longer to print than just read. The Sudoku puzzle makes more sense, and a todo list might, but still...

Depending on the content, I think a scrapbook of daily updates would be a fascinating collection for my kids to one day look through. Making interesting collections of news would outweigh the wastefulness of the experience (it's far more conservative than a daily paper).

Well, a daily paper gives me a lot more information... I could sit and read it for an hour...

It's thermal paper, which tends not to last very well. This is especially a problem for medical information. (http://www.mdsr.ecri.org/summary/detail.aspx?doc_id=8155)

Unfortunately the printouts wouldn't last for more than a few years (Little Printer uses thermal printing).

Most reputable stores recommend photocopying your thermal paper receipts if you'll ever need them for warranties because they fade so fast.

With a good API I could think of lots of things that I'd personally use this for. I, for one, like having a daily list of tasks I need to accomplish on paper that I can have with me (I know I have my cell phone, but something about that physical copy just makes me more proactive in checking it and getting those items done).

Also, I coach my son's basketball team and before every practice I'm making out a practice plan (currently just in a notebook), but that would be nice to store them online, easily modify, then print before practice.

Don't think only about the function, also think about the artistic possibilities.

I have absolutely no need for this and yet I want it anyhow. It's nice because it makes something ordinary precious through anachronism and size. If it had an API I could see using this as a fun tool for people visiting an office. Another note: I love thermal paper.

Cute, but all in all it's a machine that generates trash.

At least its not A4 sized trash!

We can talk about that how wastefull or how anachronistic it is. I totally agree, but what I find more interesting is, why so many people (including me) like this useless thing? Did we somehow, reached a point where we get too much of our experiences through a computer or a mobile display? More and more information through a narrowing medium. Or just because to have more kind of medias? Does somebody have a better hipotesis?

Yeah. My first thought was exactly the same. Why do I find this interesting (I always have my phone with me)? My hypothesis is that with everything getting displayed through LCD screens these days, after a while people will crave for the old sensory experience - working with physical paper.

Not sure about the current generation which is growing up with iPads and may have never used a physical newspaper. I will be curious to see their reaction.

Funny how you writing "physical paper" proves your own point.

When someone figures this out, they should sell the reasoning to HP. I haven't wanted to buy a printer in a long time even though $99 will get me a wifi capable touch screen fax/scanner/printer/copier these days.

Problem is HP makes money by selling ink. They, like most other printer companies, would rather sell the printer hardware at a loss and make tons of money off selling tiny amounts of ink for $20-40 a pop.

This thing is a thermal printer so the only thing they could sell you is paper and you can't really charge a large premium on paper.

They've got the design down absolutely pat - the look of the item, the look of the print-outs, the site, the video - it's great.

They've also got some valid uses for it in there - yeah, we've all got screens, but those screens are used for an awful lot of other stuff - this gives one quick place to find a couple useful pieces of information, a whole lot faster than otherwise.

It is, however, absurdly wasteful. Anything I can read off that, I can save on my phone for a pretty comparable reading experience.

I think it's the software, more than the hardware, that's attractive - Give me that information in an app on the same schedule that little box would print it, and I'd use it. It looks like a pretty good filter and delivery mechanism, but I've got no use for a bunch of scraps of thermal paper…

Minimal and fantastic.

I could absolutely imagine getting one of these for my grandparents, for example.

Or a parent with young children.

Or a local shop owner that doesn't use a smartphone.

But you set it up with your smartphone. Will you be the one with the smartphone that sets up each of those people's printer?

Have a look at: http://www.presto.com/

A Google Calendar/Tasks-polling, Arduino-driven thermal printer with one press printouts has been somewhere on my "eventual weekend projects" list for a while.

I really like this idea. I think the services it supports will make or break it.

As someone who has a smartphone permanently embedded in his pocket, an iPad never more than an arm's length away, and is strongly considering buying a second tablet, I definitely still see a great deal of utility in small, printed infoclusters.

(And for everyone saying "this just generates trash," every moment you've ever spent reading vapid nonsense on backlit screens has been a utter waste of precious energy. What's your point?)

The point is that it takes a hell of a lot less energy to display something on a screen for a couple of minutes versus printing it out; and it leaves a lot less paper trash lying around, specifically none.

You don't have to agree, but it's obviously something to consider. I still get a daily newspaper, and I'm always on the verge of cancelling it both because it's such a waste of resources and it's a chore to have to throw out a pile of paper every few weeks.

I suspect you're right that the amount of energy used to download the information and run the mechanism to print it is greater than the energy required to download and display it temporarily. Also, thermal paper is apparently non-recyclable, so that sucks.

I suppose what I was getting at is that we're all great wasters of energy and resources, and a product like this represents a fraction of a drop in the bucket, so all the commentary on how wasteful it is may miss the forest for the trees.

The primary reason I like the idea is that I waste less psychic energy with a piece of paper sitting on my desk which I glance at occasionally, versus my iPad or Android phone sitting in the same spot, capable of displaying the same information plus an entire universe of distraction.

This.

I think their landing page should de-emphasize use cases like printing Foursquare checkins from your friends (who really needs to know where their friends were?) and emphasize this. I would love to leave for work each morning grabbing my automatically pre-printed schedule and top ToDos off this printer. Something that only needs to last a day, but has info I don't always want to open my phone to check.

CUTE. But man, this feels like a product that would've made more sense a decade ago.

Probably because you could replicate the experience with a fax machine.

Yeah; next we'll see it print Opera tickets and phone books.

Yes and no. Watching the video, the biggest part of the pitch is the emotional appeal: small snippets of your digital life that you can take with you anywhere (or pack with your loved one's lunch) and enjoy away from the screens that we stare at all day. It stands out because it's an anachronism, and that would be much less powerful a decade ago.

The concept and implementation is nice. But for the sake of the planet I would not get one, nor would I recommend it either.

Or potentially for the sake of your health, especially if you spend half an hour on the train every morning handling the printouts:

- http://www.physorg.com/news/2010-11-bpa-thermal-paper-receip...

- http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Thermal_paper#Health_and_enviro...

the Wikipedia link you gave says: exposure of a person repeatedly touching thermal printer paper for 10 h/day, such as at a cash register, could reach 71 microg/day, which is 42 times less than the present tolerable daily intake (TDI).

Present being the operative word. Plus cashiers don't rub the receipts against their hand for long periods of time building up sweat, as you might if you were filling out a puzzle.

Anyway I did say potential, but as the researcher suggests pregnant women working as cashiers should be careful and err on the side of caution.

Cashiers have to deal with thermal printer paper that is being printed all the time. You will be dealing with just one or two printouts per day.

You are being overly dramatic.

Hopefully they use a standard size of paper so you can just buy BPA-free paper.

It could be potentially life threatening!!!!!!

Make sure you don't eat bananas either!

My wife is a die-hard paper/pen person. I could see printing stuff out for her, articles, grocery lists, funny quotes, etc, and putting it in her lunch for the day. It'd be a nice little pick-me-up.

I can imagine the picture with the boy face getting old very fast if it's printed on each and every note.

Make it hackable and it'll have longer legs.

A daily to-do or grocery list is a good use-case, but for social updates it's quite wasteful.

Oh come on!

You could make it print out @replies on twitter or something. How freaking cool would that be?

you mean like this? http://dangerousprototypes.com/2011/06/22/prototype-thermal-...

Anyone notice this bit?: "In your front room, Little Printer wirelessly connects (with no configuration) to a small box that plugs into your broadband router."

So it's not actually using your wifi setup, but some other parallel network. Seems like an odd choice... yes initial configuration would be hard with a box with no inputs, but since it seems to require an iPhone anyways, you could do it through Bluetooth.

Nope. That quote's not on the page that I received (updated content? A/B testing? geographical segmentation? who knows)

I did notice this bit, though:

"Little Printer sits in your home, but it’s BERG Cloud that does the heavy lifting. Because publications are created in our cloud on the Web, not in your front room, we can offer more services for your Little Printer without the need for updates or a replacement product.

"BERG Cloud Bridge sits by your broadband router and wirelessly connects Little Printer to the Internet, which makes it easy for you to place Little Printer where you can see it."

And then I noticed the domain that this page is hosted at; the people who built the little bridge box are the same people who make the printer. So, it makes perfect sense to me that they would build devices that work together, on their own little network, if each promotes sales of the other. Not an odd choice at all.

Ah yes, it's on the blog post: http://bergcloud.com/blog/

I still think it's odd to use your own wifi protocol just to support future products.

Seems like the modularity would help on the marketing side: people will be much more receptive to BERG Cloud product #2 if it connects to a device already in their living room. I think this is probably true whether or not there's a technological reason why it needs to.

Wow. These guys wasted a crapload of time on this.

Why would I want to print ANY of the things they've shown, when I could just open the app on my phone instead -- at least that way I can actually interact with the data?

Why are you killing trees for no reason?

Neat. This design team has been thinking about this for five years.[1]

Personally, I think if the printing doesn't smudge, prints at the speed it shows in the video and isn't cancerous[2] I'd love to have one.

Aside from functional difference and advantages, physical things still hold a special power in the world, at least to me.

[1] http://berglondon.com/blog/2006/10/06/my-printer-my-social-l... [2] http://www.cbsnews.com/8301-504763_162-20011903-10391704.htm...

What's the pricing going to be for this? At $30 it's a slam dunk, at $50 I would consider it. Anything more and it's a non-starter. They could try to increase profit on the razor blade model, selling ink and service upgrades.

They could likely make decent additional revenue through paid placement for front-page subscriptions via their app which is then monetized by advertiser via micro ads ("Today's crossword courtesy of Toyota"). However, as the printer is thermal they can't sell ink but it does have one significant consumable: the paper. If the paper is a custom size or with an incompatible spool mount they'll hopefully get some refills before the novelty wears off and/or it breaks down.

You realize this thing doesn't use ink?

Thermal printers use heat to print and don't require any ink.

Thank you for not calling it "Printr"

Dupe. http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3290017

Posted an hour earlier than this one.

It reminds me of the Tandy TP-10 thermal printer I had in the early eighties for my CoCo I.

http://imageshack.us/photo/my-images/360/mc10tp10wz7.jpg/

I honestly wouldn't mind a little wireless printer that I could dump lists to these days. Bonus if it printed on Post It Notes.

3M has printable post-its, but they are frightfully expensive and a bit clunky. http://goo.gl/yVlB0 At least one industrial designer has taken on the challenge of a printer for normal post-its. http://goo.gl/Hicpr

Looks like a nice device if it has some kind of API. However I'm wondering if they can make this at any decent cost.

The cheapest thermal printers, even off eBay cost around $65. Most thermal printers start at $150 and go to around $300.

At ~$50-60 with an API, this would be an instant buy for me. However, I doubt they can hit that price point.

Oh god! It's a stock ticker machine for the modern age!

I'm not sure if that's a good thing or not. :/

Although new mobile commerce solutions avoid paper receipts for emailed digital statements, I oould see this being used by many vendors in combination with payment technologies like Square to provide clients with paper statements.

shouldn't it print out the top? i read from the top down, anyone else?

I can't remember where I read it, but successful web properties often share the same theme of bringing the offline world online, or vice versa. This seems to do that quite nicely :)

i like the machine. have you thought about pitching it to businesses for receipts, movie stubs, raffles, parking tickets, checks, contact info...etc

Dupe. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Game_Boy_Printer

Reinventing the fax machine in 2011?

Perhaps this is too obvious, but this would be killer if it could get integration with Square.

My father would finally read his email if it just came out of this magically.

This is the closest thing to a fax machine made by Steve Jobs.

I hope it will be able to print flipbooks from Youtube/Vimeo!

TIL the english call their living rooms "front rooms".

Or Sitting Room

I never thought about it before, but I grew up in Missouri and we all called it the "front room", too. I still do.

We do?!

If you actually wanted this, you could just spend five dollars on a gameboy printer off ebay and make the exact same printouts.

Seems more like a novelty item.

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