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Little Printer... huge potential?
This week we welcome the latest addition to the Deeson family: Little Printer
Remember paper? Remember how you used to 'print' stuff? Remember how it felt? Exciting, permenant... real. Well, we think this is going to return you to that warm, fuzzy place.
In a nutshell, Little Printer takes online content, repackages it and prints it out on a piece of paper the size of a receipt.
Thanks to its API, the small box (it's about the size of an over-sized Rubik's Cube) prints out whatever feeds you've told it to pick up. So it could be your diary for the day, or news headlines, or an image. It does this by connecting a Cloud Bridge to the router, and so long as Little Printer is plugged into a power source, the device pairs automatically. It can be run from a website or smartphone app, plus a single button on the top of the printer. There's of course a bit more to it, but the set up is relatively simple.
There are various ways in which it can be experimented with, including writing programs for it, but as a starter users can get snippets of headlines from news sites, Foursquare updates and Suduko feeds...
But what's point?
That's a very good question. Why should we get excited about a neat little plastic box that spews out reams and reams of paper with seemingly random tweets, puzzles, news and messages? The honest truth is, we're not actually sure just yet. But that's the beauty of it. People are going to try to work out what its potential is, including us.
Indeed, Berg, the London-based company behind Little Printer, have run a couple of hack days, reinforcing the 'community' approach the company are taking to building the Little Printer ecosystem.
How are we experimenting with it?
We want to explore various ways to use Little Printer. They mainly focus on external user and client engagment – so for example, producing daily round up of Deeson news from Twitter - but all of that falls out of the following three basic steps:
Step 1: Hashtag #littleprince
Step 2: Build tweetbot
Step 3: Generate feed to printer. The feed is generated with Drupal's Views module, which gives flexibility and although we've used Drupal, it could be a feed of blog posts from elsewhere.
Next steps for our #littleprints
Currently, we can only 'pull' tweets and publish at a set time so a 'push' service needs to be built. This means Little Printer will print in realtime as soon as the tweet has been published. We've not found this function on the Berg server (yet) so we're working on creating one of our own, and will share our progress accordingly.
The future
With the printer industry seemingly on the floor, this little fella may help reinvigorate our appetite for the printed word or picture. The novelty factor is certainly strong – and it looks the MVP part, but perhaps there is more to this than just a fashionable toy. This is all about ideas. What can be created from it? How can its API be utilised? A local coffee store could print out a personalised message for a customer who's just checked in, or perhaps a hotel could have one in each room, delivering an itinary and discounts or tokens for tourists as part of their stay.
But at its core is the concept of taking the hyper-personalised engagement that we've all got so used to online, and converting it into something that we can hold, touch and use. After that, it's up to us. We can throw it in the bin. Or frame it forever.
Follow the adventures of our own Little Printer: #littleprints
Comments
Coolest printer ever, and paper friendly too.
thats , good new topic thanks
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