ZUtA Labs announced today the launch of their Kickstarter campaign aimed to help them produce a new mini mobile printer. Despite its relatively small dimensions (10 centimeters high and 11.5 centimeters in diameter) it can still print on a full A4 page or even bigger. The device, which has a robotic mechanism at its core, is essentially a print-head on a small set of wheels running along the paper, instead of having the paper feed through the device. The printer is portable enough to carry around comfortably and still print on any sized page. The company is seeking to raise $400,000 on the campaign in a 30 day period. Once said amount is raised, ZUtA says that they will be able to complete development, begin manufacturing, and bring their project to market.
The company was officially founded in January 2014, but the ZUtA team has been working together for some time now. The mobile printer was initially displayed this week at ThinkNext, a prestigious Microsoft event in which new technologies are launched. At ThinkNext, the company received overwhelmingly positive feedback from both the audience and high-level executives at Microsoft and other large corporations.
The team is made up of former-students from Jerusalem area colleges, and the idea’s inception came to them as they applied for the Friedberg entrepreneurship program at the Jerusalem College of Technology, to which they were subsequently accepted. “We often found ourselves completing schoolwork on the subway in cafés or at the library,” said Tuvia Elbaum, one of ZUtA’s founders and a serial entrepreneur. “The challenge was printing our work once it was finished. We realized that there was no real "mobile printer”.
This is the first time that a small sized printer, that prints on full A4 pages, has been available for the public and ZUtA intends to have a full line available for purchase by January 2015. “Everything around us has gone mobile, yet, for some reason, the printer missed the mobile revolution train”, said Elbaum. ZUtA aspires to change that. The device currently prints in black & white, on any size sheet of paper, is charged via USB and can print an average of 1,000 pages per cartridge.
