The paperless society just gained some more paper. Just when you’ve allowed yourself to be cajoled into putting down your bound copy of Dickens for the sterile convenience of the iPad, along comes a wee piece of technology designed to inject more paper into your Internet experience.
In August design studio BERG in London started taking pre-orders for its “Little Printer,” which looks like something Santa cobbled together in his toy shop, complete with a simple smiling face on its front.
The roughly 3.5-by-5-inch, $259 device does one thing: print out little notes from your online life. To-do lists, Tweets, phone numbers, Little Printer dutifully prints all those things that you’d like to commit to paper but don’t feel like wasting a whole sheet of paper doing so. And everything is printed out on the same thermal paper that you’re more accustomed to getting in the form of store receipts.
Little Printer patches into the Web via a wireless connection and, with the use of a smartphone app, can print pre-selected “subscriptions” – news headlines, to-do lists, etc. – at specific times of the day. The online end of things is handled by the BERG Cloud, which is expected to offer additional content with the help of partners Foursquare, Google, and The Guardian newspaper in the UK. First Little Printers ship in October.
