Thunderbolt Digital is a web design and online marketing strategy Surrey based company dedicated to giving you a personalised service. We have stumbled across this little device that might change how we function in our offices, but we invite you to make your own mind up about whether it’s useful or obsolete.
The “Pup”, as it’s been named by its French creators, is a handheld scanner that wirelessly connects to file storage, social media and various different types of email. It’s simple, high speed and connected, they boast, and it will scan documents of any size (pages of books, receipts, drawings etc.). The list of apps it will connect with is long, including Instagram, Pinterest, Facebook, Dropbox, Google Drive, Apple Mail, Gmail and Outlook. There will be a small square touchscreen on the side where users can swipe to select the app of their choice, enabling them to not only save the images but instantly email them or share them on social media.
The truly amazing thing about the Pup is that it was crowdfunded on the website IndieGoGo, raising just over $53,000 and with still a month to go. Over the short time they have been fundraising, they have enticed 327 backers, donating an average of $162.69 each. There are a number of “stretch goals” that they will most likely achieve, like the device being produced in two colours rather that one ($100), and including a live video streaming feature ($150).
This is all very exciting, but is it really a breakthrough in technology? The Pup will be sold at a retail price of $229, which is a little steep for what is essentially a glorified camera. The real question is, will it take off in the way everyone thinks it will? Granted, the idea of having a huge noisy machine to scan documents is a little outdated, but how will offices take to such a dramatic change in routine like this? The other pressing question is will it do the job? Renaud Pelissier (CEO and engineering) and his team boast that the device will cancel out the curvature of the pages of a book, and that it will scan the document “independent of the table’s colour” (without photographing parts of the table), but how well will these features work? Despite the growing list of concerns, it’s new ideas like the Pup that drives the world of technology forward, so maybe this will be the next must-have device.