The service, developed at HP Labs in Palo Alto and with the help of Derek Powazek – founder of community produced JPG magazine – enables the printing of magazines one at a time.

MagCloud has been in incubation in HP's laboratories for around a year, and its beta outing has just been made in the US.

Andrew Bolwell, director at HP's corporate venturing team, described its current incarnation as "a bit like the Henry Ford model: any colour as long as it's black".

Would-be magazine publishers take their ideas and content to the online MagCloud service to build their pages of editorial and adverts.

Each magazine is produced on HP Indigo presses from HP's network of print service providers in the US and, being saddle-stitched, has an upper page limit of 60 pages, with the cover being the same stock as internal pages.

However, there are plans to offer different finishing options and a range of formats in the future.

Each page costs 20c (10p) to produce, to which the publisher can add their own mark-up to cover their costs.

HP is looking at creating an advertising aggregation platform, not dissimilar to Google print ads.

The company is also looking to reverse the equation and allow not only publishers to create what they want, but also for readers to read what they want.

"The vision is about not just the publishers' magazines, but the users being able to personalise their magazines – choosing the best parts of the magazines they love and compiling their own magazine by dynamically inserting content," Bolwell said.

One of the early adopters of the technology platform is ConnectedDay – a company that specialises in niche social networks for the childcare industry.

ConnectedDay currently allows users to upload images of children taken during a day at nursery to a secure website where working parents can view their child's activities.

It creates an engaging print platform for targeted advertising to a demographic of professional parents. Founder Peter Vesterbacka said: "Say you are an advertiser wanting to target a part of London, then you can put your advert just in the magazines that go out to that part of London. You can get your ad to exactly the right people."

The company is taking the idea forward, with a project at Berkeley university in California looking at ways of tagging or categorising content so that it would be possible to personalise a magazine to ensure it focused on the children or grandchildren of the recipient.

Alongside this, the company is talking to the National Children's Bureau about using the MagCloud platform with the ConnectedDay service to fulfil nursery obligations to provide profiles and learning journals to parents as well.