Bad news if you own Berg’s super-cute, internet-savvy Little Printer: it might not be not long for this world. The company is going into “hibernation” after it couldn’t sustain a business based on connected devices, and its current plan has Little Printer services shutting down on March 31st, 2015. There is a glimmer of hope if you can’t bear to be without paper copies of your internet news feeds. Berg plans to at least open source its code so that fans can keep the services alive if they like, and it’s willing to sell the hardware business to any firm that will pledge ongoing support.
Berg Cloud, the pioneering internet of things firm, is closing down. In a Tuesday blog post, the design and cloud outfit said it had “not reached a sustainable business in connected products” and was going into “hibernation.” Berg (“the British Experimental Rocket Group”) was the company behind the Little Printer, a super-cute little device that could print out “mini-newspapers” derived from various online feeds, including social networking messages, news and puzzles. It was a dinky toy in itself, but the really interesting bit was the Berg Cloud backend that it ran on. Around 17 months ago, Berg pivoted from design consultancy to product firm, looking to develop more devices to run off that backend. It even teamed up with Italian fashion house Benetton on connected products R&D. Recent blog posts showed Berg working on very cool stuff, like a mechanical pixel display, and more serious endeavors like a business version of the Little Printer for receipts.
