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Super bummed to hear that Berg is shutting down.
We’ve not reached a sustainable business in connected products. But: There’s our troop! Cultural inventions! I’m proud of this British Experimental Rocket Group.
They had a tough row to hoe w/ Little Printer and building the plumbing to the IoT, but their effort and thinking was always very inspirational. Cheers to Matt, Jack, and the whole gang; now on to the next one.
BERG is now taking pre-orders for Little Printer, their cloud-enabled desktop newspaper press.
Little Printer lives in your home, bringing you news, puzzles and gossip from friends. Use your smartphone to set up subscriptions and Little Printer will gather them together to create a timely, beautiful miniature newspaper.
£199.00+shipping in the UK/EU, $259.00+shipping in the US/Canada. They begin shipping in mid-October.
BERG have announced an intriguing pair of products: Little Printer and BERG Cloud.
Little Printer lives in your front room and scours the Web on your behalf, assembling the content you care about into designed deliveries a couple of times a day.
You configure Little Printer from your phone, and there’s some great content to choose from - it’s what Little Printer delivers that makes it really special. We have an incredible group of launch partners, and in the run-up to shipping we’re working with them all on custom publications.
Underlying Little Printer is our new technology for connecting and controlling wireless products in the home, and we call it BERG Cloud.
We think of BERG Cloud as the nervous system for connected products. It’s built to run at scale, and could as easily operate the Web-enabled signage of a city block, as the playful home electronics of the future.
Here’s a short video of Little Printer in action:
New from BERG and the BBC: How Many Really?. Background here.
You can probably guess what it does from the URL — it compares the numbers of people who experienced an event with a number you can relate to: the size of your social network.
Examples: How many of your Twitter friends would have been eligible to vote in Classical Athens? How many of your Facebook friends would have sunk with the Titanic? How many of your friends would have returned from WWI?
Nice profile of BERG in the NY Times by Alice Rawsthorn.
Berg and its peers use design in the traditional way as a tool in the translation process, but they have also developed new means of enabling people to engage with technology, and to feel confident about using it. Mostly Berg does so by making complex technologies seem playful and humorous.
Built by BERG, the BBC Dimensions site allows you to overlay the geographies of historical events and significant places onto more familiar locales. Here’s the Apollo 11 Moon walk positioned over the Statue of Liberty, the size of the radiation cloud if Chernobyl had happened in Chicago, and the Marianas Trench stretching from Manhattan’s West Village to Sunset Park in Brooklyn.
Based on their great Mag+ concept unveiled late last year, Bonnier and BERG have developed a really nice looking iPad version of Popular Science. No page-turning business…you swipe left/right to page through stories and then scroll to read through single stories.
What amazes me is that you don’t feel like you’re using a website, or even that you’re using an e-reader on a new tablet device — which, technically, is what it is. It feels like you’re reading a magazine.
It’s nice to see the original concept come to life so quickly and completely. Get it in the App Store.
Magazine publishers Bonnier and BERG, a London design consultancy, have collaborated on a digital magazine prototype called Mag+. The conceptual device is impressive in its restraint and its truth to form and function.
We find that the graphical page-turning metaphors that you see quite frequently in web-based e-magazine readers are not terribly believable, and they don’t feel very honest to the form of the screen. […] Scrolling systems are more appropriate to what we’re dealing with.
Sing it, brother! Also of note is the way that the video takes the conventional “let me talk over some graphics” screencast and presents it in a much more compelling way.
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