I wondered when this might happen. You can't really rely on any of these devices with a 'cloud' based backend to work a couple of years after you've bought them (As anyone with a Nabaztag gathering dust in a corner will tell you).

I made my own version of the little printer based on the open source plans here: https://github.com/exciting-io/printer/wiki/Making-your-own-...

It's really easy to get up and running and interfacing with it is simple. I have mine print out reminders for when to plant seeds for the garden and it also notifies me when automated downloads via FlexGet have finished.

One of those things I always convinced myself I really wanted, but the fear of the cloud service going down put me off dropping the cash. £200 for a device that's useless if the business went under was not my cup of tea.

Berg has for a while explored speculative product experiences in the vein of Dunne & Raby (1) - though being design consultants, Berg's work tends to be optimistic. D&R embrace the dystopian aspects of future products, and I think they'd enjoy this conversation that's cropped up around what happens when connected objects lose their parents. (Especially when the objects are personified!) Hopefully Berg appreciates their inadvertent final contribution as well.

Does the Internet of Things need a federated model to be as trustworthy and successful as Internet classic?

1. http://www.dunneandraby.co.uk/content/home

First I've heard that Haitian proverb ("Behind the mountains, there are more mountains."). Very appropriate for this community.

Did anybody reverse engineer the Berg/Little printer protocols? OK, I have found this from 2013, not very detailed though: https://github.com/pipt/little-printer-payload-inspector

It think the printer's form factor is very nice, much much nicer than the other hacked-up solutions I have seen around.

I would pay those £149 for a thermal printer that was so cute and also completely open.

I hadn't heard of this before but it doesn't seem dissimilar to the adafruit internet of things printer. No "cloud" to speak of - you consume web services via scripts run on the raspberry pi.

http://www.adafruit.com/blog/2012/02/21/new-product-adafruit...

I did a small exploratory project using it, and my takeaway was that it was a solution in search of a problem, at least the Cloud aspect, which did absolutely nothing useful, other than sparing you from setting up your own endpoints, but in exchange your had to deal with a really limited (and limiting) API and a more complex infrastructure.

I'm not surprised. I was really excited when I heard about this device and although it seemed like a bit of a novelty, I really wanted to try it out. Then I saw the price - $260. I understand you are paying for added value and well thought out design, but $260 was an insane price for a niche product like this

Square or similar should pick this stuff up. The personality the Little Printer exhibited was a refreshing (and for me, important) distinction. Not saying that they should put it out there 1:1, but there's a lot to learn in how this thing was made, branded and communicated.

For me, this wouldn't then just be a receipt printer -- you could just as well have it push the "opposite" direction. It's essentially a straight tunnel to a specific business or person from its maker. "Here's your daily summary", "Sara from London just asked about shipment costs". Push notifications to phones does that too, but sans this - for the lack of a better word - bond. For the right business, it feels like a very interesting point of difference.

That happened quickly! They just raised $1.3m eleven months ago:

http://blog.bergcloud.com/2013/10/28/berg-raises-1-3m-round-...

I'm not sure why we're surprised to see functionality disappear from online-tethered services when it's been happening in other arenas for years now - most visibly, online gaming. The oldest example I can come up with offhand (because it's the Dreamcast's birthday) is Phantasy Star Online. That game was fun, but really only as fun as it could be played online, and the servers have been off for a long time now. EA has started turning off servers for old games in the same way. This shutdown is a shame, but hardly unexpected, especially given how niche Little Printer was.

I've not heard of Berg before, just having a quick look on their front page, shows its hardware to connect an embedded system to wifi to their cloud.

Isn't this a big worry if you're using anyone else's cloud service for your own embedded hardware.

Interestingly other platforms exist that perform similar functionality using the same WIFI chip Ti CC3000 (such as Spark Core). There seems to be a number of new chips from china which look to potentially give Ti, a run for its money, such as the ESP8266.

Crap -- I have a Little Printer still in the box that I've been meaning to play with. Really hope they open source the protocol so I don't end up with a Little Paperweight.

I think the biggest problem is that they assumed that people would like to have this disposable bite-sized information internet spews at us printed on physical medium instead of being displayed in some corner of a screen somewhere where it belongs. The kind of stuff that will be irrelevant after you've read it once. Not economic. Cute thing though. I give you that.

Looks like they plan to open source the Little Printer backend (if it's not sold).

http://littleprinterblog.tumblr.com/post/97047976103/the-fut...

Sad to see that they're closing down, but understandably a nieche area of business. The Little Printer was such a cute piece of tech, and I'm sure that they could've done a lot if not this fate was upon them.

I would be in favor of opening the code., especially if it was opened as FOSS

Hooray for cloud-tethered devices!

Note that "their cloud" (what they called Berg Cloud) was actually primarily a local wireless access solution, not a cloud in the cloud computing sense. It was supposed to make configuration and connection of the Little Printer and other future Berg devices easier. As other commenters have pointed out, you can have an LP-type device that connects directly to a normal wifi network (e.g. Adafruit's) and the content doesn't in principle need to come from a remote web service either: it could be provided by a script running on a local machine.

The quality of presentation and the user experience provided by Berg (not just this product but other things the same guys have worked on) is great, but they show their roots in the design school. The products feel to me more like the product of brainstorming at an ad agency than a mature response to necessity. London's design scene is full of this kind of "creative" activity, and it's super enjoyable to watch but probably a form of decline or decadence in terms of real manufacturing and craft. The pace of change is so great now in tech that designers tend to get left behind or reinvent the wheel.

Imagine Twitter redesigned by someone both technically knowledgeable _and_ UX aware. (No race conditions, URL shortening, or crippled API functions.) the reason we don't have this is a cultural gap between the hip designers and the technically informed.

For those curious about the ESP8266, it's a 5$ Chinese wifi module which initially had limited/no English documentation. But now people are working on translating and testing the module[1]. Alternatives based on the TI chip from Adafruit and Sparkfun, for example, are about 35$ (with the chip by itself costing around 15$).

[1] http://hackaday.com/2014/09/06/the-current-state-of-esp8266-...

[2] http://www.adafruit.com/products/1469

[3] https://www.sparkfun.com/products/12072

Is it? My impression was that the ESP8266 can do maybe 56k level throughput, suitable for sensors but not for streaming meaningful amounts of data. It is really really cheap though, which is great in itself and enables new applications.

Also the CC3000 is quite buggy, try using the newer CC3100/3200 if possible, pre-production silicon is already available.