The mega-trend is this: The network is the new electricity. Connecting products is the new electrification.

There are leaders in this field. My personal favourites are the Amazon Kindle, for using connected hardware to put the shop inside the book. And, less well known but just as amazing, Vitality GlowCap for using the network to add behavioural economics to pill-bottle lids, to make sure you finish your prescription!

And of course, the connected products on Kickstarter are a massive future-discovery effort too. Inspiring stuff.

The difficulty is that, for a particular business, no-one really knows what opportunities you get from network-enabling hardware products.

And because there are so few great models to mimic, unless you try out your connected products while you make them, they’re not so great.

We’re all learning.

So we’ve created Sandbox: a massively multiplayer prototyping and research program to figure out the future of connected products, built especially for institutions and corporations, and based on BERG Cloud… the very same technology we used to create Little Printer. We’re just getting going, and we’re announcing our first Sandbox organisation today!

Let me tell you our story…

* Exploring the future with prototypes

At BERG, we made the first magazine on the iPad with Bonnier, and we’ve prototyped videophones with Google. And I take one big lesson from our years of work helping clients figure out what big tech and social trends mean for their business: You gotta get your hands dirty.

When you prototype early, you test your strategy at the very point it needs testing most.

So we work through workshops. Prototyping, iterating, communicating… going from concept to version one.

But in recent years, companies have been asking us what connected products mean for them. Are there new features? New product categories? New business models? And what we’ve found is that it’s hard to prototype. It’s too costly – in effort, time, and money – to experiment, learn, and invent. There’s no scaffolding, no “get going quickly,” nothing like Ruby on Rails that let us validate and build quickly for the web, or iOS that let us do the same for smartphones.

In response, we made BERG Cloud.

* We built a platform for invention

Little Printer

First we made Little Printer, our own connected product.

(You can buy it now! Go ahead, I can wait.)

BERG Cloud

Next we extracted all the useful parts from Little Printer and created an operating system we call BERG Cloud — first you use it to prototype connected products, and then you take them to production, maintaining agility all the way. It’s soup to nuts, and we include everything

• from the APIs to control and configure your connected product from the web (we love the web)
• to a friendly mobile website for users to claim, share, and interact with products, making use of all of our design learnings…
• to the actual hardware and wireless.

You can get going quickly using our new BERG Cloud Dev Kits, with dev boards that plug into common hardware prototyping platforms (Arduino, Raspberry Pi, and ARM mbed). The first 3rd party on BERG Cloud is Twitter — we worked with them to make #Flock, a limited edition connected cuckoo clock that sings when you get a retweet or a fave!

BERG Cloud is especially good for autonomous, low power devices — products that are smarter than sensors, that shouldn’t require a smartphone to run.

Sandbox

And today, we’re launching Sandbox — for institutions and companies to figure out what connected products mean for them.

• We first set up campus-wide connectivity using the BERG Cloud Dev Kits, and provide dev boards so that connected hardware can be prototyped and used exactly where connected hardware belongs: In retail spaces and corridors, stuck to the wall or water coolers, on office desks and in pockets (the dev boards can be battery powered)
• Since a BERG Cloud product will run wherever there is BERG Cloud connectivity, with zero reconfiguration (we have a principle: the product is yours, the network belongs to everyone), we’ll provide the opportunities to link together Sandbox organisations so they can meet and share their learnings and code
• We co-run product invention workshops, with the designers, Arduino programmers and web developers already in the organisation, giving them the ideas and skills they need to prototype and run workshops on their own and with their colleagues

We know that future products and future business models can only be figured out with prototyping, which needs both a platform for invention, and a culture of experimentation through workshops and easy tools. With Sandbox, that’s what we’re offering — the best from our the consultancy and product sides of our business.

* Introducing our launch partner: Fabrica

In the spirit of learning through doing, we sought out a first Sandbox organisation to work with closely — where we can create the required tools in response to what we see is needed, and practice and improve our workshop patterns.

With Fabrica, we have the ideal partner.

Fabrica is the communication research centre of the Benetton Group. From their headquarters – a seventeenth century villa in Italy – they research communications, new products, and retail experience for a range of clients. They’re experimental, forward-looking, multi-disciplinary…

…and they’re going to be covering their campus in BERG Cloud connectivity, using the dev boards to prototype and learn about connected products for themselves, and with their own clients. We’ll be co-running workshops, and figuring out the future together.

As we do so, BERG will be learning from Fabrica’s feedback — developing and improving Sandbox so that we can work with even more organisations on their own products and ideas – on the cutting edge of the Internet of Things – creating a global collaborative prototyping and research program.

It’s exciting.

Talk about really getting your hands dirty.

* Join the Sandbox program

If you’d like to become a Sandbox organisation — get in touch. We’re learning too, so we’d love to chat, and we can bring all our product invention expertise to bear on your particular challenges.

And to follow the Sandbox and Fabrica story, watch this space. We’ll cover the installation, the first workshops, and what we learn.

Let’s electrify the world.

Read the press release here. (Includes press photos!)

Read Fabrica’s announcement here.

Read about developing on the BERG Cloud platform.

— Matt

We run our Little Printer hack days and after school clubs because we really enjoy seeing what can be made. They help us with the development of our own API, and it’s exciting for us to see people getting involved and getting their hands dirty with code and design. Soon you’ll be able to make your own connected products using the BERG Cloud Dev Kits. More details about the kits as soon as we can, but in the mean-time, this is a nice write-up.

Little Printer publications are a good way to kick-start ideas around objects with the internet inside — things that don’t have glowing screens, for example. With your feedback we’ve worked hard on our developer tools and its great to see companies buying Little Printer to see what it, and they, can do together.

Design consultancy Dalziel & Pow are a nice example. They’re interested in digital and the different things it can do for their agency and their clients, so they decided to get involved, rolled up their sleeves, and got stuck in.

Dalziel & Pow have turned their reception area over to Little Printer, encouraging staff to send messages and subscribe to publications. And they’ve made a countdown publication: pick a forthcoming event from your calendar, and each day a print arrives revealing how long is left until the big day. So far, so straightforward.

They’ve done something else, too, and it’s really smart. A couple of iPads sit in reception, each featuring a BERG Cloud-style button. Visitors click the button, and a web-cam situated in the office above takes a picture. This is turned into a publication, which prints back downstairs alongside a message reading “Welcome to Dalziel & Pow. XX [number of people] people are working in the office right now”. It also lists the weather details at their other office locations, and reveals how much time is left until lunch! Very cool.

These are the first steps we’ve seen anyone take towards the production of smart, on-demand, personalised internal publications for agencies and other businesses. And it’s a really nice use of our Push API, which we’ve now seen used at the Protein Coffee Shop, and by the New York Times. Three completely different uses. It’s very exciting!

Get in touch if you’re planning or doing something like this yourselves. We like hearing your stories and can help if you need it.

We have some big news. You can now subscribe to breaking news alerts from the New York Times on Little Printer!

This is the first publication that uses our Push API, so it works a little differently to our other publications. Instead of picking when you receive the news, Little Printer brings you the news as soon as it happens.

You might’ve spotted our own collaborative experiment a few weeks ago, with the Protein coffee shop, local to our studio in East London. Again using the Push API, it automatically prints a welcome message whenever customers check into the coffee shop with Foursquare. This helped us give the API a little more fine tuning, but it’s brilliant to see it being used to such effect with the New York Times. Think of the possibilities: sports results, delivered as soon as games have finished. Election results available as they’re announced. Little Printer, Big News!

We’ll be opening up access to the Push API in the near future, and all the details will be added to our developer tools. As always, watch this space!

Own a Little Printer? You can subscribe to breaking news alerts right now.

That’s not all that’s new. There’s something that started with a Facebook post.

TeuxDeux is an extremely neat to-do list app from design studio swissmiss and Fictive Kin. It’s both simple and smart, it already looks like a Little Printer publication, and it seemed like a natural fit. We got in touch, they liked the idea, and it launched this week (big thanks to Jonnie Hallman for putting it all together). We’re delighted!

Another new publication is Your Best Tweets, which provides an extremely handy guide to your popularity on Twitter. Retweets? Check. Favorites? Check. Sensitive filtering to ensure you’re not reminded of unsuccessful interactions with the Twittersphere? Yes, that’s built in too.

You’ve added a bunch of other publications since our last round-up. Publications devoted to poetry. To the skies above the UK. To tongue-twisters and to travel. We’ve started a voyage of discovery with Captain Cook. We’ve got pictures, numbers and letters. And if this all sounds a bit cryptic, sign up to BERG Cloud Announcements , which provides fortnightly updates on all things BERG.

If you live in Australia or New Zealand, we have some good news: We now ship to your country! It’s been a while but you can buy Little Printer now. Sorry for the wait.

Already have a Little Printer? More good news, we have replacement paper in stock too.

We started taking orders for Little Printer over six months ago. We shipped in December, and opened up a second round of orders in January. Throughout, we’ve had an enormous amount of useful feedback, but the most common question is the one which asks, “when are you shipping to my country?”

So far, sales have been restricted to countries within the European Union, USA and Canada. But we’ve been working hard at expanding the list, and from today we’re also taking orders from New Zealand and Australia.

The next production run is due to ship in July, and we hope to have many more delivery destinations in place by then. But you can place your order right now if you’re in Darwin or Dunedin or in places in-between (remember, Little Printers are manufactured in limited runs and sold on a first-come, first served basis), and they’ll be shipped at the same time in July as all the other orders.

Watch this space for further updates, as we’ll be adding more destinations as we go along. In the meantime, if you live in Australia or New Zealand, you can order a Little Printer now!

We’ve added something else to the shop: replacement paper rolls.

If you’ve been following our progress, you’ll remember some of the issues we had with paper slipping. The stock we’re now selling is the stock we settled on after a lot of testing to get to the root of the issue. It’s also BPA-free, which is something many Little Printer owners have requested. Of course, there are plenty of alternatives out there (some of which are also BPA-free), but most won’t have gone through the extensive testing process that our paper has.

The paper comes in batches of five rolls, and will be despatched in a manner designed to protect it from the elements — wrapped in plastic in a specially-designed, sturdy cardboard box. It’s just £5 for five rolls.

—FL

The third Little Printer hack day took place last weekend, in Pittsburgh. Organised by Plot, it was held at the Computational Design Lab at Carnegie Mellon University.

Here’s the package we sent them.

And here’s some of the attendees watching the introductory video Alice and Alex made.

A great mix of people came: writers, graphic designers, and developers. Some were students, some were professors, and together they came up with some awesome ideas. These included a pizza generator, a daily paper doll (to be used in case you’re ever called as an expert witness), a simple monthly calendar, pocket maps for local gallerires and museums, a ransom note generator, a publication that’s part of a much larger project about gun control, and a publication that provides a (fake) time-stamped ATM receipt to prove you were elsewhere when that terrible felony you’ve been accused of was committed. No, really.

Here’s something we love: a panorama of Pittsburgh made using the rapid prototyper in our developer tools.

And a whole pin-board full of prints!

For more examples of the work produced on the day — and perhaps to find out why so much of this activity appears to be crime-related! — there’s an excellent, in-depth write-up on the Plot blog.

And if you’d like to host a Little Printer hack day of your own, we’d love to hear about it. Get in touch at publishers@bergcloud.com. We’ve got some resources you can use, and we’ll be happy to help in any way we can!

—FL

Last September we launched our developer tools. We were thrilled when people we’d never even met used them to make publications for Little Printer.

In the months since, we’ve added publications with pictures of monsters, publications that display events from your calendar, and publications that encourage new writers or feature established authors. There’s publications for children and publications for radio hams. Some are pretty, others useful — some are downright weird. Two are in Dutch. Some arrived out of the blue, while others came out of our hack days and took months to see the light of day.

Along the way we’ve monitored things quite closely. We’ve talked to publishers and fed back with our thoughts about content, design and scheduling. Publications were put live only when everyone was satisfied. We’ve learnt a lot about people’s needs and expectations, and we’ve tweaked our tools to accommodate them. The process was sometimes rather more analog than you’d expect from a connected product. We’d print off publications in the office and put them in the post to developers. Or we’d take photos of the print-outs and e-mail them. It worked, but it wasn’t ideal.

There are a lot more Little Printers in the world today, and more and more people are able to test the publications they develop on a physical printer of their own. So we’re freeing things up a little. Publishers can now submit publications, put them into ‘developer test’ mode (which means they can subscribe privately, and check everything works) and then send those publications live, all without our involvement. It’s what we’ve been aiming for since launch, and it’s great to get there!

We’ll still keep monitoring new submissions and providing feedback where we think it’s necessary, but we’ll be keeping a fairly light hand on the tiller. The object, after all, is to make things as easy as possible for people to put their work in front of Little Printer owners.

All that we ask is that publishers think hard about what they’re submitting. The most successful publications benefit from beautiful design, or from useful content. Some feature both. All provide something Little Printer owners find handy, or entertaining, or educational. The top ten include subjects as varied as world news, local weather, your friend’s birthdays, and much more…

So what’s next?

We’ve got some really exciting publications in the pipeline. Some are using our new Push API (watch this space for more details!), which allows the delivery of content to Little Printer owners as soon as it becomes available. We’re continually reaching out to people who might be interested in making their own publications, and we’ve made it easier to get those publications online. We’ve built the tools to make it happen.

What are you waiting for?

Mostly Little Printer lives in people’s homes… here’s one in a public place.

Using the new Push API, we’re running a little experiment: If you go to the Protein coffee shop in east London, and check in using Foursquare… their Little Printer on the counter will print a personal greeting. It’s fun!

Where will it lead? Smart recommendations? The receipt as a publishing platform? Vouchering? This is just a start, so we’d love to hear your ideas.

Read Newsletter #5 for more on this and other news. (Sign up here.)

And to try the experiment for yourself, visit our friends at the Protein coffee shop, 18 Hewett St, London — and don’t forget to send us a photo! Use the tag #littleprinter.

—MW

As Russia experiences its worst winter in a century and the “Beast from the East” (pictured, below) continues to bring cold weather to the UK, it’s perhaps timely to note that the snowpocalypse may finally be over: today is officially the first day of spring.

To mark the occasion we’ve just launched a Little Printer publication from the good folk at the Royal Museums in Greenwich. What’s Happening Above Britain? will deliver news about one celestial event per month, personally selected by astronomers from the Royal Observatory. It starts, serendipitously enough, with the spring equinox.

Elsewhere in London, Little Printer is on public display at the Design Museum from today until 7 July. It’s there as part of the Designs of the Year exhibition, alongside lots of other clever and beautiful things. The winner will be announced on 17 April.

For the duration of the exhibition Little Printer will be printing deliveries every hour, on the hour, so be sure to schedule your visit with this in mind (think of it as like feeding time at the zoo, but way cuter). If you can’t make it, you can read more about the awards at The Guardian and Design Week.

—FL

New publications continue to arrive in all sorts and shapes and sizes. Some are from major media organisations, some are from bedroom hobbyists, and plenty are from somewhere in-between. We’ve tweeted about a few of them, while others have featured in our newsletter (sign up here!), but we’ve not listed them on these pages, and it’s about time we did.

Good Food
Put together by the foodie folk at BBC Good Food, this publication delivers useful information about a UK seasonal ingredient each week, with tips about what to look for and what to cook. This week, for instance, is all about chicory. You’ll learn to avoid the green tips, and that it goes well with leeks. In a pie.

COLORS Yellow Pages
From the world-reknowned COLORS Magazine, this is a “thematic selection of classified ads for obscure products and uncommon services around the world”. The current edition informs the subscriber that Tokyo’s famous Tsukiji Market has suffered from drunken tourists making too much noise and licking the fish.

Advice Slip
Based on the Advice Slip website by Tom Kiss, this publication does what it says on the tin: it delivers advice. Tom created the service to compensate for the lifelong disappointment felt when receiving advice slips from cash machines that lacked any advice whatsoever.

Would You Rather?
Based on the age-old game of unlikely improbables, Would You Rather asks the questions that would otherwise never be asked. Like, would you rather cough up hairball every day, or own 75 cats? We’ve been discussing this all week, and we’re still no closer to a definitive answer.

Buzzword Bingo
If you work in the kind of environment where thoughts regularly turn to “blue sky thinking” or “low hanging fruit”, then you’ll love Buzzword Bingo. Print off the publication, take it into a meeting, and check the boxes as the phrases appear. Can be played furtively, or as a group. Made by JP Alexander.

Tile Town
Cut out and keep tiles, delivered every day. Use to create your own unique tiny town — think of it as The Sims you can pin to a fridge.

Werewolf Watch
This publication is an extremely handy guide to werewolf activity. It only prints when there’s a full moon, allowing potential victims to flee to safety or stock up on silver bullets, and notifying actual werewolves that it’s time for business. Fiendish work from Amos Jackson.

Instapen
Written by Jim Maes, who describes the publication as “Crazy, weird, funny short stories inspired by Instagram pictures”. Jim also describes the publication as “Gekke, eigenaardige, sappige, grappige kortverhaaltjes geïnspireerd door Instagram foto’s”, but only because he’s written an entirely separate Instapen publication for Dutch readers. Thanks, Jim.

Microspores
Leaning over my shoulder right now is Matt, who says that he knows Jeff Noon’s Microspores isn’t a recently added publication… but there’s a fresh tweet-length sci-fi story everyday, and everyone should subscribe. Noon is the Arthur C. Clarke award-winning author of Vurt — seminal science fiction from the 1990s — and it’s a coup having his fiction delivered each morning with a cup of tea. Here’s a Microspore from earlier in the week.

So there you have it. A round-up of recent additions to the Little Printer stable of publications, and one that isn’t so new but is really worth signing up for.

If you have a Little Printer, these are all available now. If you don’t have a Little Printer, you can place an order. And if you’d like to create a publication yourself, you can do so using our developer tools. We’d love to see what you come up with!

—FL

On Saturday we held our second Hack Day. Everybody cleared their desks, and we set up 11 Little Printers around the room for 35 designers and developers to come and play with.

It all kicked off at 10am with a quick run-through our developer tools: how to build for Little Printer, and what makes a good publication. Then the making began (interrupted only, of course, by pizza and salad for lunch!).

At 4.30 we stopped for demos. Demos are a big part of BERG culture, and work is shown and celebrated in an informal setting every Friday. It was really nice to be able to extend this tradition to Hack Day.

Here is a run down of what people showed:

• BERG’s very own Adam Sven Johnson gave a live demo of Monogram, a browser based picture messaging site for Little Printer.
• Mark Sta Ana made Poison Pentamatron a publication that makes poetry out of tweets in iambic pentameter.
• Henrik, Tom and David brought Captain Cook’s first voyage to life with Dear Diary.
  

  Dear Diary by Tom, Henrik and David

• David Wilkinson, a veteran of Little Printer publications (he’s already made three!) showed off his latest work, an iphone app for printing photos.
• Faheem Patel made Hello Awesome, a daily reminder of your achievements from yesterday.
• Alex Forey (another familiar face in the world of Little Printer publications) made Little Dropper (Available on Github), a chrome extension that prints post-it notes from text copy-pasted to it.
• Martyn Loughran demoed Github Yesterday, to be used in morning development standups as a list of your activity yesterday on Github.
• Amos Jackson made Werewolf Watcher, a publication for civillians and werewolves alike, notifying them of full moons.
  

  Werewolf Watcher by Amos Jackson

• Joe Hughes demoed Fruit Machine, for making three printers into a fruit machine installation, Memento Mori a reminder of how many weekends you have left before you die, a publication for printing out banner text and an image test for testing Little Printer’s slipping paper.
• Matt asked Alex to do a mock up of a publication made out of a tiny tamagotchi character saying ancient texts written in the smallest font possible.
• David Chatting showed us Little Things, a square box each day to fill to a brief, for example ‘find something alive’ or ‘find something shiny’.
• Mario demoed What Does It All Mean?, a series of images from a university brief that he’s currently working on.
• Tomasz Made a collection of animals and facts for children to collect.
• Andrey made the world’s slowest game of tetris
  

  Slow Tetris by Andrey Zhukov

• Steve Stagg made Print Man the world’s slowest Pac Man game, including links via QR code to choose your next move.
• Cally Gatehouse and Anisha Peplinski (aka Team Little Draw) made ‘Meme Stocks’, a publication that tells you which memes to be using when.
• Andy Ellis broke all of our brains a bit with his mini projection map. 
• Jerry, Katja and Carla demoed a design for ‘Ways To Die’ a Little Printer choose your own adventure which always ends messily.

Hopefully you’ll soon be able to subscribe to some of the publications discussed above. In the meantime, here’s a timelapse video of the day made by Alex Forey. You can also check out the Little Printer Flickr group for more photos of the day.

BERG Hack Day Timelapse from Alex Forey on Vimeo.

Events like Hack Day (and our After School Club) are really important, not only because of the new publications people come up with, but also because the ideas people have prompt us to think about Little Printer, and what Little Printer is capable of, in new and inspiring ways. The studio is still buzzing from the excitement of Saturday, and we’re already writing tickets for developer tools to build and planning ways to make the next Hack Day even better.

So finally, thanks to everyone who attended!

—AB