Little Printer may be no more after its creators Berg Cloud made the heavy-hearted decision to send itself
into “hibernation” and remove all support for the popular product early next year.
A blog post from Berg [the British Experimental Rocket Group] explained the decision was made due to the
un-sustainability of its business model and a skeleton staff is set to look after Little Printer until March 2015.
be found, all Little Printer features [publications, messaging, and face changes] will stop working. In the
meantime we’ll be opening up the code behind Little Printer, and seeing if the community would like to take it
on,” read a post on the Little Printer blog.
Little Printer owners are able to print out “mini newspapers” created from a range of different online feeds
such as social media posts, news and puzzles with the Berg Cloud providing the back end for the device.
Even if no one steps forward to buy the business it could still prosper thanks to the open-sourced Berg Cloud code that is still available to the community and the company CEO Matt Webb told GigaOm that he is still enthused by the sector.
“Whether we sell or open source Little Printer, there’s an interesting future there,” he said. “This doesn’t dampen my enthusiasm for hardware startups in general, and London’s potential in this sector in particular.”
Berg Cloud is one of a number of firms looking to capitalise on the need for a backend to support the thousands or even millions of Internet of Things devices that are flooding and will continue to flood the market.
IDC predicts that the IoT market will be worth some £4 trillion by 2020 and it shows just why providing the back end to all this is a risk to take.
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