Is this the offline device that will allow those who scorn technology (for to do lists, calendars, etc.) in favor of print to move online, or is this just for techies?
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.
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.
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.
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.
Since it's a thermal printer they aren't going to make very much selling ink.
Although - since HP make more and more profit by selling smaller and smaller ink cartridges - I suppose they could make an infinite profit on a zero volume cartridge.
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.
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
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).
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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 :)
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[ 2.3 ms ] story [ 110 ms ] threadI 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.
- http://www.physorg.com/news/2010-11-bpa-thermal-paper-receip...
- http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Thermal_paper#Health_and_enviro...
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.
You are being overly dramatic.
Posted an hour earlier than this one.
Although - since HP make more and more profit by selling smaller and smaller ink cartridges - I suppose they could make an infinite profit on a zero volume cartridge.
Thermal printers use heat to print and don't require any ink.
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.
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.
A daily to-do or grocery list is a good use-case, but for social updates it's quite wasteful.
You could make it print out @replies on twitter or something. How freaking cool would that be?
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?)
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 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.
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.
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.
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.
I still think it's odd to use your own wifi protocol just to support future products.