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Livescribe's Pulse pen opens the door to paper-based computing
The original Palm Pilot back in 1996 made my technology senses tingle. I couldn't help but believe that the little green-screen device was going to turn the gadget world upside down.
And it certainly did. By breathing life back into a flagging mobile computing industry, Palm shaped the face of handheld computing and what we later came to know as smartphones.
I've long wondered whether my technology senses would ever tingle quite the way they did when I first saw a Palm Pilot.
Attention: They're tingling again. Big time.
A start-up company called Livescribe has produced the first viable device in a new industry it's calling "paper-based computing." At first, the Pulse Smartpen simply looks like a nifty way to synchronize audio recordings with handwritten notes. Indeed, that basic function works extremely well.The pen is used to write on paper imprinted with a barely perceptible pattern of dots, called the DPS, or "dot positioning system." Each page bears a unique dot arrangement that a camera in the pen's tip camera uses to keep track of where it is on the page; a microchip inside the pen creates a digital copy of the user's writing while simultaneously recording any surrounding audio, such a business meeting or lecture.
But there is far more to these $150 gadgets than first meets the eye. With the brains of a handheld computer and the flash memory of a smartphone, as well as a surprisingly bright OLED (short for organic light-emitting diode) screen and a powerful little macro-focused camera, the Pulse is no one-trick pony.
Livescribe plans to open an online software store similar in concept to the Web applications store that Apple offers for the iPhone. More than 2,600 developers already are preparing new programs for the Pulse, called "penlets," that let it become a foreign language translator (a 20-word demo of six different languages already comes built into every pen), a musical instrument, an interactive calculator and a "pencasting" tool to let users update their blogs with animated and audio-enhanced hand-drawn movies.
Eventually, books or even magazines could be published on dot-paper to allow users to interact with the printed page in entirely new ways. Notes written on dot-paper business cards could be sent automatically any time the pen is connected to a computer.
I've got a sneaking suspicion we'll be hearing plenty more from Livescribe. Stay tuned.
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