First I've heard that Haitian proverb ("Behind the mountains, there are more mountains."). Very appropriate for this community.
berg also means mountain in german!
Berg is shutting down
51–57 of 57 posts
Re: Berg is shutting down
#52Earlier quoted context omitted.
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.
I'm still waiting for mine to arrive, but I'm wondering if it _may_ be possible to get faster data rates without using the AT commands, and running code on the ESP8266 itself.
Ah yes that would be the holy grail, most BLE or Wifi chips have an MCU that could be used if their dev. environment weren't the software equivalent of unobtainium, require 500$ dev boards and / or be totally obscure.
If you find out anything, make sure to post it somewhere!
Re: Berg is shutting down
#53Earlier quoted context omitted.
Ironically this mindset contributed to them going under. Not criticizing you, just a funny observation.
I'd like to think that charging £200 for a device that has little better use case than being cute and quirky played a part as well. Especially considering that you can buy a professional POS thermal receipt printer for the same price for any viable projects requiring printing in that general form factor.
They were a leading speculative design studio, not another manufacturer of printers. Coming from a different place, more similar to how sci-fi stokes the fires. I'm shocked and sad that they went under given that they had been doing consulting for years. I wonder how taking VC last year affected this.
But not shocked that Little Printer or the Berg Cloud was commercially unsuccessful. Perhaps they just bet a little too much thinking that their excellent design and particular approach would translate to enough value for enough people.
Re: Berg is shutting down
#54Berg 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?
Re: Berg is shutting down
#55I'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 fro…
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 doe…
Agreed - I think a lot of the activity there is a result of the RCA design program, and it's much needed to inject inspiration into the design-tech-culture space. But they're a distance from viable products, and (godblessem) more enamored with their own journey with craft than in getting costs down.
We just need some more intermingling and we'll get to where this is all pointing.
Re: Berg is shutting down
#56That happened quickly! They just raised $1.3m eleven months ago: http://blog.bergcloud.com/2013/10/28/berg-raises-1-3m-round-...
You can see there's 8 of them here http://bergcloud.com/about . They probably burned through that 1.3 with a year of wage expense.
Re: Berg is shutting down
#57I'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…
PSO was playable just fine offline and split-screen however. And if anyone is interested SCHTSERV[1] is a PSO private server that is still up. They have gamecube, dreamcast, and PC clients. [1] http://www.schtserv.com/
Thanks!, I've got both gamecube and dreamcast with PSO and always wanted to be able to play them online for the full experience but didn't own them early enough to do so.