Interconnected

Recent press on BERG Cloud, the new Dev Kits and Little Printer:

• Twitter Tests a Toolkit That Puts the Internet in Things: Platforms that combine networking with user interfaces will help companies test post-PC ideas: But according to Berg CEO Matt Webb, the basic engineering challenges of connecting physical objects to the Internet are still too daunting to encourage rapid innovation. ‘Our ambition is to let you go from zero to your first connected product in a day,’ says Webb. ‘We all cut our teeth developing for the Web, and we wanted to create a way to experiment with hardware that’s just as agile.’ - John Pavlus, MIT Technology Review (3 May)
• Ticker tape, circa 2013: New York Times breaking news alerts come to Little Printer: It’s easy to imagine all sorts of ways that Little Printer could make push notifications a little more personal and tangible; for instance, Berg has already field-tested instant ‘welcome’ printouts triggered by patrons checking in to a cafe using Foursquare. Fortunately, Little Printer is pretty hacker-friendly, so it shouldn’t be too tough to whip up your own alerts using IFTTT, Twine, or otherwise. - Ellis Hamburger, The Verge (3 May)
• Little Printer: Meet the palm-sized, werewolf-spotting, cheeky face of the internet of things: The company envisions a future where, much as the advent of the web enabled smaller companies and start-ups to start online businesses without needing a huge corporation behind them, connected objects will allow them to get into the hardware game too. - Jo Best, ZDNet (2 May)
• Twitter UK’s #Flock cuckoo clock shares time and tweets alike: Twitter UK has teamed up with Berg to produce #Flock, a smarter-than-average clock that both marks time and pops out a bird whenever there are new followers, replies and retweets. It’s comparatively simple underneath the wood, as a Berg Cloud developer kit links an arm mechanism to the owner’s Twitter account. - Jon Fingas, Engadget (19 April)
• From Berg, A Birdhouse Powered By Your Twitter Stream: Sadly, the project isn’t for sale. Instead, this extremely limited batch was produced as a proof of concept for the studio’s new Berg Cloud Dev Kit, which is basically a hardware bridge to connect the Internet to Arduinos, enabling your bespoke physical projects to speak with the voice of cloud data. - Mark Wilson, Fast Company Co.Design (18 April)
• Twitter UK shows off #Flock, a cuckoo clock powered by tweets: Twitter built the clocks in partnership with BERG, a London design consultancy that specializes in forward-thinking, quirky, and sometimes unclassifiable objects. - Casey Newton, The Verge (18 April)
• Product Design Agency BERG To Become BERG Cloud, An Internet Of Things Startup: BERG Cloud aims to be an ‘operating system for connected products’. What we saw, cofounder and CEO Matt Webb told me in an exclusive interview, is the emergence of a platform that could control everything from the Little Printer to the signage in a city, to home electronics and automation inside businesses. - Mike Butcher, Techcrunch (18 April)

And one slightly older piece:

• The Virtual Haircut That Could Change the World: On or about the 14th of February, 2013, the hair on Little Printers’ faces began to grow. Stick with us. This is about the future of the Internet of Things. - Tim Maly, Wired Design (20 February)